Wellington City Council's Mātai Manapori - TrackDem now has vote tracking
Wellington City Council’s awesome and award winning transparency tool Mātai Manapori - TrackDem has just received it’s final major update.
As part of an improved view of how decisions are made and who’s been driving them, you can now track every amendment, motion, and vote on issues over time. If you wanted to find this out at most councils you’d need to first identify what meetings decisions had been made (in itself often a massive task), then you’d have to go and hunt down the PDFs or webpages of the minutes of those meetings, and then you’d need to scroll through the individual documents or webpages to find the votes.
Being able to see and track all of this in the one place on the one tool removes so much work for the end user! Honestly, unless you’ve been following an issue closely or have a working knowledge of an individual council’s specific governance structure and processes, it can be a nightmare trying to dig down to find this information.
Trust me, I should know. As part of working on stories for Local Aotearoa I routinely find myself trawling across the websites of nearly every council in the country trying to find information and somehow 78 local government entities have come up with nearly 78 different ways of doing the same thing!
But enough about that.
Another great additional is that you can now also easily download all the data relating to meetings of the full council and its committees, providing easy access to journalists, researchers, and local government spotters like me.
Wellington City Council gets given a lot of grief, so it’s worth celebrating them leading the way to lift the local government sector’s approach to transparency and accountability.
It’s also important to note that Wellington City Council’s approach to improved transparency and accountability didn’t start with Mātai Manapori - TrackDem. As part of my research into whether councils had opened up their workshops and briefings in response to the Ombudsman’s Open for Business report, Wellington City Council had already opened up and were livestreaming these sessions long before the publication of the report (and from memory potentially even before the Ombudsman started his investigation).
At a time when trust in our civic institutions is under increasing pressure, these types of initiatives to break down barriers and improve accessibility to elected representatives and the information and processes that shape their decision-making are more important than ever.