Initiative overview
Municipal council meetings are the core of local democracy, yet citizens rarely engage with them. In Greece, meetings are legally public but practically inaccessible: hours of unstructured video, no searchable records, and no way to know when your neighbourhood is discussed. The 2024 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust found that only 21% of Greeks believe they can influence government, among the lowest in Europe.
OpenCouncil addresses this democratic information gap by converting raw meeting recordings into structured, searchable, location-aware content using AI. The platform pursues four objectives: establishing democratic transparency as default infrastructure through automated transcription, speaker identification, and searchable archives; making council proceedings comprehensible through AI-generated summaries and plain-language explanations; connecting discussions to specific streets and neighbourhoods so citizens can discover what affects their area; and proving this approach is replicable at scale through open-source licensing and infrastructure-agnostic architecture.
OpenCouncil launched in Chania, Greece, in January 2025 through a partnership between the Municipality of Chania and OpenCouncil, a non-profit technology organisation. In its first year, the platform processed over 70 meetings totalling 110+ hours. After initial website visits were lower than expected, the team adapted by building a proactive notification system. Citizens now receive WhatsApp and email alerts based on their neighbourhood or interests, shifting the model from passive availability to active engagement.
The platform also serves institutional needs: it generates official minutes automatically and provides council members with participation analytics, ensuring municipal buy-in and sustainability. Nine additional Greek municipalities adopted the platform within the first year, from the island of Samothrace, with 2,000 residents, to Athens, with more than 665,000, validating both the technical model and the financial sustainability of the open-source approach.
The platform continues to expand. Over 10 additional Greek municipalities have expressed interest in adoption. Future development includes enhanced AI accuracy, integration with participatory budgeting mechanisms, and potential adaptation for municipalities beyond Greece. All code is published on GitHub under permissive licensing, and public APIs enable developers and researchers to build on the democratic data infrastructure. The goal is for OpenCouncil to become permanent democratic infrastructure for local government, replicable by any municipality in Europe.
