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

Nonprofit online news organizations are working to bring the public back to public meetings.

Buffalo's Fire, an Indigenous-led news organization based in Bismarck, and the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance are bringing a program to North Dakota called the Documentaries Network.

The program involves training (and paying) local residents to attend local government meetings, take notes, and publish meeting summaries online.

“This really puts the power back in the hands of the people to hold their elected officials accountable,” said Bismarck Documenters Program Manager Alicia Hägglund-Thorpe.

Hägglund Thorp is seeking community members to lead meetings and Tribal Council meetings in the Bismarck-Mandan region. Organizers hope to expand coverage of state conferences in the future as well.

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

After participants complete the training, they can view a list of upcoming conferences and select the one they would like to cover. Hägglund-Thorpe said documentarians are paid between $17 and $24 an hour to cover conferences, and the average assignment can last between two-and-a-half to three hours, depending on complexity and distance. That's what it means.

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

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

Buffalo's Fire publisher Jodi Rabe Spotted Bear said this would be the first local and first Indigenous-led group to join the Documenters Network. Anyone who wants to participate is welcome to do so, she said.

“This is an opportunity to engage with the community and open the door for them to be part of a conference that impacts their lives,” Spotted Bear said.

Documenters Network was founded in 2018 by City Bureau, a nonprofit citizen journalism institute. The organization is active in 18 other cities and centralizes information about public gatherings in one searchable location.

Many of the conferences covered by Documenters are local conferences that don't typically get media coverage. For example, participants in Akron, Ohio, covered a meeting of the Vacant Buildings Commission last week and published detailed notes along with an audio recording of the meeting.

The Bismarck Documenters website has detailed information on how to get involved, as well as links to regional meetings from the Bismarck School Board to the Mandan Architectural Review Commission.

This article was originally published on NorthDakotaMonitor.com