City of Worcester, MA

WORCESTER, Mass. – The City of Worcester announced Wednesday the transition to its new agenda management system starting July 1, 2025. 

The new system, OneMeeting, is owned and managed by Granicus, a company specializing in government software solutions. It will replace the current Council Calendar system, a custom software solution created by the municipality’s in-house development team in 2006. OneMeeting will become the single repository for all public meeting agendas, minutes, video recordings, and other associated items.

“This new agenda solution offers council and committee management components, a standardized combined agenda for both City Council and City Manager meetings, and increased accessibility for the public with full council item searching capabilities,” said City Clerk Nikolin Vangjeli. “Residents will be able to access and engage with council items, actions, and minutes like never before.”

OneMeeting will offer the public new access and transparency currently not available within the current solution. This access includes the ability to search for items, documents, and meetings using OneMeeting’s public Meeting Search and Item Search portals. Using the Meeting Search portal, users will be able to search for public meetings filtered by date and the meeting body and search for items on these meetings. Results returned will include the agenda and minutes of each meeting, as well as direct links to view items. Meetings with video recordings will be available in the same place as the rest of the meeting’s documents. 

“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. The new solution is a significant upgrade in terms of search capabilities and transparency that aligns with the municipality’s focus on technology modernization,” said City Manager Eric D. Batista. “It also features improvements in language access equity as residents will be able to translate agendas to more than 30 languages via a built-in Google Translate capability”

The Item Search portal will allow residents to search through all public meeting items using OneMeeting’s built-in advanced search. Each item will include all attached documents, metadata, and a full accounting of the history of the item. Initially, the system will include all items going back through 2021 but within the coming months all digitized records from past meetings will be made available. During this historical data migration period, materials related to meetings prior to 2021 can be accessed via public record request.

Additionally, users will be able to leverage Google Translate to translate HTML agenda and minutes documents into the language they would like, a service not offered in the current solution. 

As of July 1, pending applications and meeting materials for the Division of Planning and Regulatory Services will be available on OneMeeting and linked from the relevant webpage. Instructional tutorials will be made available to users. All public meeting video livestreams will be moved to the City of Worcester’s YouTube Channel where they will be stored for future viewing. Residents will still be able to attend City Council meetings remotely via Zoom and Boards and Commission meetings via Microsoft Teams using the instructions posted on each agenda. In the coming months, the municipality will move its entire meeting video archive to YouTube, and existing videos will continue to be available on the municipal website until that migration takes place as well as on the City Government Channel – Spectrum channel 192 and Facebook Live.