How to use SayIt to publish transcripts of meetings

A Scribe from the Book of HoursIn yesterday’s blog post we talked about using our free, Open Source software, SayIt, to create collections of statements, like our collections of Party speeches.

That’s one use of SayIt – but we actually built it with a slightly different aim in mind: the storing and publication of transcripts.

SayIt really does transform transcripts – so, if you regularly take minutes of meetings at work, or in another capacity, it’s worth a look.

That’s easy for us to say, we know. But if you play with it for half an hour, we think you’ll see the benefits.

Making online transcripts better for your readers

Traditionally, transcripts of meetings are published as PDFs or Microsoft Word documents. The information is there; you’ve done your duty in making it available – but do you ever wonder if it’s really working for your readers?

For example, let’s say you are a clerk in the local council, and you routinely publish transcripts from council meetings online.

The chances are that residents access your transcripts when they have an interest in one specific topic. Typically your meetings cover many subjects, and readers have to wade through pages to find the part they want. On SayIt, searching is very easy, even for people who are not very familiar with internet technology.

Search on SayIt

Or suppose that you are a member of a pressure group, and you’ve transcribed a local community meeting to share on your website. You might want to highlight particular parts of the meeting. With SayIt, you can link to individual statements, so it’s simple to share them by email, social media, or on your website.

A SayIt speech is linkable in context

 

See some examples

If you’d like to see how your meeting transcripts will look, once they’ve been published on SayIt, have a browse through these two examples:

 

Getting started

SayIt sign-upReady to have a go? Here’s how to start your own SayIt site:

  1. Go to this page and sign up.

We’ll ask you for:

  • Part of the URL (web address) for your site – for example, if you choose “TotnesCouncil”, your new URL will be http://TotnesCouncil.sayit.mysociety.org. Note that URLs can’t contain spaces or non-regular characters.
  • A title: this will appear in the top bar of your website. Don’t sweat too much: you can always change this later. In this example we might choose “Totnes Council meetings”.
  • A description (optional): this is a good place to explain the purpose of your site at a little more length. You might write something like “Transcripts from local council meetings in Totnes, UK, 2014 onwards”. Again, you will have the chance to change this later if you like.

2. Confirm your email address

If this is the first time you have used SayIt, you will need to input your email address, then go to your email and find our automated message so you can click on the confirmation link.

SayIt congratulations

Keep a note of your password, as you will need it whenever you want to edit your site.

Inputting transcripts

SayIt is currently in Beta – that’s to say, it’s functional and live, but we’re still developing it.

In this phase, you can manually type (or copy and paste) each statement of your transcript in. Soon, it will also be possible to import a document of the entire meeting, as long as it’s in the required format – if you have a lot of existing transcripts and you’d like to try this, get in touch and we may be able to help.

In this post, we’ll look at the manual input of speeches.

Manual input

You will need either a copy of your transcript, or a recording of the meeting you wish to transcribe.

Here’s how to begin:

1. Click on the ‘add your first statement’ button.

Add your first speech to SayIt

 2. You can paste, or type, your content directly into the box marked “text”.

Adding content to SayItIn the fields below the text box, you have the option to add more details about this piece of text. None of these fields are mandatory, but all of them add functionality or information to your transcript:

  • Date and time If you know these, they are useful because they will help SayIt to order your speeches chronologically. Don’t worry if you don’t know them, though – SayIt automatically arranges speeches in the order that you input them, unless the timestamps tell it otherwise.
  • Event and location What sort of meeting was it, and where did it happen? For our example, we might input “Totnes Town Council Meeting” and “Guildhall, Totnes”.
  • Speaker Enter a name, and then click on the underlined text to add it to your database. As with all text fields on SayIt, once you have added it, it will be offered as an auto-fill option for subsequent speeches. Attaching names to your speeches also means that SayIt can do clever things, like display everything said by one speaker.

If you are not sure who spoke, don’t worry – you can leave this field blank, or enter a name such as ‘Unknown’.

  • Section Meetings often have distinct sections: an introductory period, apologies for absences, following up on agreed actions, etc. Or you might use Section to identify items on the agenda. If you use the Section field, SayIt will automatically arrange your transcript into groups of associated content.
  • Source URL If you are taking speeches from a source such as a news report or another website, you can add the web address so that interested people can see it in context.
  • Title and tags: These enable you to tag your content – for example, you might want to tag everything to do with road-building, and everything to do with tourism, et cetera. That means that your readers will be able to find the sections of the content they are most interested in.

When you’ve added everything you want to for this part of speech, click “Save speech”.

Well done! You’ve just added your first speech to SayIt.

You can go back and edit it at any time – and that applies to every field.

A SayIt speech

3. Continue adding speeches.

As you do so, SayIt will be making connections and organising things neatly.

Tip: If you click ‘add another speech like this’ then fields such as ‘event and location’ will automatically be filled for you – you can overwrite them if they are incorrect for your next speech.

Click on ‘Speakers’ to see an icon for everyone you’ve added:

Speakers screen on SayIt

– and click on any one of those icons to see just their speeches:

One person's speeches on SayIt

Clicking on ‘Speeches’ in the top bar will show you every speech you’ve input; if you used Sections, they will be divided up neatly:

Speeches on SayItClick on any of those sections to see its content:

speeches on SayIt

You’ve done it

So there you are, now you’ve seen what SayIt can do – we hope you liked it enough to consider using it in the future. Remember, it’s completely free.

Let us know if you hit any problems, or if there are features you’d like us to add. SayIt is in active development at the moment, so your feedback will help shape it. We’d also love to hear if you are using it.

Importing content

Manual inputting is clearly only practical for shorter meetings (or people who have plenty of time on their hands!). As mentioned above, we’ll be adding the ability to import your transcripts.

They will need to be in the format that SayIt accepts, which is Akoma Ntoso, a schema for Parliamentary document types – you can read more about that here.

If you already have documents in Akoma Ntoso, get in touch and we can get them imported for you.

Hosting

You can host SayIt on your own servers, but for beginner users it’s quicker and easier to start by creating a version that we host, as described in the steps above.

If you decide later on that you want to host the content yourself, and perhaps embed it on your own website, that option will remain open to you.

SayIt is a Poplus Component – open-source software that is designed to underpin digital democracy projects. It can stand alone, or work with other Poplus Components. The source code is also available for developers to modify and improve, so if you are already imagining more ambitious ways that you might use SayIt on your website, let us know.

Other ways to use SayIt

We’ve recently written about:

Using SayIt to make collections of statements.

Using SayIt to store interviews from your research project

We’ll also be looking at the following soon:

– Collaborating with other users on SayIt transcripts

Image: A scribe from the Book of Hours (public domain)