Council and committee meetings transcribed

Which meetings

• Municipal council and council committees. The minutes or decision list must match what was said, also during a long budget debate.
• Provincial councils and water board general assemblies. Same pattern: many speakers, a fixed agenda, minutes that are formally adopted.
• Works council. The consultation meeting with the director, whose minutes later form the basis for agreements. Topics are often confidential, so a short retention period is sensible.
• Boards and supervisory boards. Also smaller boards of foundations and associations that have to keep minutes.

This page is about minutes of meetings. For the broader question of why government organisations choose a service that runs in the Netherlands, see transcription for government.

From recording to minutes

1. 1
   Get the recordingMost councils broadcast via a council information system. Download the recording there. A four-hour video can be larger than 1 GB; in that case export only the audio as mp3 or m4a, which is much smaller. Higher plans allow 2 GB per file.
2. 2
   Upload in one goRecordings longer than three hours are split into parts automatically and processed in full; you do not have to split anything yourself. An hour of audio is done in under a minute, so even a long evening is in your Studio within a few minutes.
3. 3
   Name the speakersSpeaker recognition is always on. Rename "Speaker 1" to "Chair" and the other speakers to the names of council members and aldermen. The name changes throughout the transcript.
4. 4
   Write the minutesSearch by agenda item or motion, click a passage to hear it again, and write the minutes or decision list. Export the transcript to Word as a working document next to your minutes.

Names, streets and projects spelled correctly

A council meeting is full of names no general model knows: council members' surnames, neighbourhoods, streets, the name of a redevelopment project or a local party. Add them to the custom vocabulary once and they are correct in every following meeting. Start, for example, with the list of council members from the website and the neighbourhood names from the budget.

Transparency, the Woo and retention

Public meetings and their minutes are public, but a transcript is often a working document. Agree internally what happens to it: is it kept next to the adopted minutes, or does it disappear once the minutes are adopted? A document you keep may fall under a freedom of information (Woo) request, so it helps if that choice is made deliberately. In Murmel you set the retention period accordingly: keep until you delete it, or delete automatically after 1, 7, 30 or 90 days or a year. Murmel is not an archive system; the adopted minutes belong in your own archive.

For closed sessions and works council meetings this applies even more. The recording is processed and stored in the Netherlands and not used for training, and with a 7-day period it is gone once the minutes are done.

Hybrid meetings

If a committee or works council meets via Teams or Google Meet, the note taker can join. It is visible in the participant list, has to be admitted and stops with one button. Zoom is not supported by the note taker; you upload a Zoom recording as a file.

What it costs

A three-and-a-half-hour committee meeting costs about €5.08 incl. VAT with prepaid credits. With Basic (€10.89 per month incl. VAT, 12 hours) you handle three such meetings a month. A clerk's office with several staff chooses a team account with shared minutes. For municipalities, provinces and water boards, payment by invoice, a data processing agreement and help with a DPIA are available; get in touch. All rates on pricing.

Frequently asked questions