WORCESTER—If you’ve ever tried hunting down an old Worcester City Council agenda and ended up tangled in a maze of PDFs and outdated links, relief may be in sight.
Starting July 1, the city launches OneMeeting, a new cloud-based agenda management system aimed at making local government meetings more accessible, transparent, and navigable for the public. The platform, developed by Granicus, replaces Worcester’s current council calendar—a homegrown tool built by city developers back in 2006.
According to a city announcement this week, OneMeeting serves as a centralized hub for agendas, minutes, meeting videos, and supporting documents across all public boards and commissions.
“This new agenda solution offers council and committee management components,” said City Clerk Nikolin Vangjeli in the announcement, “a standardized combined agenda for both city council and city manager meetings, and increased accessibility for the public with full council item searching capabilities. Residents will be able to access and engage with council items, actions, and minutes like never before.”
Among the most significant changes, residents will be able to search for specific meeting items, documents, or actions using keywords—a major improvement over the limited navigation tools available on the current system. Meeting videos will also be stored alongside agendas and minutes, consolidating what was previously a fragmented experience across multiple city platforms.
The new system will also offer improved language access. With a built-in Google Translate feature, agendas and minutes can be viewed in more than 30 languages—an option not available in the old software.
Initially, the OneMeeting system will include city records dating back to 2021. Older materials will be migrated in the months ahead, though the city says meeting records from prior years can still be requested through standard public records channels during the transition.
“We listened to public feedback and worked closely with Granicus to implement a new agenda management solution that is modernized, more user-friendly, and faster,” said City Manager Eric Batista in a statement. “It also features improvements in language access equity.”
The transition will also affect how residents access materials from the city’s Division of Planning and Regulatory Services. Starting July 1, pending applications and associated meeting documents will be available via OneMeeting and linked from relevant city webpages.
Public meeting livestreams move to the city’s YouTube channel, where recordings are stored for on-demand viewing. Meanwhile, existing video content will continue to be available through the municipal website, Spectrum channel 192, and Facebook Live until the full migration is complete. Remote participation remains available via Zoom for City Council and through Microsoft Teams for boards and commissions, with access details listed on each meeting agenda.
Instructional tutorials for the new system are expected to be released soon, giving residents a chance to get familiar with the upgraded platform.
Have news, tips, or a story worth telling? Reach Editor Charlene Arsenault at carsenault@theworcesterguardian.org—because good stories (and great scoops) deserve to be shared.
