Streaming council meetings online

Maybe Prince Rupert city council could learn something from Calgary about openness and transparency:

gordonmcdowell.com/20101108-yyc-city-council/

I also hear that Terrace will be live streaming their council meetings online soon as well.

Our council does broadcast live. The fact they haven’t spent the money to update it’s equipment for live stream is hardly an indication of a lack of transparency… Tune to channel 10.

OHHHH this council is the bestest ever eh sonny…
CAble Ten?? WTF is cable ten…the city owns an internet cable telephone company…through the internet dept and the citys own budget, could they not live stream???

Nope… better keep the good mushrooms of rupert fed more shit…and dont open the windows cause mushrooms dont like light…

I would say that our council’s lack of transparency is a good indication of a lack of transparency.

[quote=“mcsash”]

OHHHH this council is the bestest ever eh sonny…
CAble Ten?? WTF is cable ten…the city owns an internet cable telephone company…through the internet dept and the citys own budget, could they not live stream???

Nope… better keep the good mushrooms of rupert fed more shit…and dont open the windows cause mushrooms dont like light…[/quote]

I’m not saying they couldn’t. It would be awesome if the city decided to spend that money–great for someone like me away from Rupert. I’m saying that the fact they don’t stream now doesn’t mean they lack transparency or accountability.

Mcsash , go get them …

No, the record number of closed meetings is an indication of a lack of transparency.

The mayor saying “I’m not sure about being on the leading edge, you might be on the leading edge of our own demise” is an indication of a lack of transparency.

Having a mayor who doesn’t know how to (or is afraid to) reply to an e-mail is an indication of a lack of transparency.

Having a website that requires Flash just to navigate, and posts PDFs as image-only is an indication of a lack of transparency (neither can be indexed or searched by Google).

If I still lived in Prince Rupert, I’d live-stream (and archive) the channel 10 broadcasts on HTMF using about $19 worth of equipment (cheaper if you bought it on ebay).

Here’s something that always bugs me: Again, comparing Prince Rupert to Terrace, but the comparison could be made to other cities as well.

You’ll find the minutes of meetings here:

princerupert.ca/page.php?id_ … _section=5 (what the heck is up with that URL? )
versus
terrace.ca/docs-forms/council_minutes

and then look at the latest minutes:

princerupert.ca/images/edito … inutes.pdf
versus
terrace.ca/documents/council … inutes.pdf

Notice how the Prince Rupert document is an image, and not searchable, and therefore not indexed or searched by Google? Not to mention it’s not accessible to people who use screen readers, or want to copy-and-paste information.

Either this kind of thing is on purpose (“see? We posted it online, what are you complaining about?”), or the person responsible for the website just doesn’t know how the web works. Either way, it contributes to the lack of transparency, in my opinion.

It would be the equivalent of making meetings available on VHS tapes (or BETA!) just so they can say that they have them available. Sure they’re available, but not really accessible, or transparent.

In 10 seconds, they could have turned an unsearchable, non-indexable, un-googleable document into a more accessible one, like this: dl.dropbox.com/u/76069/10-12-10% … chable.pdf

I’m really considering doing a wiki-style Prince Rupert City Council website, just to have this kind of thing archived and easily available. If they won’t do it (or don’t know how), then maybe we should do it for them.

[quote=“MiG”]

No, the record number of closed meetings is an indication of a lack of transparency.

The mayor saying “I’m not sure about being on the leading edge, you might be on the leading edge of our own demise” is an indication of a lack of transparency.

Having a mayor who doesn’t know how to (or is afraid to) reply to an e-mail is an indication of a lack of transparency.

Having a website that requires Flash just to navigate, and posts PDFs as image-only is an indication of a lack of transparency (neither can be indexed or searched by Google).

If I still lived in Prince Rupert, I’d live-stream (and archive) the channel 10 broadcasts on HTMF using about $19 worth of equipment (cheaper if you bought it on ebay).[/quote]

Hey for council meetings we …“the good people of HTMF would take donations for MIG to come down to PR and live stream the meetings” just cause im a tech idiot and couldnt do it my self…

Could you imagine the looks on the faces of those councillors if that happened??..they would clam up and there would be “nary any talk of a pie contest hosted by a little sisters wanna be outlet”…

[quote=“mcsash”]

No, the record number of closed meetings is an indication of a lack of transparency.

The mayor saying “I’m not sure about being on the leading edge, you might be on the leading edge of our own demise” is an indication of a lack of transparency.

Having a mayor who doesn’t know how to (or is afraid to) reply to an e-mail is an indication of a lack of transparency.

Having a website that requires Flash just to navigate, and posts PDFs as image-only is an indication of a lack of transparency (neither can be indexed or searched by Google).

If I still lived in Prince Rupert, I’d live-stream (and archive) the channel 10 broadcasts on HTMF using about $19 worth of equipment (cheaper if you bought it on ebay).

Hey for council meetings we …“the good people of HTMF would take donations for MIG to come down to PR and live stream the meetings” just cause im a tech idiot and couldnt do it my self…

Could you imagine the looks on the faces of those councillors if that happened??..they would clam up and there would be “nary any talk of a pie contest hosted by a little sisters wanna be outlet”…[/quote]

Why would he need to come down to do it when there are quite a few people capable of carrying out such a task? Besides I hear his consulting rates are really high :wink:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/76069/avatars/unexpected-reboot.gif

If somebody can host a computer connected to a cable box, I’ll donate the “expensive piece of equipment”.

dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.5707

That’s the one I’ve used to live stream (and archive) events. US $8.87 Free shipping.

The wiki site is a great idea, MiG. Like you say, if the city IT/Communications department can’t or won’t do make the thing a little less cumbersome, then it’s practically a duty to make the information more accessible. Who knows, maybe one day someone young will get elected, and they’ll jumpstart council into this century. Only it’ll probably be next century already. :smile:

Maybe so… That’s just not the point you made in your original post. Again, unfortunate (likely accidental) ignorance of a certain broadcasting technique isn’t an indication that a body isnt transparent. I have a feeling that if we took a poll of every city in Canada with roughly the same population size as PR we’d find that the majority aren’t streaming their council meetings.

Scroll up and you’ll see that I said “Maybe Prince Rupert city council could learn something from Calgary about openness and transparency.”

That’s the point I made in my original post. Prince Rupert could learn something from Calgary about openness and transparency.

You may well be right, but the point of looking at other cities should be to find examples of innovation and best practices; not shaky justifications for inaction.

Those other cities big and small are also unlikely to own telecoms. Rupert is one of only a handful left that still feels that it needs to own a communications business. The city council appoints all of the Citywest directors. The city administrator is the board chair. Getting some technical help from Citywest to stream council meetings online should not be a problem, even leaving aside MiG’s advice that doing so is not complicated or expensive.

Quite possibly no one in City Hall has thought of live streaming; but whether they have or not there is still a political problem to overcome. The city council has in recent years developed a political culture of avoiding public scrutiny, as illustrated by the Mayor’s statement about greater information bringing about the council’s “demise” (a statement more likely to contribute to his own political demise). Also telling were councillor Bedard’s remarks.

I hope that a wikileaks site is added to HTMF. Having researched a few documents and reported them here, I suspect that rather than reporting leaks it would be more likely to report public information that the city avoids informing the public about.

Fixed.

Well, that’s not what I said. Sorry that you didn’t read it properly.

I said “Maybe Prince Rupert city council could learn something from Calgary about openness and transparency.” Scroll up and you can read it for yourself.

[quote=“eccentric”]

Fixed.[/quote]

If there is a point in the above it is becoming pretty obscure.

The city could do a number of things to improve transparency: exclude the public from fewer meetings; provide more information when the council feels that it must; don’t make decisions about or discuss issues in closed meetings that are supposed to be discussed in public or that the meeting wasn’t closed for; don’t berate or embarrass citizens when they try to speak; post reasons for holding closed meetings and agenda packages for public meetings before the meetings (they recently stopped doing that); post minutes and recordings of meetings in a timely manner (that’s also slipped recently); make the agenda packages (much information is buried there) searchable pdfs, and have live streaming available for those who rely on the intertubes for information, don’t bother much or at all with tv (a growing demographic) or are out of town and don’t have access to ch10.

First priority, though, to advance the cause of transparency would be to switch on the City’s friggin web site. Firefox tells me: “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.” IE gives me a “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Test Page”.

[quote=“BTravenn”]

Fixed.

If there is a point in the above it is becoming pretty obscure.

The city could do a number of things to improve transparency: exclude the public from fewer meetings; provide more information when the council feels that it must; don’t make decisions about or discuss issues in closed meetings that are supposed to be discussed in public or that the meeting wasn’t closed for; don’t berate or embarrass citizens when they try to speak; post reasons for holding closed meetings and agenda packages for public meetings before the meetings (they recently stopped doing that); post minutes and recordings of meetings in a timely manner (that’s also slipped recently); make the agenda packages (much information is buried there) searchable pdfs, and have live streaming available for those who rely on the intertubes for information, don’t bother much or at all with tv (a growing demographic) or are out of town and don’t have access to ch10.

First priority, though, to advance the cause of transparency would be to switch on the City’s friggin web site. Firefox tells me: “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.” IE gives me a “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Test Page”.[/quote]

Like you I also have been having problems accessing the city’s website of late, even before the current troubles however as you mentioned the updates were getting slower and slower, I believe they were about two meetings behind when it came time to posting the minutes last time I checked.

As mentioned by many the format being used by the city doesn’t exactly make seeking out information an easy task. The pdf file system just dumps out the whole body of work, no search engine to seek out particular items of interest, which would be greatly helpful for residents who don’t want to scroll through pages and pages of material when all they want to do is see how council voted on a bylaw amendment or some such thing.

And speaking of voting, it would be nice if the city would include the voting records (not to mention the attendance) of the council on these initiatives that they put forward every two weeks, as it is. While they list those councillors that attend in the minutes, there is no ongoing record of same for easy reference.

Likewise, we have no real idea, unless we hear word of mouth, as to how the council members voted on the issues of the day. Something that one would think should be part of the public record and easily accessible.

To a degree I’ve tried to offer up at least an attendance check on city council matters on the blog, but the links to council items that I include can get frustrating with the city’s website down, official attendance notes not listed, or agenda items not posted or featuring broken links.

One of the things that the Daily News did right with its council coverage back when they published, was to offer up a synopsis of each council meeting and provide a scorecard of sorts as to how each councillor and the Mayor voted on the issues, it was quite helpful for those that watch council’s events.

I had hoped that the Northern View would pick up the ball on that one, but alas, so far they haven’t offered up that kind of chronicle of the council meetings with their coverage thus far.

Hopefully part of the process towards more information at Cityhall will include a revision of their website mechanics so as to make it more user friendly for those that seek out information from it.

Unfortunately any changes at the City level are going to take a 180 degree change in thinking. Right now they approach everything from a “everything is secret unless we make an exception” point of view. We want them to approach it as “everything is open to the public unless we make an exception”.