History finally made as Wrexham Council allows anyone to film meetings

Today was the first meeting under the newly approved council Constitution, so we used the new rules for the first time.

The Constitution is the rules and regulations for council business, and also includes the rules on how meetings are run. At today’s Audit Committee meeting we thought we would give it a whirl, with the below being the first video taken under the new rules and the top picture the first image.

Historic tweet and content! pic.twitter.com/hdz0RfETmw

— Wrexham.com (@wrexham) May 30, 2019

We were hoping to give the rules a run out in the forthcoming Extraordinary Meeting, to see which councillors were aware of what they had nodded through, however it appears Chair’s have been given the heads up on a range of changes.

The new Constitution is live (we can only spot a link to the May revision inside a previous Full Council report) however it is not linked to from the council’s constitution page.

There are several new and interesting bits to the document, and one that caught our eye was the rewording of the filming rules to open the council up finally:

This contrasts to the previous wording that locked down meetings to ‘text based’ social media such as tweets or ‘sms text messaging’ only. That created silly situations where we could not take a picture of what is in front of us in the chamber, however could post up screen grabs from the webcast covering the same meeting – or even create images via text from a meeting in some ASCII art!

Cllr Rob Walsh is in the chair for the first time as Mayor to run a meeting. (Picture from webcast, that we are allowed to use, but we cant take a picture in this chamber as that would be against the rules 👀) pic.twitter.com/iLmSqnLiwx

— Wrexham.com (@wrexham) May 22, 2019

Forgot we once did an ascii art version of a Council meeting as text was allowed but ‘images’ not! pic.twitter.com/vapNPv4dPV

— Wrexham.com (@wrexham) February 29, 2016

In early 2011 Wrexham.com were stopped from using laptops to work on live drafts of stories, and from tweeting in Council meetings that we first attended, that baffled us at the time as it seemed arcane. In 2013 we were finally allowed to send text based social media updates from a meeting – as documented in this historic tweet:

We asked the Chair if we could transmit & recieve data via mobile devices during tonights meeting.The Chair said yes.Thus transmitting this!

— Wrexham.com (@wrexham) January 9, 2013

Back in 2014 we filmed a meeting for the first time via permission from the Chair, before webcasting of meetings was common, however today was the first time such permission was not needed.

Now in 2019, as long as you do not disturb the business of meetings you and anyone else can take pictures and video of meetings.