OpenCouncil — Greece's AI Platform Making Municipal Council Meetings Transparent and Searchable

OpenCouncil is an open-source platform built by the Greek non-profit Schema Labs (legally, Schema Labs AMKE) to make municipal council meetings — often several hours long — accessible to ordinary residents. It downloads council session recordings, uses OpenAI's Whisper model for speaker-attributed transcription, then applies further AI processing to categorise discussion by topic (e.g. sanitation, traffic), generate short summaries and short-form video clips for social media, and send neighbourhood-specific WhatsApp and Viber alerts to residents about agenda items that affect them.
The Municipality of Chania became the first to formally present the tool in a pilot on 14 May 2025, with Mayor Panagiotis Simandirakis calling it the first nationwide system letting citizens, journalists and interested parties monitor council proceedings in real time. As of mid-2026 the platform's own dashboard lists seven municipalities live — Chania, Athens, Sparta, Xylokastro-Evrostini, Orestiada, Vrilissia and Samothraki — with 1,362 discussion topics indexed. In April 2026, OpenCouncil secured €200,000 in revenue-based financing from the Investing For Purpose Fund (backed by EquiFund II and the European Investment Fund), explicitly to hire two more staff and expand to further municipalities while keeping Schema Labs' non-profit, steward-owned structure intact.
No independent study has yet measured whether OpenCouncil changes citizens' knowledge of, or engagement with, local government — the evidence so far is adoption and output data (number of municipalities, topics indexed, funding secured) rather than outcome evaluation. The system also depends on a third-party US AI vendor (OpenAI) for transcription, and no public data-protection or transcription-accuracy audit was found.

Read the full analysis: https://opencouncil.gr