North Dakota group pays community members to attend government meetings – InForum

A nonprofit online news outlet is working to bring the public back to public meetings.

Buffalo’s Fire, a Native-led news organization based in Bismarck, and the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance offer a program called Documenters Network in North Dakota.

The program involves training (and paying) community members to attend local government meetings and take notes, with meeting summaries posted online.

“This really puts the power back in the hands of the people to hold our elected officials accountable,” said Alicia Hegland-Thorpe, Bismarck Documenters program manager.

Hegland-Thorpe recruits community members to cover meetings in the Bismarck-Mandan area as well as tribal council meetings. Organizers would like to expand their coverage to state meetings in the future.

A free orientation was held on Wednesday, May 15 in Bismarck and additional orientation sessions will be held in the future.

Once training is complete, participants can view a list of upcoming meetings and select which ones they want to address. Librarians are paid between $17 and $24 an hour to cover a meeting, depending on complexity and distance, with an average assignment estimated between 2.5 and 3 hours, Hegland-Thorpe said.

The training will prepare participants to focus on fact-based reporting rather than opinion-based reporting, Hegland-Thorpe said. Meeting notes will be edited before being published.

“We also want it to be objective,” she said.

Jodi Rave Spotted Bear, publisher of Buffalo’s Fire, said this will be the first rural and Indigenous-led cohort to participate in the documenters’ network. It is open to anyone who wishes to participate, she said.

“It’s a chance to engage the community and open the door for them to participate in meetings that impact their lives,” Spotted Bear said.

The Documenters Network was created in 2018 by City Bureau, a nonprofit civic journalism lab. The organization, which operates in 18 other cities, centralizes public meeting information in one searchable location.

Most of the meetings covered by documenters are local meetings that generally do not receive media coverage. For example, a participant in Akron, Ohio, covered a Vacant Buildings Council meeting last week and posted detailed notes, as well as an audio recording of the meeting.

The Bismarck Documenters website has more information on how to get involved, as well as a link to local area meetings ranging from the Bismarck School Board to the Mandan Architectural Review Commission.

This story was originally published on NorthDakotaMonitor.com