Web Labs

Committee's manager is a module for the Document Master product that has been designed in cooperation with councils and enables this powerhouse of an EDRMS product to quickly automate the building of the agendas, reports and minutes that are vital to councils, companies and many other organisations. On top of this Committees Manager can take care of attendance records for those coming to the meetings, access to secure documents and a customisable web page for the searching and viewing of Agendas, Minutes and supporting documents. This will show only public documents until logging in which will then enable viewing of Private documents.

Key Points

• Built on top of powerful and secure Document Management system
• Easy creation of Agenda's and reports
• Maintenance of attendees and attendance reports
• Easy creation of Minutes document based on the Agenda items or as a normal document upload
• Lots of document creation tools
• Friendly customisable Web front end viewer

To start with, the system will ask you for meeting details, date, time and location and some extra description to help, this will then appear in the meeting calendar as a green box. This will then allow people to view upcoming meetings even though agenda and reports are not ready and provide a Google map to locate the meeting.

Next step is the creation of meetings agenda and reports which is accomplished with a step by step creation tool which allows adding of public and private reports to the agenda. This is all then output via HTML and as a word document. Once meeting is complete, a minute's document can be created step by step or a completely created document uploaded. All in all, the system tried to make the creation of Agenda's, reports and minutes as easily and securely as possible.

The bigger picture of Local Government Committee Meetings

Local Councils are under pressure to reduce cost and improve communications with the public in addition the Local Government Act 2000 has imposed a time limit on publishing agendas and minutes so any system that speeds the production of the publishing process could assist Local Government staff.

The Act also introduces scrutiny committees and decision call-in so a system that caters for this added complexity would also benefit the democratic service staff.

The traditional activity of producing Agendas, Minutes and the publication of the Committee Meetings are effective but labour intensive. The advent of electronic document storage and easy publishing to web sites means that this activity would generally benefit from the deployment of these new technologies to speed the process, lower coast and provide a comprehensive service to the public and elected members.

Web-Labs has in conjunction with several Local Government customers developed 'Committee Manager' a web browser based and fully integrated solution to meet all aspects of the Local Government Act and assist local government officers to administer and publish all aspects Committee Meetings.

Web-Labs also provides as part of the Committee Master solution all the functionality to enable Local Authorities to meet all the Priority Outcomes relevant to Democratic Services.

Local government officers already using Committee Manager by Web Labs get:

• Automatic creation of forward plans, decision notices, agendas and minutes
• Publishing all committees documents to the web
• Satisfying user experience and fast easy access to public committee papers powered by the Search Master Advanced search engine
• Document packs as PDF files, including running page numbering, headers, public and private version
• Supporting committee and delegated decision-making with an easy to use web site
• Draft review and approval workflow
• Conversion of reports format to PDF for easy access
• Comprehensive decision publication and web call-in with web-based information submission
• Powerful concept based search engine indexes and categorises all documents including scanned document via OCR for easy retrieval, and to the page accuracy
• Track decisions throughout multiple committee stages
• Committee security system for access control across departments to a committee, a meeting or an individual document.
• Member details, including contact information, surgery times, committee memberships, declaration information and membership of external bodies, as well as tracking meeting attendance can be handled easily within the system
• An online manual
• Management report builder to give you just the reports your organisation needs, regarding committees, members and many other types of information
• Enabling viewing of documents from any web browser or mobile device
• Auto subscribe to any document or committee and be advised when updates are published
• Supplementary agendas feature and late breaking reports can be produced with updated document packs
• Deadline schedules for documents and agendas will alert if Agenda and reports are running behind your schedules or statutory timing schemes
• Member absence feature – track those members that have not attended their meetings and are not fulfilling there required attendance
• Parish councils details – All parish details can be stored within the system
• Member declarations can be searched at any time through the concept based search engine
• Generic documentation publishing – The system can publish any document including, images, video streams, audio podcasts and either within the committees area
• Easily track decision documents by remembering within your personal shortcut folder and track through committees
• Outlook calendar integration - meeting dates and links appear in attendees Outlook calendar automatically
• Committees Wizard will guide you through the creation and publishing of all committees agendas, reports and minutes
• Table of deadlines can be published on website
• Decision tracking reports can be made available to all members and the public to show progress throughout there approval and final action being taken
• Store and manage information about outside bodies
• Special user types can be created for example Mayer, Member, MEP with access control
• E-Consultation option is available that allows easy to create multi page questionnaires that ensures the public has a say in discussions held in their name
• Any user in the system can have their own personal easy to modify web site with link to the work and documents where access is granted.
• Register of Interest Database - A comprehensive database is now available offering many facets to ease management of this important data
• Political Balance Calculator - dynamically re-calculate the political balance of the Members update and provide a graphical presentation on your website
• Dual format web documents - both PDF and HTML links are available automatically for all documents published automatically

By deploying the Web-Labs systems you will benefit by being a Local Government Member of an active user group discussing practical operation issues and future developments.

Web Labs have telephone support desk, 24x7 online reporting system and a Users forum all designed to assist our customers to work efficiency and keep abreast of developments.

Integrated to other products e-democracy suite i.e. e-petitions, room booking, e-consultations, Election Publishing/Broadcasting, Members Sites, Community Sites, Social Networks, EDRMS etc