A major American city runs its city council on a patchwork of separate systems. Concourse is building a unified platform to replace all of them in less than nine months.
The problem
The city council meets to discuss everything from the budget to street repairs. Behind each meeting sits a complex document pipeline. City departments, commissions, and other parties send the council more than 10,000 documents a year, which the office of the city clerk sorts into legislative files, adds to meeting agendas, and makes searchable by the public. The council meetings themselves run for hours—members of the public speak, council members vote, and the proceedings stream on a local broadcasting channel and YouTube.
All of that work is spread across a dozen tools today.
The solution
Concourse is building one platform that manages all of those processes. Documents submitted to the city council flow into an intake queue, where they’re added to legislative files and referred to committees. Staff then use those files to build city council meeting agendas—those agendas control which ordinances, budget decisions, and policy changes the council acts on. Residents follow those agendas through the platform’s public calendar.
The platform manages council meetings, too. Council members vote by pressing aye and nay buttons at their desks. Today, the results get printed on paper, and a staff member enters them into another system. The new platform will log votes directly to the legislative file. Meetings stream to the city’s broadcasting channel and to YouTube with multilingual closed captions.
After each meeting, a series of workflows turn those votes into official city action and law. Everything appears in a public portal where residents can search through the council’s roughly 500,000 documents.
What’s next
The new platform will do more than the systems it replaces, at a fraction of the cost. Its 10 modules are set to go live before the end of the year and save staff hours every week by bringing scattered work into one place.