Dane County staff receive hands-on Legistar agenda management training

Trainer (Legistar trainer) led a recorded agendas training for Dane County staff covering how to schedule meetings, build and edit agendas in Legistar, and publish final and revised agendas to the county’s public Insight page. "Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the agendas training," the trainer said at the start of the session.

The session focused on four practical steps: scheduling an agenda date, compiling and modifying an agenda, running drafts or packets, and publishing. The trainer demonstrated navigating the agendas module, adjusting the local date-range view (default 90 days forward and 90 days past), and creating a new meeting record with location, public notes and status fields (draft, hidden, final, final revised). The trainer showed that hiding a meeting prevents its line and details from appearing on the public insight page (dane.legistar.com).

A substantial portion of the training covered the Generate function and the system’s agenda template (Administration → Workflow Control → Primary Legislative Body → Agenda Definitions). The trainer explained that agenda section headers are ordered by sequence number, can be set as forcing (always included) or non-forcing, and use three metrics — meeting body, file type and file status — to determine which legislative files populate each section. Example configurations shown: special matters can pull special resolutions or presentations; public hearings are controlled by file status set to "public hearing"; consent calendar entries commonly require file type = resolution and file status = recommended to board.

Trainer demonstrated manual adjustments after generation: adding one-time headers or page breaks (type PAGEBREAK in the description field), inserting agenda items via the agenda-item dropdown or Add Many Lines (which lists files that do not have a final action date), drag-and-drop reordering, auto-numbering items and deleting lines from the agenda view (which does not delete the legislative file from the system). The trainer warned that re-running Generate overwrites later customizations and that there is currently no built-in way to re-run Generate only for newly created items; attendees requested that as a feature.

On publishing, the trainer laid out the required steps: change the meeting status to Final, click Tools → Export Data to push to Legislate, then run Reports → Meeting Agenda and choose Publish to Insight Calendar (PDF). The trainer noted the Insight sync delay of about five to ten minutes before the published agenda and accessible agenda become available to the public. For amendments to a published agenda, the trainer demonstrated unlocking the agenda, making edits, changing status to Final Revised, re-exporting data and republishing; sending subscriber notices (Send Agenda) was highlighted as the method to notify subscribers of new or amended packets.

The session closed with an overview of the new web-based Legislate viewer (dane.granicus.com/legislate), which replaces the installable iLegislate program. The trainer demonstrated attachments, annotation tools (highlight, sticky notes, stamps), bookmarking, note saving and video playback. User and group administration for Legislate is managed in the media manager (admin → users and groups); the trainer advised removing users who no longer serve on meeting bodies.

Kaylene, a Dane County staff member, confirmed one detail about recordings: "No, no, we do it outside of Granicus." The trainer and attendees agreed to schedule admin training on Thursday and a separate minutes training with Carolyn; the trainer said she would mark the test meeting hidden so it would not appear publicly while it is used for later training.