|
From KillerApp.Com Profile
Improving public access to meetings has long been a goal of
local governments. Ever since cable television became widespread, government
agencies have videotaped their meetings for broadcast over cable channels – a
system that has never been entirely successful. Not all localities have
government channels, and for those that do, meetings aren't always broadcast on
schedule. “We can get the video to the cable company, but if they don’t show it
at the specific time the public expects, it’s out of our hands,” says Patty
Crittenden, chief deputy clerk for Solano
County, California. As more areas are wired for broadband, local governments have
begun webcasting their meeting videos. Many of them are working with partners
like Granicus, a San Francisco–based company that helps government agencies leverage
the Internet to improve public access and participation. Reaching the Public Granicus offers an end-to-end solution for streaming video
over the Internet that includes encoding, distribution and content management. The
suite enables local governments to get up and running quickly, using their existing
cameras and other equipment. Miles Larsen, government access coordinator for Sarasota, Florida,
says, “We broadcast our meetings on a local cable channel. When we started
using Granicus, we basically just plugged in a couple of additional pieces of
equipment and the computer and were ready to go.” Streaming video over the Internet lets local governments reach
more of their constituents than they ever could before. It overcomes the
limitations of meeting rooms in places like Onslow County, North Carolina,
where, as board clerk Beth Purcell says, “We don’t have an identified meeting
space or a council chambers. We actually use a courtroom that is shared with
the judicial system, and it isn’t a large room. If we had a thousand people
interested in a meeting, they wouldn’t be able to attend, but we can have a
thousand hits on our meeting online.” In Sarasota,
Internet broadcasts serve a variety of purposes; as Larsen explains, “You’ve
got people who come to every meeting, and … if they want to listen to something
again they can just fire it up on the Internet. Then you’ve got the people who
don’t enjoy coming to the meetings but want to keep up on things. Usually they
have to download the minutes, make a phone call and pay to have a copy of the
tape made, wait a couple of days for it to be made, come pick it up, put in the
VCR, and scroll through to find what they’re interested in. All that work is
going to weed out a lot of people that don’t want to put in all that effort.
Now they can just go to the city government website, go to the Granicus page
there, click a button and they’re watching. A lot of those people are more
involved than they would be without this.” Crittenden finds that webcasting is a boon for Solano County
residents who can't make it to meetings “because they have transportation
issues, they’re homebound, or they’re not well—they can still see what’s going
on with government. They don’t have to be here physically. They can be at their
home or at their library, whatever works for them.” It’s also helpful for those
who would just rather watch from home: “I’ve had people email us on our webpage
and say, ‘I love watching the video in my pajamas.’”
A Better Public Record Videos of public meetings don’t just improve access; they
also help set the record straight. Crittenden says, “There’ll often be two
different opinions on what the board said. ‘What direction did they give us?’
When you’re in the meeting things can get jumbled up and interpreted
differently. They can now zip into the video quickly and can go back and see
exactly what direction the board was giving to them.” But “zipping into the video” isn't practical unless the video
is indexed properly. “The more information you have, the more you need to make
it searchable and easy to find,” says Tom Spengler, CEO of Granicus. “We’ve
tried to make it very easy for our customers to manage the audio and video
records along with the other components of their public meetings.” To help governments make their videos more usable, Granicus
introduced its MinutesMaker module, which allows live indexing based on the meeting’s
agenda. “They’ll take your agenda, import it, and turn that into the driving
force of the on-demand video,” Larsen explains. “In other words, the agenda
items become links to that portion of the video.” A user who wants to watch a
specific part of a meeting can simply click on the relevant agenda item, and
the video will begin playing back from the point at which that agenda item was
discussed. MinutesMaker is a tremendous timesaver for city and county
clerks charged with taking notes and combining the agenda and minutes with the
video. “These meetings can be three hours long, so when you’re transcribing
them you’ve got three hours of tape to listen to, which can take five or six
hours of transcription. It’s pure drudgery,” says Purcell. “With Granicus, this
all can be instantaneous. This is a clerk’s best friend. I feel like I’ve gone
from a Flexible Flyer to the space shuttle.” The availability of indexed video is even transforming note-taking.
“We used to do discussion minutes that were pages and pages of ‘he said, she
said.’ Those minutes took days to write and it was very costly,” says
Crittenden. “Now we’ve gone to action minutes” – brief notes on the actions
taken by the board – “because the video is all there as a document.” Getting the video out quickly is vitally important to
constituents who have business interests in the issues under discussion.
“You’ve got a lot of people who have a lot of money, time, and energy riding on
these issues, so if they have to wait three, four, five days or even longer to
receive these tapes, that’s a problem,” says Larsen. “Now by noon the next day,
they can fire the video up online and check it out. It just makes the whole
system work better.” Granicus’ goal is to create an “integrated public record”
that combines the video and audio with other pieces of information like agenda
items and minutes. Another feature linking data with video is the VotingSystem
module, which captures and indexes public officials’ votes so that members of
the public can search video and audio records specifically for votes. Involved Citizens = Better Government Webcasting government meetings has had a profound effect on
many local governments. “The more involved the citizens are, the better the
city runs,” says Larsen. “The government is there to do the business of the
people, and if the people aren’t telling them what needs to be done, they can’t
do their job. And when the citizens know what’s going on, the whole operation
works better and is more effective.” Citizens seem to agree with Larsen’s assessment, judging by
their adoption of this technology. “We had a meeting recently where we had
sixteen hundred hits in two weeks and we’re a county of only a hundred and
fifty thousand people,” says Purcell. “It was about an issue related to law
enforcement in a rural area where we had probably fifteen people speak. By the
next day we just had hundreds and hundreds of cumulative hits.” And some of these implementations are even beginning to
receive official notice. This past year, the North Carolina Association of
County Commissioners, a clearinghouse of new ideas and initiatives in local
government, cited Onslow
County’s use of Granicus
in its annual roundup of Best Practices. “Our focus is changing the way people interact with government by improving public access and creating this integrated public record,” says Spengler. “Some of the processes we walked into were very inefficient and it’s nice to help our customers spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently.”
© Copyright Killer App Ventures |
