City Council Training on Granicus Voting and Meeting Management System - September 2, 2026
City Council Training on Granicus Voting and Meeting Management System - September 2, 2026
This session was a hands-on training for city council staff (likely the clerk and council members) on the new Granicus Live Manager and Vocast Web voting system. The training covered how to set up, launch, and manage a meeting using the platform, including voting, timestamps, roll call, motions, speaker queue, and display settings. The meeting was a test, not a formal public meeting, and no substantive agenda items were discussed or voted on.
Discussion Items
- System Setup and Voting Preferences: The trainer demonstrated how to enable voting, choose between no encoder and the new Granicus encoder, and configure live vote display. Participants decided they did not want the public to see live votes changing in real time; instead, they preferred to show only the final tally after the vote is recorded. The display settings were adjusted to hide individual vote changes during the voting process.
- Timestamping and Agenda Navigation: The trainer showed how to timestamp agenda items to link them to video, and how the active item appears on the display. Participants noted that the live stream video feed has a 30-second delay, and there was a brief issue with the display not updating the current agenda item on the live stream, which was resolved by refreshing.
- Motions and Voting Procedures: The group practiced making motions, seconding, and casting votes. The trainer explained that the motion text does not always appear on the display (e.g., the word "approve" was missing after a motion to approve), and noted that the product team is working on enhancements. They also discussed the ability to "stop voting" (pause) versus "reset votes" (clear all votes).
- Speaker Queue and Public Participation: The trainer showed how to add speakers, set timers, and display the speaker queue. Participants decided not to show the upcoming speaker order to the public to avoid confusion; instead, only the current speaker's name and remaining time would be displayed. The public would not see the queue list, but council members would.
- Notes and Annotations: The trainer explained that council members can take private notes within the system that are tied to their login and persist across devices. Annotations (highlighting on attachments) are local to the device and will be lost if the agenda is republished. Notes are not searchable by default, which the participants preferred.
- Display and Chambers Setup: The group discussed how to cast the display to multiple screens (e.g., the chamber TV facing the audience). The trainer noted that launching the display is now a manual process per meeting, unlike the previous system where it was automatic. They also set the display to dark mode and adjusted the vote result display duration to 5 seconds.
Key Outcomes
- Settings Agreed: Live vote changes will not be shown to the public; only the final tally will appear after the vote is recorded. The display will show the current active item, motion text, and vote results for 5 seconds. Dark mode will be used for the display. The speaker queue order will not be shown to the public.
- Training Complete: Participants (Nikki, Jackie, and others) indicated they were comfortable with the system and felt it was similar to the previous platform. The trainer agreed to provide a one- or two-page quick reference guide for council members.
- Next Steps: The city will continue testing and will train other staff. The test meetings created during the training will be made non-public or deleted.
Meeting Transcript
That's instructional. Come on. So yeah, I mean, obviously, publishing your agenda is a big piece of it. Once it's published to Insight, you can come in and see it. You'll see the actual event here. We have the uh the agendas outline. That's important. If you go back to the basic tab, though, there's a couple of things you want to check on before we get started. So the one thing is enable voting, right? We just have the you can use either no encoder or the new granicus osspreary encoder, that's fine. Once you enable voting, you'll have some other options as well that come in after it. The one is show live votes. So if you haven't seen it yet, we're gonna have the vocast display that comes up during our test meeting and stuff like that. And once the vote is live, um, it'll show whoever's voting and how they voted. Now, while their voting is going on, other people might change their mind and go from yes to no to abstain. Are you planning to to want to show the public that you have council members that are changing their minds six times? No, we don't want the public to see them in the voting process. Okay, so what would happen instead? If you want to do this, we can show the live tally. It'll just say at the end, okay. That's good. That's yeah. I never want to say like you shouldn't do the one, but just to me, most places don't like that, but whatever. Um like the live votes. Yeah, don't like the live votes. They want to see what's happening at the end there. So the common council and profile one, it's just a matter of which one of those settings do you want as far as the yes, no abstain, recuse, excuse, whatever other ones you have and stuff like that. You can pick it. We can go back in and clean that up when you're done. Uh when we're done here, no problem. Um, we're gonna just save those settings. Uh, and from here, we can launch the event. Can we make those default? Yeah, when you go back into here, if you pick the one, um, let's pick which one we want to use. Okay. So the one that we have as the default was uh let's see, common council will be default, I guess. One, two, three. And let's let's get rid of the other one. That's got that. And let's go back. Oh, that was the default. Okay. Hold on. Default. One, two, three, four, five. Save it. Let's delete that one. Okay. I'm gonna just change this to say common council. And I'll I'm gonna go back in and restart the meeting.
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