Dane County staff trained on compiling and publishing agendas in Legistar

Dane County staff participated in a training session on July 26, 2025, on using the Legistar system to schedule meetings, compile agendas and publish agenda packets and accessible agendas to the county's Insight page and to the Legislate application.

The session, led by a Granicus trainer, walked attendees through the end-to-end agenda workflow in Legistar: scheduling an agenda date, creating legislative files, generating an agenda from the county's predefined agenda template (agenda definitions), making on-the-fly edits, running draft reports, and the steps required to publish the final agenda and any subsequent amendments.

Trainer: "This training is going to encompass putting together and publishing an agenda from your Legistar system," the trainer said at the start of the session, emphasizing the session would show "how to schedule an agenda date in the system." The trainer repeatedly demonstrated features and settings while answering staff questions.

Why it matters: correct use of Legistar controls what items appear on a public agenda, how attachments are linked, and how subscribers are notified. Misconfigured template rules or file statuses can cause items to be omitted from a generated agenda; publishing steps also control when the public can view the agenda documents and accessible versions online.

Key points from the training

- Scheduling and local settings: The default agenda search window shows 90 days forward and 90 days back; attendees were shown how to change that default (for example to 180 days) and how to set a default meeting body when creating a new agenda. The trainer noted some clients' historical data go back to 2013'2014 in their system.

- Agenda generation and templates: The trainer explained that the generate button pulls items…