City of Richmond Council Minutes and Voting Record

The City of Richmond, B.C., uses Inmagic DB/TextWorks to manage the minutes of council and committee meetings as well as their municipal archives collections. This database has been available for City staff to search for many years, but Andornot has just helped the City to launch this database publicly, along with a new option for the public to see the voting records of councillors. This extra functionality was requested by Council and thanks to the flexibility of DB/TextWorks, the City Clerk’s Department was able to adjust the database so that this voting data could be extracted.

This database of council and committee meeting minutes is now publicly searchable online at https://www.richmond.ca/cityhall/council/councildecisions/about.htm using an interface developed by Andornot and based on Inmagic WebPublisher PRO.

Users can search for meetings and decisions of interest by keyword, date, subject, personal name, and committee name. Results show the most recent meetings first, and are usually available online once the minutes have been adopted, usually within about a month of the meeting.

Voting Record. A tabular display of the voting record of the current mayor and council is available at https://www.richmond.ca/cityhall/council/votingrecord.htm We used the open-source Tabulator javascript library, pulling data exported to JSON format from the same DB/TextWorks database as the full council minutes search above.

The tool allows citizens to view the voting record of each mayor and council member on each topic of each council and committee meeting, with options to limit their view by date and keyword. Users may click links to view the full minutes of the meeting, and click through to the record in the above search using the record’s permalink.

The City was able to capitalize on their existing software and ongoing use and expertise with DB/TextWorks. Andornot’s expertise with DB/TextWorks, JSON and web development was key to quickly putting all the pieces together for a successful launch.

There are often opportunities to extract data and repurpose it in a different format. In this case we were able to research and implement a solution for the voting record quickly and effectively.