What happens if nobody does it
Nothing, for a while. Then a resident asks for the packet from a meeting two years ago and it takes forty minutes to reassemble. The link practice a clerk starts in January has lapsed by June, because it is a task after every meeting, forever, and it belongs to nobody. We read thirty Indiana towns' archives before building this. Twenty-nine had this gap, including towns paying for a meeting platform.
Why it is worth doing at all
A resident who wants to know what the council decided has to watch an hour of video, then go find the agenda somewhere else on the website, and hope it is the right one. Most give up. The information is all public and none of it is findable, and nobody chose that: it is just what happens when the recording lives on YouTube and the paperwork lives on a website and no one has the job of connecting them.
The law is why this is timely. It is not why it matters. It matters because a town's record of its own decisions should be usable by the people the decisions are about, and because small towns should not have a worse public record than large ones just because nobody sold them a system. One town in the thirty we read does this correctly, by hand, every meeting. Nobody is making them. They just think it is right, and they are right.
What you get
- Nothing new after a meeting. No uploads, no logins, no per-meeting step. You record the way you already record.
- One link for your notices. Your archive page address goes in the notice template once and never changes.
- One email a month. It says every meeting is archived and linked. If something is wrong, you hear it from us before you hear it from anyone else.
We read thirty Indiana towns' archives before we built this
Twenty-nine of them had the same gap: the recording is in one place, the agenda is in another, and nothing joins them. Towns paying for a meeting platform had it too. One town in the thirty does it right, by hand, every meeting.
That told us what this actually is. It is not a technology problem. In most towns full compliance is two pasted links per meeting plus one line in the agenda template. It does not happen because nobody owns it. So we own it.
Meeting Archive is run by Tim Hopper. Not a call center. When you email, you get the person who built it.
How it works
- Send us two links. Your YouTube channel, and the page where you post agendas and minutes.
- Thirty minutes on the phone. You approve our access to your channel. We confirm your boards and your meeting schedule.
- You are done. Your archive is current the same day, back 90 days. After that you hear from us once a month.
What the law asks for
Indiana law (IC 5-14-1.5-2.9, effective July 2025) asks covered public bodies to live stream their meetings, keep the recording up for at least 90 days, link each archived recording to that meeting's agenda, minutes, and memoranda, and put the archive address in the meeting notice. Nearly every Indiana town solved the streaming part on its own. The linking part is the one that keeps not happening, because it is clerical work that recurs forever.
We watch your YouTube channel and the pages on your own website where you already post agendas and minutes. When a new recording appears, we find the documents for that meeting, write the links into the video's description underneath whatever you already had there, and publish them together on your archive page. When the minutes are approved three weeks later, we go back and add them. We badge each meeting with its 90-day window, and if a recording disappears while it is still inside that window, you get an email that day.
Nothing about your process changes. You do not upload anything to us. You do not log into anything. The most work you will ever do is answering our monthly email, and you do not have to.
Price
- Small town (up to 3 boards): $600/year. Council, board of works, park board.
- Standard (up to 8 boards): $1,200/year. Add BZA, plan commission, redevelopment, whatever else you stream.
- City (unlimited boards, archive on your own domain): $1,800/year.
Every plan: automatic document links in your video descriptions, your public archive page, 90-day window tracking, notice text, a monthly summary, alerts when something breaks, and setup done by us. Invoiced annually. Pay by check or ACH like any other claim. No login to maintain, no seats to count, no per-meeting charge.
Starting out: our first towns pay $500 for year one in exchange for telling us what is wrong with it.
Ask for a review of your archive
Tell us your town and we will send back what we find: what is there, what is missing, and what the statute asks for. It goes to you and nobody else. We do not publish these and we do not grade towns publicly.
Ask for a review of your archive
Or just email ops@meetingarchive.org.