📝 The Changelog
What's new and what's it to you

2024.04.09
🎭 St. Paul , 🧑‍🏫 Newark, and 👋 Madison

We had a request for Madison, Wisconsin where aldermen have considered staggered terms as per WORT, and council members are looking at a pay hike as per the Wisconsin State Journal.

Meanwhile, also per the New York Times, 16 year olds in Newark can now vote in school board elections. So we added Newark of course.

St. Paul elected an all woman city council as per Minnesota Public Radio and the New York Times. Great news and we were psyched to add them to Legigram to celebrate – but their Legistar API is not available. They join the sad ranks of Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Baltimore which also do not have their agendas and matters available via API.

2024.01.10
🦀 PG County and New Feature Notifications

Hoo-boy it has been a minute. But we finally added a sign-up form for those of you interested in helping shape new features here. Notifications for new agendas - critical for city hall reporters working on tight deadlines in advance of public meetings as well as the rest of us - are in the works. Let us know what's important to you and be the first to know about new features by signing up here.

And yes, we added coverage for the council of Maryland's Prince George's County. PG County, as it is widely known in the acronym laden DMV, is widely known as the wealthiest majority black county in the country.

Check out some recent local coverage of the PG County council here from John Domen at WTOP and here from Lateshia Beachum at the Washington Post. They passed 180 bills and resolutions in 2023 as per Domen - which is less than half the average number of matters on a typical agenda at Harris County Council.

2023.08.20
👋 Hello (Portland) Metro Council Oregon

This one was long overdue, and well, I'm not making Twitter lists any more, but check out the coverage from Nigel Jaquiss.

  • ✨ Linear view on desktop
    The three-by grid was fun while it lasted, but the new matter layout for desktop is much easier to browse IMHO.
  • ⭐️ Star filter in sticky nav
    This means you can more quickly filter an agenda for the items you want to review.
  • 🧭 SEO friendly headings, times, keywords
    Thanks Nick for the free consult!
  • 🎩 Icon added, emojis removed
    Fancy, no?

2023.04.24
🥾 Ann Arbor Journalists Stepping Up

😲 Legigram now covers 30 million constituents.

  • 🌳 Added Ann Arbor
    In 2019, a journalist ran for council. The New York Times also featured a reporter from The Michigan Daily in a discussion of university papers covering local government.
  • 🤓 Readability improvements for people and bots
    Now there is more negative vertical space to make matter titles more legible. And page headers clarify city council where applicable.

2023.03.14
👩‍⚖️ Nashville Metropolitan Council in the NYT

  • Improved home page tout
    Let us count the places and the constituents covered by Legigram for you 😉

  • NYT: Nashville Sues to Block Law That Would Shrink its Council by Half
    The state of Tennessee wants to reduce the size of the council to 20 from 40. Why?

    Enacted less than five months before the next Metro Nashville Council election, the act will sow political chaos, create significant voter confusion, dilute voter representation and jeopardize running the state’s largest economic engine,” officials wrote in one filing, adding that the new law “does all of this in a rushed and haphazard fashion without any purported public policy goal.

    Follow the action at council here on Legigram.

2023.01.13
🎇 An auspicious start of the new year

2022.12.21
🙋‍♀️ Hello Sacramento! Hello home page grid!

Well, the year is wrapping up so we have a few updates for you.

  • 👋 Sacramento, CA
    Our newest city has a majority-women city council going into 2023. Check out the story from Kristin Lam with CapRadio here and follow other City Hall watchers here.
  • 🪟 Added home page view of clickable places by state.
    That drop-down in the top nav was just a little too cumbersome.

2022.11.18
📞 Sorry to Bother You

Busy month but we got Oakland onboard – now if only we could get Philly, Baltimore, or San Francisco to come around.

  • Oakland, CA – Check out the list of local City Hall watchers before Twitter implodes here.
  • We tweaked the linked event titles and matter numbers to simplify the layout
  • In advance of @seereadnow's talk about Legigram at GDG Dallas in January 2022, we will be reaching out to users for feedback.
  • TBD if we are going to keep bothering with Twitter lists

2022.10.07
🎈 Show Me, Show Me

We are a little slow on new features this round – but we have big things in the works so stay tuned. And don't forget to check our Twitter lists.

2022.09.09
A Boston Minute?

  • Boston, MA has arrived.
    It should come as no surprise – Boston has healthy city hall coverage compared to a lot of places. Check out our list.
  • View meeting minutes.
    If a meeting has them, you can view them.

2022.09.02
Look out, Charlotte

  • Charlotte, NC is here.
    A slightly different video viewer here compared to the other cities so far. We fixed a few of the others including El Paso, Seattle, McKinney, San Jose, and North Richland Hills.
  • Home page launched.
    Apologies to the long standing default Fort Worth but a fast loading home page will help new users get oriented more quickly.
  • Browse by matter status and type.
    View statuses and matter types, along with respective counts, in the header of each event. You can filter by clicking any of them.
  • Tap Next on mobile to scroll to the next item
    Another beta version feature but this should save some thumbs from those super long agendas.
  • New colors! And they are WCAG friendly.
    Shout out to the WAVE tool. Our filtering still needs some work but we are getting there.

We had a lot of changes under the hood this week. If you would like to see more committee events from your city or any other info that appears in your Legistar, please let us know.

2022.08.25
Getting cleaned up for Columbus

  • 😎 Fresh new look.
    Well, that was long overdue.

    We rearranged the layout so that the matters are easier to visually scan. Some changes include:

    • Matter status appears at the top of the matter, to the right of the matter ID
    • Matter 'type' appears just below the matter ID
    • Matter title is a bit larger. They are never too concise unfortunately so it's a balancing act.
    • Matter 'action' appears below the title.
    • Max width set for the main container

  • 👋 Columbus, OH is now on Legigram.
    Council for the second-most populous city in the Midwest appears to be on break at the moment. In the mean time, check out our featured list of city hall reporters on Twitter.

A color refresh and filtering by status are on deck.

Also, we had a request for historical searches but that will take a little more time to figure out. We can only make so many hits to the Legistar API and our current setup can only do so much caching. That, and we are trying to avoid linkrot/bitrot so this one is a bit tricky. But we are thinking about it! And, for the record, financial support would help move this ask up in the queue.

2022.08.22
Jax, ⭐️'s, caching

  • ☀️ Jacksonville.
    America's largest city by area and 12th largest by population is now on Legigram.
  • ⭐️ Filter agenda items with a star.
    Long lists can be overwhelming. A recent Harris County agenda had more than 400 items. So now you can star items that you want to review. Then hide the other items by clicking the ☆ that appears in the header of the corresponding section. Note: your stars are not saved anywhere currently, not even in your browser session. So if you close or reload the page, they will disappear.
  • ⏱ Faster loading through better caching.
    We have shifted some of our caching around to improve page speed without reducing the timeliness of our data. Let us know if you anything seems off.
  • 🗃 Close button for document viewer.
    Finding the inline Hide button is a tricky sometimes, especially on mobile so now you can close a document by clicking a convenient Close button.

2022.08.19
⛰ Grouped by state, navbar, counts, hierarchy, .doc, footer

All sorts of new UX polish for you...

  • ⛰ Denver is here!
    Our 15th city! Almost 25 million constituents are now covered by Legigram!
  • 🏘 Municipalities grouped by state
    The dropdown is a bit less cluttered now. Yes, North Texas is over represented currently.
  • 🧭 Navigate across agendas, matters, and down to the footer.
    Jump to any of the three sections via the top nav.
  • 👀 See the event and matter counts.
    You may have heard that meetings can run long – so can the agendas. These counts update when you filter, too.
  • 🔮 Reference the record time ranges and limits.
    Know what you are seeing and what you are missing.
  • 🏛 Footer layout.
    Added some structure so you can more easily decide what to do after all of that scrolling.
  • 📑 View .doc and .docx files
    That's right – not just PDFs.

And we fixed the Twitter list links.

2022.08.10
Changelog, KC, esc, PDFs on mobile

We pushed a bunch of fun stuff today...

  • 📝 Follow the Changelog.
    This thing you are reading right here let's you know what's new.
  • 🥳 Kansas City is live!
    KC is our fourteenth council. We have a Twitter list of reporters here.
  • 🪄 Escape!
    You can close a document by pressing your esc key.
  • 📲 Viewable PDFs on Mobile
    PDFs actually display when you tap View.