ESDH – This is where it happens!

Electronic Case and Document Management - in everyday speech, may not sound exciting. Nevertheless, it is right here that the democratic process is strongly expressed through the citizen's opportunity to follow the municipality's work. Kruso has taken a look beyond the ESDH peaks and gives you a panoramic picture of different solutions for your municipality's display of agendas and minutes.

Municipality's agendas and summaries are usually displayed in a structure where navigation from councils and committees, to their agendas and summaries, to year numbers and lastly to the individual dates. This structure is complemented by the ability to filter the council and committee, by year, and also by the ability to search for words in agendas and summaries.

To the north in Frederikshavn Municipality, their agendas and summaries are displayed exactly like this, but in addition they have chosen to make it possible for citizens to subscribe to the individual committees, councils and boards, so that as soon as a new agenda or a new summary is posted on the website, the citizen will receive an email with notification of this.

The subscription function makes political work more present, and increases the citizen's - and the municipality's employees' - opportunities to stay informed in current cases.

Vejen Municipality does not apply filtering to their overview of agendas and summaries in their front end work. In return, their webmaster can control which advice and committees to display on which site.

Behind a login, Vejen Municipality's web administrator can opt-out of displaying individual councils and committee agendas and summaries on specific sites. This is beneficial when you have a committee whose agendas and summaries are particularly relevant to a subsite's visitors, such as the Disability Council's meetings at the Disability Council's subsite, or when a committee's agendas and summaries are only relevant to a small group, such as the Staff Committee's agendas, and summaries on the employee intranet.

In the east, Hvidovre Municipality has recently launched a new web solution with a display of agendas and summaries. The solution includes an overview of the individual councils and committees, the associated agendas and summaries, a search of agendas and summaries, the possibility of subscribing to the individual councils and committees, and lastly managing which committees are to be displayed on which sites.

In addition, Hvidovre Municipality gives citizens the opportunity to print each agenda or summary and share it via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or e-mail. By making it easy for the citizen to share agendas and summaries, it also makes it easy for both the individual citizen and his or hers network to get involved in the democratic work.

The attentive reader will now have turned his gaze to the west. In the near future, Herning Municipality plans to launch a new website, including a new ESDH integration for displaying agendas and summaries.

This screening will to a large extent be based on standards for screening, which Kruso has developed in collaboration with a large number of the Denmarks municipalities, including the above examples. The standard has been prepared on the basis of requests from committee members, web editors, citizens and the press.

The key features includes: 

• The best practice display of the individual points as a fold-out function 

• Filtering and free text search 

• A subscription function 

• Managing which advice to display on which sites 

• Automated import of documents and aooendixes 

• An accessibility view tested by 3rd party accessibility specialists 

Together, these functions give citizens the opportunity to have an overview of the municipality's activities, to stay informed and to get involved.

The solutions have been developed with a view to the least possible administration for the municipality's web administrators, so that various councils and committees can hold meetings without having to carry updates to the municipality's website.