We did it – our first televised City Council meeting. The DVDs and web download version won’t be available until Monday, though, so those of us who were on tv won’t have a chance to see how it looked until then. A few folks sent emails last night saying they thought it worked well but I welcome thoughts from anyone and everyone. You can email me directly or, if you are willing to share the readers of the blog, post them here. We had some colorful discussions about public art and what to do with the land north of town that we purchased as part of the city maintenance shops project and I’ll report on those over the next couple of days. Thanks to everyone who pushed for so long to make televising City Council meetings a reality.
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Golden Voices 
April 7, 2006 at 9:48 am |
I watched last night, and I thought it was terrific! Sound and video quality was very good, and it was very interesting to hear the topics you were discussing. Keep it up!
A few thoughts…
1) I think this is an extremely important and valuable service. This really enhances the accountability of City Council when your constituents can see not just how you vote on important issues, but your reasoning and how you work and interact with the other council members. This also could really improve public confidence in our elected leaders and city staff. It is also extremely valuable because Golden doesn’t have an effective press. This provides information that would never appear in the Golden Transcript (and if it did, would probably be incorrect or incomplete) and provides much more factually neutral and accurate information than appears in the Voice of Golden.
2) It seemed like a pretty fancy production. The camera was constantly zooming in and out, and each time a council member spoke, their name and picture appeared at the bottom of the screen. Maybe you could save some money with less production–fixed cameras, less on screen graphics, etc.
3) The sound should probably be turned off sooner after the meeting adjourns. We could still hear your conversations for a few minutes after the meeting was over.
April 8, 2006 at 10:03 pm |
Thanks for the support. So far all the responses that I’ve seen have been positive. After our three month trial we’ll have to decide if we want to continue and, if so, at what level of production quality. We opted to do the trial at a high level production quality, as you noted, but we might be looking at as much as $200,000 to purchase and install all the equipment if we want to keep doing it in the same way. There are, of course, less expensive options as well. I am recommending that City Council invest some money in effectively measuring the extent to which folks in the community use this new service, and the ways in which they use the service, in order to make good, informed decisions after the trial about how to proceed.
Also, thanks for the comment on the sound. I don’t know if they can turn it off sooner or if we’ll just have to remember that the mics are still on.
Thanks for the feedback.
April 10, 2006 at 11:36 am |
Where on the city’s webpage is the webcast version of the meeting? I can’t seem to find it. Is it not up yet?
April 12, 2006 at 8:42 am |
It took them a bit longer to get it up on the web site than they expected. It is up now: https://goldenvoices.wordpress.com/2006/04/12/city-council-webcasts-are-online/