"Incredulity from the younger members of council filled the air"

Don't let your wife read that part.

I think it is a total waste of money when it's already being broadcast on television. They have minutes too you know. Who looks back at council meetings anyhow, and with the cast of characters we have I'm sure they don't want ANY recording of the meetings for future reference!

What we need is to determine how many people watch the meetings in the first place before we go off and buy tomorrows electronic junk.

N.W.

I completely agree that streaming the Shaw broadcast is the first step to take, particularly with the points raised above that unless you’re still using the Shaw analog signal in to your TV you have no way to watch the broadcast. And that would be a very easy step, you already have Shaw there with the cameras and doing the audio leveling. It would also be an easy step to save these streams for on-demand streaming as I do. I could save them for download as a higher quality but quite frankly I just don’t feel like paying for the extra disk space on my server. For the 7pm council meetings, most of the hard work is already done by Shaw.

The afternoon meetings are a different story, while I agree having the full Shaw-type setup with multi-camera, audio leveling, titles, etc would be optimal, I’m simply saying if Council is balking at what I agree is peanuts compared to other wasteful spending they undertake, a stream from the camera in the corner of Committee Room 2 is better than nothing. I’d rather get a wide angle shot with horrible audio than having to take time off work to attend and listen to an issue I might be interested in. And if it allows the media to better cover these meetings as well, that’s fantastic. Its all about taking steps, however small, to increase transparency and accountability.

Yes, you could get a crap camera and a capture card at NCIX and go to town, but nobody is going to watch anything that looks like garbage. Even the Shaw 3 camera coverage has a minuscule audience of hardcore council watchers, make people work to watch it through a crappy webcam and terrible audio, the audience would be non-existant. It really doesn’t take that much to make a halfway decent live show anymore.

$25,000 will get you a couple of cameras and something like a Tricaster (or even better a Broadcast Pix) so you could have a couple of shots. An audio board (which you really need for gain control on council meetings, the house feed raw is always terrible), and more importantly, graphics telling you what they’re talking about. The streaming can be had for free, but you’ve got to pay the people who are doing the show, which is where your $25,000 a year comes from. If you expect people to show up to council week after week and be reliable, a little stipend goes a long way.

Now that being said, if you just streamed the Shaw broadcasts it would be simpler, which they would be happy to allow I’m sure. The real value would be having someone do a cutdown of the meeting and posting it online as a highlights package. That takes someone’s time, and over the long haul, that takes a little money.

How about taking that money to sponsor 10th to the Fraser to handle the project? That would get my vote

Of note at the meeting was an announcement that Theresa McManus of The Record would no longer attend council meetings on a regular basis (unless something of "particular interest" was on the agenda), leaving the City with potentially zero media coverage of the meetings.

This development supports the idea of making the meetings web accessible.

The one I will offer is:

Every time the timer beeps at some unrelated moment to actually timing someone's 5 minutes because it wasn't stopped (premature beeping during someone's 5 minutes because it wasn't reset from the previous speaker counts too)

Players will raise a glass when:

"Osterman displays righteous indignation (take two drinks if it

involves A Variance)

McEvoy displays earnestness

McIntosh Smooths Things Over (usually after Osterman)

Mayor Wright looks like he's thinking about his laundry, vacation

or anything except whoever is talking

…that's usually enough for us, what with the two small kids who

get up at 5 am & all."

But I think we can make up our own rules…

For the tech-lovers out there who might be curious on the full process, here’s how I’m doing it.

Its actually a very simple process, a $120 capture card (Hauppauge WinTV-1600) from NCIX (I already have a few in my homebrew PVR I’ve had for years), it runs off an open source package called MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org) under linux on a 6 year old PC, dime a dozen these days. I over-record the video the length so I don’t miss anything (as you can see from the earlier recordings where it is cut off) then use another open source package called GOPchop to quickly trim down the MPEG, a process that takes no more than 5 minutes.

Finally the open source video encoder mencoder is used to transcode the video from the typically about 6GB MPEG-2 file to a smaller XviD video. That takes about 2.5 hours to run on a dual-core machine, but is easily something that could just be left running overnight on an older machine like the PVR itself.

Finally storage, hard drives are CHEAP these days. I picked up a 2TB drive for work two weeks ago, $150 at NCIX. That would be enough to store over 200 meetings worth of the original high quality version of the videos. Yes in an enterprise system like the city would use (and I maintain professionally myself) its a little more per GB, but still dirt cheap, I’d estimate easily less than $20/meeting for storage on a large RAID6 system like they probably already have to store all their other documents. I bet that’s less than they spend on coffee and other materials for the meeting.

The only issue is when the meeting isn’t broadcast via Shaw, for example during WHL playoffs when it can be preempted. However if the City was doing this I’m sure they could arrange Shaw be there even when the meeting isn’t broadcast.

I would love to see the Committee of the Whole meetings broadcast as well and almost think that’s more important since its where many discussions occur. I’ve noticed in Committee Room 2 there is already a camera mounted on the wall. This feed could easily be plugged in to a MythTV box as described above. Sure you wouldn’t get the panning to individual council members as they spoke, it would likely just be a wide angle shot of the room, so what. That’s how many video conferences are already done, what they say is more important than a cameo and face-time on camera.

We’ve inquired with Shaw last year about copyright issues and I have a copy of an email from Shaw where they waive permission for residents to record council meetings.