Introducing the Plenários.pt blog

Plenários.pt was born inside sessions: municipal councils, assemblies, parish boards, advisory boards. Places where a lot gets decided, and where much of the work happens after the session ends, in the minutes, the publication and the archive.

This blog is where we will share what we learn from that work.

What you will find here

• Experiences from sessions. What works, what changes in the daily routine of whoever prepares a session or writes minutes, and what organisations teach us. Always with the permission of those involved.
• Practical guides. How to choose the writing register for minutes, how to prepare an order of business that makes the minutes easier, how quorum is calculated on the effective legal membership of the body, what to put on the transparency portal.
• What changes in the law. The European AI Act, the GDPR, the NIS2 Directive, the publicity of resolutions. Explained for those who have to apply it.
• Platform news. What we add and why.

How we write

We write without jargon and with facts that can be checked. We write in Portuguese first and translate into English whenever we can. When a topic has a legal dimension, we say so and point to those who have to decide: each organisation's lawyers and data protection officer.

We do not publish session data, or the names of people or organisations, without written permission. The examples we use, such as councillor Ana Costa in our texts, are fictional.

To start with

Today we are publishing three articles:

• From session to minutes in under 24 hours, step by step: the journey of a set of minutes on the platform and where people's work fits in.
• Classic, hybrid or full: choosing the register for your minutes: the three registers side by side, with the same contribution.
• The AI Act and minutes: what has changed since 2 August 2026: the essentials of the Regulation for anyone using AI for minutes, and six questions to ask any supplier.

And, in Portuguese, O nascimento da Plenários: the story of how it all began, at the back of a session room, behind a camera.

Follow and suggest

To get new articles, the blog has a feed that any feed reader (RSS or Atom) can follow. And if you work in a council, an assembly or a parish board and have a question you would like to see answered here, write to us at [email protected]. The best ideas for this blog will come from sessions.