Minutes of collegiate bodies in the Spanish public sector

In a company, meeting minutes help people remember what was agreed. In the public sector they’re much more: they’re the document that records how a collegiate body reached its decision, what was voted on and with what result. The implementation of resolutions, any appeals and the information citizens receive all depend on them. That’s why they have formal requirements, a person responsible and an approval procedure. At the same time, ways of working have changed: many sessions are recorded, streamed online or held remotely, and that opens up new ways to prepare the minutes and make them more accessible.

This guide is general information, not legal advice. The official minutes are the responsibility of the body’s secretary, who writes them and certifies their content. The specific requirements depend on the rules that apply to your authority and its internal regulations: always check them.

Collegiate bodies and their rules

A collegiate body is one made up of several people who decide together: a city or provincial council’s full plenary, a local governing board, scrutiny committees, a university’s governing council, school councils, foundation boards or the boards of some public entities. In Spain, Law 40/2015 on the Legal Regime of the Public Sector sets out the general rules on how they work, including minutes. But many of these bodies also have their own rules: local authorities follow local government legislation and their own standing orders, and universities their statutes. So what follows is the common framework; the details of your case are in your own rules. Some examples of what varies from one set of rules to another: who can call a meeting and with how much notice, what quorum is needed, whether sessions can be held remotely and how remote participants are identified, or the deadline for submitting a contribution in writing.

What the minutes must record

• Attendance: who chairs, who attends, who sent apologies and who acts as secretary. In local bodies, the finance officer and whether a quorum is reached are usually recorded too.
• Place and time: where the session is held (or whether it’s remote or hybrid), the date and the start and end times.
• Agenda: the items as they appeared in the notice of meeting, in order. If an urgent matter not on the agenda is dealt with, it’s worth recording how the decision to include it was taken.
• Summary of deliberations: the main points of the debate on each item, not a verbatim record. The positions and key arguments are enough.
• Votes and results: how each item was voted on and the result, with votes for, against and abstentions, by group or by person if that’s the practice.
• Resolutions: the content of each resolution adopted, worded so there’s no doubt about what was decided.

In general, anyone who votes against or abstains can also ask for their vote and reasons to be recorded, and anyone who wants their contribution or a proposal included word for word usually has to provide the text at the time or within the deadline set by the rules. These requests are a good example of why recording helps: it lets you check afterwards exactly what was asked and when.

The secretary’s role

The minutes are written by whoever acts as the body’s secretary, who also certifies what happened in the session. In local government, that role belongs to the council secretary; in other bodies, to whoever the body or its rules designate. That has a clear practical consequence: any tool, whether a recorder, a transcript or AI, can only provide working material. Choosing what goes in, wording the resolutions and signing are the secretary’s job. A good draft saves hours of writing up, but whoever signs must be able to check everything against the recording or their own notes. It’s also worth agreeing the level of detail with the secretary: some bodies prefer a short summary of each contribution and others a fuller account, and a draft that already follows that approach is much quicker to review.

Approval at the next session

Minutes are usually approved at the same session, at the end, or at the next one, as the first item on the agenda. So they need to be ready in time to send with the notice of meeting so members can read them. At that point corrections can be requested, discussed and, if accepted, incorporated. Until the minutes are approved, the secretary can issue certificates of resolutions stating that fact. All of this pushes in the same direction: the sooner a reliable draft reaches the secretary, the more time there is to review it calmly and send it out on time.

Recording and transcribing sessions

Many authorities already record their plenaries and committees, either with the chamber’s own system or because the session is held by video call. The recording backs up the minutes and, if transcribed, lets you find what each person said in seconds. If the session is held by video call, the platform itself can usually record it; in that case, check that it records the audio of every participant and not just the organiser’s. For the transcript to come out well, sound quality matters more than anything else:

• One microphone per person or per desk, and each person speaks with theirs switched on. A single microphone in the middle of a large room gives audio that’s hard to separate.
• Record from the sound desk output if there is one, not with a phone from the back of the room.
• Avoid talking over each other: in heated debates, the chair giving the floor also helps the transcript.
• Say names when giving the floor: “Councillor García has the floor” makes it easier to name each contribution.
• Announce vote results out loud, with the numbers, so they’re in the recording and in the text.

Video minutes

In Spain, “videoacta” (video minutes) usually means minutes backed by the audiovisual recording of the session. Instead of summarising the whole debate in writing, the written document records the essentials (attendance, agenda, votes and resolutions) and is accompanied by the video file, with a guarantee that it’s authentic and complete, usually the secretary’s electronic signature. Law 40/2015 provides in general terms for sessions to be recorded and for the recording, with the corresponding certificate, to accompany the minutes. How that applies in each authority depends on its rules and standing orders.

Video minutes solve the problem of transcribing the debate, but not of finding something in a four-hour recording. That’s why many authorities add an index with the time of each agenda item and each contribution. A timed transcript is a quick way to prepare that index, and it also makes the session searchable by word. That way, anyone looking at the session months later can go straight to the point they need instead of working through the whole recording. Be careful: an index or transcript published alongside the video minutes must be reviewed as carefully as the minutes themselves, because everyone will read it as official information.

Accessibility: subtitles and transcripts

If an authority publishes video of its sessions, that video is part of its content and the accessibility rules for public sector websites and apps apply to it. In practice, that means recorded video should have subtitles and, if it’s streamed live, live captions wherever possible. Subtitles aren’t only for deaf and hard-of-hearing people: they’re used by people watching with the sound off, people who don’t speak the language well and people looking for a specific moment. A full transcript published with the video also helps screen reader users and anyone who prefers to read. There’s more on making good subtitles in the accessibility and subtitles guide.

Transparency and publication

Transparency and local government legislation push towards publishing resolutions and, in many cases, the minutes of plenaries and the recordings of public sessions. Publishing well isn’t just uploading the PDF: it means people can find, read and understand it. Useful practices include publishing the approved minutes alongside the video, linking each agenda item to its timestamp, offering the transcript as searchable text and keeping an archive organised by date and body. Think about the format too: minutes as a scanned PDF can’t be searched or read with a screen reader, whereas a PDF exported from a word processor, with headings and real text, can. Governing board sessions and many committees aren’t public, so their recordings are handled differently and aren’t published in the same way as a plenary’s.

Data protection for attendees and the public

Recording a session captures data about the body’s members, the staff present and, in public sessions, the audience and anyone who speaks during questions. The basis for processing it is usually a task in the public interest or a legal obligation, not legitimate interests, which a public authority can’t use for its functions. Even so, the duty to inform and the data minimisation principle still apply:

• Say that the session is recorded and streamed, with signs in the room, in the notice of meeting and on the website, stating who the controller is and where to exercise rights.
• Frame the camera on the top table and the speakers, not the audience.
• Take care with items involving third-party data: social support, disciplinary files or staff matters. These are often dealt with without names or in the private part of the session.
• Review the text before publishing it: ID numbers, addresses or phone numbers said out loud don’t need to appear in a public transcript.
• Set a retention period for recordings that aren’t published and for working material such as drafts and internal transcripts.

From audio to minutes: a way of working

1. Record the whole session with the best possible audio and keep the original unedited.
2. Transcribe the recording and name each person who speaks.
3. Mark the start of each agenda item in the transcript.
4. Check each vote result and the wording of each resolution against the audio: it’s the most important part of the minutes.
5. Write the summary of deliberations from the contributions, following your authority’s criteria and format.
6. Review any requests to have something recorded and any dissenting opinions.
7. Send the draft with the notice of the next session and keep the transcript as working material with its retention period.

Working with a draft from Echo

Echo prepares the working material for steps 2 to 5: the transcript with each contribution, who’s speaking and the time, and a draft organised into sections. It doesn’t replace the secretary or write the official minutes: it saves the work of writing up the session. This is how it fits into the day-to-day work of the public sector:

• Upload the chamber recording (up to 2 GB per file), import the session from its YouTube link or record it with Live from a computer in the room. Long sessions are summarised in parts and then combined.
• Every contribution with its speaker and time: Echo separates speakers and, when you name someone once, the name changes throughout the transcript.
• A draft with plenary sections: the council plenary session template explains how to create an analysis type with attendance, agenda, debate by item, votes and resolutions, motions and questions, and close.
• Download in Word or PDF to apply your authority’s format, or as TXT if you’re pasting it into another application.
• Subtitles for publishing the video: the subtitle editor follows industry rules, you can add tracks in other languages and download the video with burnt-in subtitles.
• Live captions for people following the session: you share a link and up to 300 people read them without an account, each in their own language.
• Data in the EU and access control: transcription and AI on Edorteam’s own servers in the European Union, with no model training; restricted folders, an activity log, SSO, automatic deletion and hiding personal data such as ID or phone numbers.

Echo doesn’t currently hold National Security Framework (ENS) certification or any other certification, and shouldn’t be treated as approved for any public tender: assess it using the Encargo del tratamiento (in Spanish), the sub-processor list on the Security page and your security officer. If you’d like to see how it works with a real session, you can try it on the Free plan (see pricing) or get in touch through contact. For everyday meetings without formal requirements, there’s also How to write meeting minutes.