Over the next five years, public meeting technology will shift from platform-centric choices to operations-centered outcomes. Residents will judge success by intelligibility, timeliness, inclusion, and integrity of the record—not tool brands. Municipal teams that invest in human-centered controls, portability, and repeatable procedures will navigate vendor churn, budget cycles, and regulatory change with greater stability.

This paper advances an evidence-based roadmap in four movements. First, accessibility becomes an SLO (service level objective): caption latency and interpreter uptime are treated like uptime, with named owners and first actions. Second, automation and AI move into the workflow, but only where they are observable, reversible, and tied to public artifacts. Third, resilience and security mature: per-user identity and change-freeze windows become table stakes, while drill culture spreads to small teams. Fourth, publication norms professionalize: canonical pages, validated caption files, and link audits reduce records friction and increase public trust.

We recommend that clerks and IT leaders structure investments around ‘resident-visible controls’—dashboards and checklists that map directly to what viewers feel. Procure outcomes rather than features: exportable logs; open caption/transcript formats; version pinning; and clauses that require vendors to pass along artifacts necessary for audits and continuity. A two-year stair-step plan then builds toward a five-year destination in which rooms feel simpler, incidents are short and transparent, and multilingual participation is routine.

The sections that follow describe the trends shaping this trajectory (hybrid norms, AI assistance, security posture, accessibility), examine organizational implications (roles, procurement, budgeting), and provide templates (roadmaps, scorecards, RACI models) for city and county clerks to apply immediately.