Council information system
A council information system is a computer -based information and document management system for managing communities , to city-states .
Since 1990 around 15 competing systems have been offered on the market in German-speaking countries. Council information systems are increasingly fulfilling all tasks connected with the work of the political organs of the municipality, right down to the administrative processes. A council information system fulfills various tasks:
Meeting service
- Meeting calendar
The most important planning instrument for the progress of the decision-making process is the calendar of meetings of the municipal bodies. The meeting calendar is required by the council information system in order to assign pending questions, motions and decisions to the next possible date.
- Establishing the agenda
Based on the upcoming tasks of the committees, council information systems put the planned tasks on an automatically generated agenda. The agenda is formally set up by the chairman of the respective committee by adding further items, structuring the order of the meetings and moving items to another date.
- Sending the invitation / publication
Once the agenda has been set up by the chairman of the committee, the invitation is sent and the meeting is officially announced through the council information system. The systems increasingly offer electronic transmission of information over the Internet. The conversion to a fully electronic mailing system is tied to certain limits in accordance with the respective municipal regulations and in some cases requires the formal delivery of a written, paper-based invitation by post.
- Preparation of the meeting
The preparation of the meetings is supported by a council information system. This includes room planning and the provision of the necessary work equipment for the meeting, such as sound systems, projectors and other items. The compilation of the necessary documents is supported for the meeting service. These include birthday lists, attendance lists, press information, and agendas for display in the public area.
- Session handling
During the meeting of the body, the Council Information System ideally provides all necessary information as a basis for political consideration and decision-making. In addition, the system creates a basic framework for the minutes to be created, which can already be created in a short form or in full during the meeting and is therefore available to other interested parties as an unapproved draft minutes after the meeting and thus helps to speed up administrative processes.
- Protocol creation
The council information system creates a raw protocol from the existing data, which is enriched with further information. Depending on the municipal code, this includes the course of the debate and, above all, amendments and their results.
- Excerpts from the minutes
The council information system should automatically create extracts from the minutes. For this, it is necessary to provide the relevant departments in the administration and other bodies and possibly elected officials with a copy. Within the framework of the system, this can be done by notification or by email.
- Settlement of attendance fees
Based on the list of participants and the information to be stored in the master data, the system should automatically calculate attendance fees and ideally make them payable through a cash register interface. Income tax regulations must be observed.
Workflow
In order to get closer to the ideal of a paperless office and to make administrative processes faster, more transparent and more cost-effective with the support of IT, it is up to the council information system to map these processes of information transfer. For this purpose, the previous ways of co-signing, correction, signing, approval and other procedural steps must be replaced by a forgery-proof procedure. It is particularly important to document the path of a process, to document the signatures of employees or mandate holders in a forgery-proof form and to record various processing states of a document. The administration employee must be able to trust that the templates created by him will either be passed in unchanged form or that changes in the work process can be recognized as such.
Council information
The Council Information System provides political mandate holders with the information they need for political work. Since this information goes beyond the public domain, the accesses for council members are particularly security-relevant and require protection against unauthorized access in order to be able to take into account the concerns of data protection and confidentiality.
Citizen information
Citizen information is generated fully and semi-automatically from the data available in the system and is primarily made available to the population via the Internet. The information offered regularly includes the meeting calendar, the meeting templates (as far as possible) and the meeting minutes. Research functions enable citizens to find out about the status of decisions on community issues.
Success and decision monitoring
Depending on the current state of development of the council information system, the system serves as an information base for the administration, the politically responsible, the elected officials and the citizens, how far the projects decided by the municipality have been implemented and thus enables a comprehensive and current monitoring of the administration by the politicians and the Politics by the electorate.
literature
- Successful introduction of council information systems - A guide for politics and administration , Bertelsmann Stiftung publishing house , Gütersloh 2004, ISBN 3-89204-722-7
- KGSt report 3/2004: From the Ratsinformationssystem (RIS) to the Ratsportal , Cologne, 2004
- From the municipal meeting service to the council information system: an implementation guide; Optimization of the work of the council, network: local authorities of the future (Bertelsmann Stiftung; Hans-Böckler-Stiftung ; KGSt) Part I + II, 2002