Civic Documentation: Recording What Happened in Public

by bam

Public meetings decide budgets, contracts, zoning, policing and schools, and most of them happen in rooms with nobody watching. This course teaches the discipline of documenting them: what a public body actually is, how to read an agenda before you go, how to behave in the room, what open-meetings law protects and what it does not, note-taking to a standard a stranger can use, recording and photography with consent, interviewing after the gavel, and revising notes before memory fades. It covers where documentation ends and reporting begins, why that line protects you, and what defamation and the fair report privilege mean for someone publishing notes. Built on the Documenters Field Guide published by City Bureau, whose program trains and pays people to do exactly this work, with Indianapolis and Mirror Indy as the worked local example. Not affiliated with City Bureau or any local Documenters program. Education about the law, not legal advice.