Before you set up your first board, it's worth understanding how MuniMins thinks about the world. The concepts are simple, and getting them straight now will save you time later.

Organizations

An organization in MuniMins is your municipality. One town, one organization. When you signed up, an organization was created automatically using your email domain — for example, an email at @townofwilton.gov creates the Town of Wilton organization. Everyone on your team who joins MuniMins with that same domain lands in the same organization.

On the MuniMins plan, all users in an organization share a common view of boards, members, and minutes. On MuniMins Free, each user's work is isolated — seats exist but they don't share access.

Boards

Boards are the committees, commissions, and governing bodies that hold meetings in your municipality — the Select Board, Planning Board, Conservation Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals, and so on. Every set of minutes in MuniMins is tied to a specific board.

A typical small town has fifteen to twenty boards and committees. You don't need to set them all up at once — start with the one you're using for your first test meeting, then add others as you go.

Members and participants

Two groups of people show up in municipal meetings, and MuniMins treats them differently.

Board members are the voting members of a specific board. The Planning Board's members are different from the Select Board's members. Each board has its own roster. Members cast votes and make motions, and MuniMins uses your member list to attribute those correctly in the generated minutes.

Participants are non-voting attendees who often show up across multiple boards — the Town Administrator, legal counsel, department heads, recording secretaries. Participants are organization-wide. You can tag which boards they regularly attend so MuniMins knows to expect them.

The flow, end to end

  1. You upload a recording — an audio or video file, a YouTube or Vimeo link, or a Zoom cloud recording
  2. MuniMins transcribes the audio and separates speakers using voice identification
  3. AI generates formal minutes — attendance, motions, votes, and a narrative of what happened
  4. You review the output — confirm speaker identities, fix anything that needs correcting, and move the minutes through your approval workflow
  5. Export to PDF or DOCX when you're ready to share

That's the whole loop. The rest of this guide walks you through doing it for the first time.

Next step

Step 1: Set Up Your First Board →

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