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Good practice Imported

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

Greece · Chania · See the Greece profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 62% 53/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Greek non-profit Schema Labs' OpenCouncil uses OpenAI Whisper to transcribe, summarise and index municipal council meetings, alerting residents by neighbourhood. Live in 7 municipalities with €200,000 in EU-linked funding (2026); outcomes remain unmeasured.

7
Municipalities live (mid-2026)
1,362
Discussion topics indexed (mid-2026)
EUR200,000
Revenue-based financing secured (Apr 2026)
OpenCouncil — Greece's AI Platform Making Municipal Council Meetings Transparent and Searchable

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Schema Labs (OpenCouncil)
Period
2025–2026
Keywords
civic tech, local government, transparency, speech-to-text AI

Context

OpenCouncil is an open-source platform built by Greek non-profit Schema Labs to make lengthy municipal council meetings accessible, downloading session recordings, using OpenAI's Whisper for speaker-attributed transcription, then categorising discussion by topic, generating summaries and video clips, and sending neighbourhood-specific alerts. The Municipality of Chania was first to formally pilot it, on 14 May 2025.

Results

As of mid-2026 the platform lists seven municipalities live -- Chania, Athens, Sparta, Xylokastro-Evrostini, Orestiada, Vrilissia and Samothraki -- with 1,362 discussion topics indexed. In April 2026, OpenCouncil secured EUR200,000 in revenue-based financing from the Investing For Purpose Fund to hire two more staff and expand further.

Conclusions

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 rather than outcome evaluation, and the system depends on a third-party US AI vendor (OpenAI) with no public accuracy or data-protection audit found.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
Schema Labs AMKE non-profit team (2 additional hires planned)

Conditions for success

  • Open-source, steward-owned non-profit structure
  • AI transcription/summarisation pipeline reusable across municipalities
  • Impact-investment financing to fund expansion

Common failure modes

  • No independent outcome evaluation of citizen engagement
  • Dependence on third-party US AI vendor with no public accuracy/data-protection audit

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

Where it's been adopted

Documented replications and adaptations of this practice elsewhere.

PlaceWhenAdopterOutcome
Athens, Greece — Municipality of Athens Adopted the OpenCouncil platform following the Chania pilot.
Sparta, Greece — Municipality of Sparta Adopted the OpenCouncil platform following the Chania pilot.
Xylokastro-Evrostini, Greece — Municipality of Xylokastro-Evrostini Adopted the OpenCouncil platform following the Chania pilot.
Orestiada, Greece — Municipality of Orestiada Adopted the OpenCouncil platform following the Chania pilot.
Vrilissia, Greece — Municipality of Vrilissia Adopted the OpenCouncil platform following the Chania pilot.
Samothraki, Greece — Municipality of Samothraki Adopted the OpenCouncil platform following the Chania pilot.

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