Public Meeting Notices and Agendas/Guidelines

Public Meeting Notices and Agendas is intended to help local and larger jurisdictions and other interested parties the understanding and best practices for creating a healthy ecology of public notices within a larger civic ecology. Towards this we have a few guidelines:

• Jurisdictions should not have to cede identity, jurisdiction or oversight over their public notice systems as part of any contract or terms of service.
  • However, jurisdictions may be held responsible for other sorts of provisions including paying for services and materials necessary to publish and syndicate the notice information.
• Jurisdictions should not limit access to the information that is published for any reason including jurisdiction, constituency, payment, and authentication for any purpose. However, based on sound and reasonable methods, jurisdiction should be encouraged to limit participation to any criteria that is understood, explicit and based on previously instituted rules, laws and regulations.
• Regardless of any additional methods of conveying the information contained in a public meeting notice, there must be a main method which is both human readable and machine processable.
• Aggregators, re-publishers and value add systems must always link and/or cite to the original and authoritative published version without any additional cost or proscriptions regarding the original content.