Wellington City Council's awesome transparency tool: Mātai Manapori - TrackDem

An AI-generated image of a box of documents in the sky, surrounded by fireworks.

As long-time followers know, I’m a passionate advocate for improving transparency and accountability in local government. With local government, it’s very easy to write about negative issues in the sector, especially when it comes to transparency. Today I wanted to do something different and celebrate an awesome (and now Association of Local Government Information Management award winning) transparency tool developed by Wellington City Council: Mātai Manapori - TrackDem.

Launched in May 2024 with the goal of lifting transparency and civic engagement by improving public access to council decisions, Mātai Manapori - TrackDem allows users to easily find and see the status and history of decisions made by Wellington City Council, including pulling together relevant supporting documents and links to videos of meetings.

As anyone who has tried to find what councils are doing on a particular issue, that typically involves searching and reading through numerous council agenda papers - typically PDFs. It’s historically been a slow and painful process, and one where if you don’t already have a working knowledge of a specific issue, haven’t been following it in real time, or don’t understand council processes, then it can often be a fool’s errand. Even with local government experience, 78 councils often find 78 different ways of searching and presenting the same information and processes, making things even more difficult. It’s a small mercy when you find a council using an agenda template you’re already familiar with, even getting to that point can be a struggle.

That’s where Mātai Manapori - TrackDem comes in.

A screenshot from the main search functionality of Mātai Manapori - TrackDem.

Mātai Manapori - TrackDem simplifies this through easy to use search functionality that pulls together the full agenda for a given decision, the current status of parts of that decision, links to videos of relevant meetings, supporting documents and related reports.

A screenshot from a search result from Mātai Manapori - TrackDem.

There’s two things I love about this. The first is obviously being able to easily search by a particular issue or topic. Technicality you could do this already, but to do so you’d need to know how to structure a specific site search using Google to get it to locate a direct link to a PDF, which may or may not be what you were looking for. Mātai Manapori - TrackDem massively simplifies this process not only by making the ability to find things significantly easier for everyone, but crucially it pulls together all the relevant information and presents it in an easy to follow format.

There’s also more functionality being continually rolled out to it. I understand that the next features to be soon included will have detailed decision processes (e.g. amendments, motions, and votes) and downloadable voting data, which are great steps for further enabling better transparency and accountability.

While obviously my focus is on how this improves transparency and accountability for us local government geeks, Mātai Manapori - TrackDem also reduces the administrative burden on council staff too by streamlining the way they manage actions from decisions, providing updates, and reporting on progress.

What’s also cool is that the system has been designed so that it can easily be adopted by other councils both domestically and internationally, and I really hope Wellington City Council is able to license Mātai Manapori to other councils and help lift the collective performance of the local government sector as a whole.

With local government and Wellington City Council often in the headlines for the wrong reasons, I think Mātai Manapori - TrackDem is a great reminder that there are awesome things and exciting innovations taking place in the sector. More often this stuff flies under the radar because there’s ever more limited resources in newsrooms, scandals tend to get eyeballs, and when things are working well - people just don’t tend to notice and so good work can often go unacknowledged by the wider community.

So a big shout out to Wellington City Council for their work on Mātai Manapori - TrackDem. I’m really excited to see where this exciting tool goes next!