Wellington City Council has introduced new functionality to its website in a bid to remove barriers associated with locating information around Council voting records and meeting data.
The award-winning system shows how the Council and its committees have come to their final decisions, by laying out the recommendations made by the Council officers, any changes or amendments to those recommendations, and then how each individual Elected Member voted.
Smart Council project lead, Matt Lane said the tool unlocks access to complex information and enables in-depth data analysis of content that traditionally has been hard to navigate.
“This will make it much easier for journalists and members of the public to see decisions and understand how they were made. Technically all the data existed in meeting minutes, but they can be pretty hard to understand,” said Mr Lane.
“It was possible to track this information before this tool, but not without digging through what are sometimes 300-page PDFs. What used to be a two-hour job will now take two minutes.”
The project was a collaboration between the Council’s developers, designers, the Democracy Services team, residents and council staff writing reports for committees. Elected officials were also given the opportunity to have input.
Team Leader Democracy Services, Sean Johnson says the project was driven with feedback from the public, interviews, and usability tests with a diverse group of Wellingtonians, ensuring the tool met community needs.
Mr Johnson said it was important to make the decisions that impact Wellingtonians more accessible, and this new approach will make them much easier for the lay person to understand.
He says other New Zealand councils have indicated they are interested in following Wellington’s lead.
“We have done what no other council in New Zealand has done in releasing voting data this way, and we’re potentially the first in the world.”
The new functionality was released onto the Council’s website this month, with voting data dating back to June 2021.
Manager Governance and Information, Jennifer Parker says the improvements align with the Council’s vision of enhancing transparency, civic engagement, and trust in local governance, and bridges the gap between government and citizens.
“We’ve worked for a long time on how to make decision-making as accessible and transparent as possible,” said Ms Parker.
“This initiative promotes long-term civic engagement and accountability, contributing to a better-informed public and a more transparent, efficient local government.
“We’re looking forward to seeing how this tool evolves to inspire civic innovation, not just in Wellington, but potentially across councils worldwide.”
The project won the Web, Digital, and Communications Project of the Year at the ALGIM conference in 2024. All territorial authorities are members of ALGIM (Association of Local Government Information Management).
