OpenCouncil turns recordings of municipal council and committee meetings into transcripts, summaries, decisions and searchable, map-based pages, and tells residents by WhatsApp, SMS or email when their council discusses something that affects them. Every transcript is checked by a person. The same pipeline produces the official minutes, so municipalities use it to replace the transcription service they already pay for. It runs today in 14 Greek municipalities covering about 1.2 million residents
Initiative overview
Greek municipal council meetings are public by law, but in practice they are hours-long videos and minutes that are published weeks later, if at all. Few residents know what their council decided about their street, and the administration spends days transcribing sessions by hand. OpenCouncil needs only a recording of the meeting (a YouTube link is enough). From it, the platform transcribes every word and attributes it to the right speaker and political group; splits the session into subjects, linked to the agenda, each with a plain-language summary, the decision taken and the location it concerns; publishes a page per subject, session, speaker and party, with full-text search across every municipality and a map of what was discussed where; sends personalised notifications ("Notis") to residents about the neighbourhoods and topics they follow; produces the transcript and draft minutes for the municipality, checked by a person and ready for signature; and exposes all public data through an open API and an MCP server, so residents, journalists and officials can ask AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT about their council and get answers that cite the exact moment of the meeting. The municipality changes nothing about how it meets, and sessions are published as soon as they are processed.
Objectives: OpenCouncil aims to make every council and committee meeting searchable, readable and linkable. It explains proceedings in plain language, subject by subject, so a resident can follow a three-hour session in minutes. The platform connects discussions to the streets and neighbourhoods they affect and brings this information to the people who live there. It also seeks to replace manual transcription and minute-taking with a faster, cheaper, human-verified service by producing transcripts and draft minutes for municipalities that are checked by a person and ready for signature. Finally, OpenCouncil is designed as a standardised, open-source product that any municipality can adopt using only a recording and without changing its existing procedures.
OpenCouncil targets residents, elected councillors from both the majority and opposition, municipal administrations, particularly council secretariats, as well as journalists and civil society organisations. The platform uses speech recognition and speaker identification to produce fully attributed transcripts of council meetings. Large language models are used to identify subjects, generate summaries, extract decisions and locations, and draft meeting minutes. To ensure accuracy, every transcript is reviewed and corrected by trained staff before being used for official minutes, while every summary includes a link to the exact moment in the video so that information can be verified. The system is hosted in the European Union, is GDPR-compliant, and includes a data protection impact assessment for speaker voiceprints.
Other relevant details
Results: OpenCouncil is currently used by 14 municipalities in Greece, covering approximately 1.2 million residents. More than 630 council sessions have been published and over 1,150 hours of meetings have been processed. The platform records around 2,500 monthly engaged citizens and 1,535 residents subscribed to notifications as of October 2026. Council sessions are published as soon as they are processed, rather than weeks later, at the same or lower cost than existing transcription services. The platform is used by councillors across political parties, municipal staff, local journalists and civic groups. Beyond Greece, OpenCouncil also powers the public record of the Cyprus House of Representatives, published by Oxygen for Democracy, and is being piloted with municipalities in France and the Western Balkans.
Challenges and how they were addressed: Low public engagement was addressed through proactive, neighbourhood-level notifications that bring relevant information directly to residents. Concerns about accuracy and trust were mitigated through human review of every transcript and traceable links between summaries and the original video recordings. Procurement challenges were addressed by replacing existing expenditure on transcription and minute-taking services with population-based pricing. Scaling across municipalities was supported through a standardised product, simple onboarding requiring only a recording, and an approach that avoids integration work.
Lessons learned: 1) Push beats pull: notifications reach far more residents than a website alone. 2) Local relevance drives interest: people engage with the street outside their door, not with the council as a whole. 3) Serve the administration as well as citizens: solving the municipality's own problem, the minutes, is what makes the project financially sustainable. 4) Build for replication from day one: open source and a standard product let the 2nd to 14th municipalities onboard in days, not months.
Evaluation and impact measurement. Impact is measured continuously through platform analytics using four core indicators developed with OpenCouncil’s impact investor: the number of municipalities under contract, the number of meeting hours processed, the number of monthly engaged citizens, and the number of notification subscribers, including subscriber rates per 1,000 residents covered. Surveys of residents and municipal staff on awareness of and trust in local decision-making are planned from 2027.
