Video archiving of council meetings waiting green light says official
As Calgary lumbers toward making city hall more open and transparent Calgarians are taking matters into their own hands by creating better quality more accessible online videos of city hall meetings.
Leading the charge is Gordon McDowell a one-man video production wizard and stay-at-home dad along with Chris Harper a former aldermanic candidate in the 2010 civic election.
During the election McDowell began videotaping candidates’ forums and posting them in their entirety online. He was later recruited to produce Naheed Nenshi’s Better Ideas policy videos.
Now his camera is aimed at documenting city council meetings. “I’m just trying to embarrass the city into improving the accessibility of their coverage” says McDowell.
While city council meetings are currently live-streamed on the city’s website the feed is unreliable meetings typically occur when many people are working and the meetings aren’t archived.
After a laborious experiment recording the November 8 council meeting at city hall which involved multiple cameras cables tripods a laptop and a bucket of sweat McDowell has streamlined his production.
For the time being he’s recording the live feed from the city’s website and Shaw TV before uploading it to his Youtube channel. The videos are indexed allowing viewers to skip through each motion instead of grinding through an entire meeting which typically lasts about eight hours.
“The aldermen have intelligent reasonable conversations and it’s the kind of stuff Calgarians could probably relate to if they were exposed to this stuff” McDowell says. “But I don’t see how a typical Calgarian could or would be exposed to this. You’d have to watch it during office hours which is kind of ridiculous.”
Harper meanwhile has also taken his latest civic undertaking online. His website councilconnect.ca acts as an unofficial repository of recorded city council meetings including ones created by McDowell.
Although the city records and posts council’s agenda and meeting minutes showing who introduced and supported motions the dialogue and the debate is excluded. “You have no way of knowing unless you contact your alderman why they voted in a particular way” says Harper.
“It’s just proving this is easy to do that it can be done in a really inexpensive manner and that there’s value to this” says Harper who paid about $50 to register and manage the website.
The city clerk’s office the official recorder of council and committee meetings is however making changes. About a year ago it began developing a video-on-demand system because “not everyone is able to watch a live-stream during the middle of the day” says Gregory Pastirik strategic legislative analyst for the city clerk’s office.
The first phase of the project called ‘electronic legislative management solution’ rolled out with a much-improved webpage ( agendaminutes.calgary.ca ) allowing for easier navigation of the council meetings agendas and minutes. But the video archiving feature is still on hold awaiting council’s nod says Pastirik.
The City of Edmonton’s on-demand video system which launched 10 months ago cost $300000 to purchase the software program train staff and customize it to suit the city’s needs. Maintaining the system costs taxpayers about $60000 a year.
McDowell says the city should also create a written Hansard documenting every word spoken during a council meeting similar to the one used in the provincial legislature.
Experiments with YouTube’s built-in transcription feature and the city’s closed-captioning system have thus far been hit and miss says McDowell.
But creating a written Hansard of council meetings is extremely expensive says Pastirik. Transcribing a couple of council meetings would cost about the same as recording a year of council meetings on video he adds.
According to the office of the Alberta Legislative Assembly transcribing a one-hour debate costs $550. Transcribing a Calgary council meeting could therefore cost about $5000.
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi who floated the idea of video archiving council meetings during the election is supportive of McDowell’s efforts including the idea of using closed-captioning to create a Hansard.
“It’s not particularly accurate about 85 per cent accurate but if we could find a way to store that with a big disclaimer saying ‘It’s not entirely accurate’ that might be a way too” says Nenshi.
