Join the conversation about this project on Slack or email Aaron for an invite (councils only)
Work
As a Democratic Services officer
I need to manage committees, agendas, and meeting papers in one place
So that I can run transparent, efficient governance without being tied to a proprietary vendor
Hammersmith & Fulham Council is leading the development of an open-source committee management tool, and the Discovery phase has already begun.
The core build will deliver committee and meeting management, agenda and minutes workflow, document pack compilation, role-based access controls, and a public facing portal — with data migration considered from day one, not bolted on at the end.
What the tool will do
The new governance tool will cover everything a Democratic Services team needs to run committees and public meetings.
For staff:
- Create and manage committees, meetings, and a corporate calendar in a central workspace
- Build and publish agendas with automatic page numbering and itemisation
- Compile meeting packs and make changes without reprinting or redistributing papers
- Role-based access controls for restricted and exempt items
- Reusable templates for consistent agenda and minutes formatting
- Configurable workflows for report submission, review, approval, and publication
- Automatic email distribution of agenda packs to members and attendees
- Attendance recording and in-app voting for live and remote meetings
For members:
- Annotate documents
- Offline access to meeting papers
- Notifications for updates to meetings and committees
For residents:
- A public-facing portal for agendas, minutes, and decisions — using the council's own CSS and navigation, not a bolt-on portal
- Full-text search across committee records, designed to work with partial information
- Online petitions: submit, sign, track, and receive automated updates when thresholds are reached
There will be WCAG 2.2 AA compliance throughout.
More details on Chicken's website
Estimated time/ cost
If sufficient financial pledges are received, this project will be built by Chicken, Hammersmith & Fulham council's Drupal agency.
The Discovery phase is in progress, and has been funded by Hammersmith & Fulham.
The Core build will cost between £65k and £80k to include:
- committee and meeting management
- agenda and minutes workflow
- document pack compilation
- role-based access controls
- public-facing portal
- search and archive
- member registers
- data migration
Additional features can be scoped and funded separately by participating councils.
| Councils co-funding | Cost per council |
| 1 | £65,000 |
| 2 | ~ £21,700 |
| 3 | ~ £13,000 |
At five councils, each funder pays ~£13,000 — less than a single year’s licence fee with most proprietary suppliers, and at the end of it, every council owns the tool outright.
Tell us your needs
We are running a survey to find our what features councils need and how much further from the scoped work we need to go, if at all.
Fund this work
If you’re interested, please contact Will.