City of Napa Legistar Retraining Session - February 5, 2025
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City of Napa Legistar Retraining Session - February 5, 2025
This was an internal Legistar administration retraining session for City of Napa staff, led by Granicus product training specialist Lauren Hawley. Participants included city employees Sam and Tiff. The session covered two main topics: People & Users, and Government Bodies & Dependencies. No public comments, votes, or formal decisions occurred.
People & Users
- Creating People Records: Demonstrated how to create new person records in Legistar, including fields for display name, organization, email preferences (no notices, daily summary, or individual), alternate approver (emphasized as critical for approvers), department, and checkboxes for Active, Can Be Requester, and Approver. The team discussed the importance of assigning alternate approvers to prevent workflow stalling.
- Adding Office Members: Walked through adding members to a meeting body (e.g., Housing Authority), including fields for member selection, office title, appointed by, start/end dates, term out date, member type (chair, vice chair, etc.), sort order, vote weight, and checkboxes for Can Sign, Term Extended, and Show on Web. A brief technical difficulty with body header dates was resolved by re-opening the administration window.
- Creating New Users: Explained the user account creation under system security, including assigning a logon name, security group (e.g., department drafter), and the ability to create new security groups via the blue plus button. The team discussed the large number of existing security groups (e.g., department drafters, department head approvers) and expressed interest in consolidating them.
- Security Features by User Groups: Reviewed functional lists (red = none allowed, gray = partial, green = all allowed) and body security lists to control permissions for each user group. The team noted that current setup allows any drafter to edit any file, which may need to be revised per city manager Steve's request to restrict placeholder creation.
- Approval Tracking Sequences: Covered how to create, edit, and manage approval sequences (16 currently in system), set sequence owners (by person, body, or department), assign email templates (must match action type), and set due days. The team asked about cleaning up inactive sequences and custom email templates.
Government Bodies & Dependencies
- Creating Government Body Types: Walked through creating a new body type (e.g., "Unicorn Workshop") and its settings: mover/seconder options, can control file, show on web, media manager export settings (duration, camera, player template, archive folder, archive status). Noted that archive status set to "public" makes video immediately available after publishing minutes.
- Creating Meeting Bodies Under a Type: Demonstrated adding a specific body (e.g., "Unicorn Regular Workshop") with fields for location, description, abbreviation, contact, body meets, active, can be requester, sort order, body GUID (do not modify), meeting time, sponsor type, body header, and report header. The team discussed using existing body types (e.g., "Board or Commission") for multiple boards if they share the same agenda format.
- Workflow Control (Dependencies for Use): Explained how to define agenda definitions (section headers like call to order, roll call, consent, administrative reports), set forced headers, assign controlling body, file type, and file status to narrow down items when generating agendas. Also covered copying settings from another body (e.g., Housing Authority) and using the Easy Add tab to assign file types and actions for each meeting body.
Key Outcomes
- The team identified several cleanup tasks: consolidating security groups, removing inactive/unused body types (e.g., commissions and committees duplication), and reviewing existing approval sequences.
- A plan to restrict drafters' ability to create placeholder files was discussed but requires further coordination with City Manager Steve to avoid unintended consequences.
- The next session (February 7, 2025) will cover drafting and approving, with a possible addition of Live Manager topics.
- Staff will practice independently before the next training to solidify understanding.
Meeting Transcript
We are now. So welcome, team. Today is day one of your Legistar Retraining. Of course, my name is Lauren Hawley, and I am going to be your product training specialist. We're going to talk about today all of the ins and outs of Legistar administration. We're going to be talking about two separate sections. So well, when I say sections, we're going to have two different topics. The first will be people and users, and the second will be government bodies and dependencies. We're going to be all over Legistar Administration today. So if you are looking to follow along, feel free to open up that administration window. Excuse me. I'm still calling. You're good. As Sam pointed out, we are recording this session. So you'll get a copy of this call in your media manager archives. If you want to be able to reference it in the future, it'll be there for you. And so here on the first part of our call today, we're going to talk about creating new people records. Those people records will be necessary whether you're looking to add people as users of the system or as office members, so people who hold seats in your in your city. So here we're going to talk about creating those people records, and then we'll talk about using a people record in order to add in an office member. We'll also talk about taking a people record and using it to add in a new user. Next, we'll talk about your security features by user groups. So how does it work in terms of making sure that people have the correct permissions based off of the groups that they're in and where do we go if we want to make sure or make updates or changes to those permissions. Next, we'll talk about managing your approval tracking sequences, whether it's that you need to add new sequences, update existing ones, delete existing ones. We'll talk about that there. Now that'll be all for the first part of our call. We'll probably take a short little break if you need to get up and get your coffee, water, stretch your legs a little bit. And then we'll talk about government bodies and dependencies. Now during this part of the call, we're going to talk about creating new government body types, and then we'll talk about creating new meeting bodies that would be associated under those body types. We'll talk about dependencies for use within Legistar. So things like file types and workflow actions, which can all be associated directly to each meeting body. So it's important to remember here that when we are working within Legistar, we could have 200 actions available, 200 file types, but we get to tell Legistar out of all those file types, just this handful are the ones that we want to use on any one particular meeting body. So we can do that there. Now, of course, once we've completed all of that, we'll have some time for QA. Um if you have questions during the it's just the three of us, so you don't need to use the chat. Feel free to ask out loud if you'd like. All right, any questions before we get started? No. Super excited. Love it. All right. So here as you can see, I am logged into your Legistar database. And in order to get to admin, you guys already know how to do this. We're gonna go to the tools menu here and select administration. Now I'm gonna do a new share on my screen because that administration window is pretty small, and I know you guys won't be able to see it if I um you know pull it up normally. Alright. So now that we've got our administration window open, our first topic for today will be people and users. So we're gonna talk about creating people records. Here, in order to do that, we are going to navigate into the people section on the left-hand side, and that is going to open up a menu that will show us all of the people records we have in our system. Now, again, these people records are users and they are also people who have served on meeting bodies or might currently serve on meeting bodies. Now, here when we open the people tab or the people section, the first thing we'll notice is that we do open onto a person, whoever our topmost person is based off of our sort order.
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