Web-casting Council Meetings
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Posts
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The Welsh Assembly is giving every County Council in Wales £40,000 to enable Council Meetings ( only some) to be seen live on the Internet. That equates to£800,000 for all 22 County Councils. Does it really cost that much to get a few meetings live on the Internet ?
depends…
20 quid per month for extra bandwidth – 240
a good camera – 300
sound equipment – 2.000
a wage to film it 20,000
an ability to record it – 100It depends on the route taken as there is corperate style stuff and very cheap / free peer provided stuff.
I could rock up and ustream a meeting decent def. However the arguement against is I could just film one party, miss some sides – deliberate or otherwise etc or not do it. Likewise ustream may stop!
Corp stuff in theory stops thats, but viewing say the magistrates video link the other day the expense of a system doesnt equate to it working!
It will be interesting to see how it works and if stuff like rights free / creative commons style licesing will be used.
The other thing I think is important is deciding the success criteria ahead of the trial, as is say 20 people viewing a planning meeting online good or bad?
Hopefully this will result in an opportunity to see ‘democracy in action’. But unless allmeetings are recorded and published, this is just an exercise to keep the status quo and is an empty gesture.
I see over the weekend one of the local councillors made an angry four letter word rant with unproven accusations about one of the local co-operatives management. Sadly none of the media (including wrexham.com) chose to publish this, even though it’s quite obvious that something like that is a newsworthy item about the councillors inability to hold his post.
Hi Everyone
I’m from over the border, Shropshire (originally a Brummie) though my sister married a Welsh guy from Llangollen and all her family live in Wales so I get to hear a lot of Welsh news.
I was interested in the Webcasting Public Meetings.
That poor woman Jackie in Carmarthen has fought for more accountancy in local government for years but is now paying the price for taking on the top guy. She was wrongly arrested for filming a planning meeting in 2012.I have been haranguing our leader, Keith Barrow from Oswestry regarding this having personally been on the receiving end of planning corruption for ten years now due to living opposite a local councillor.
If you look at other councils you’ll see some have been doing this for some years now, some better than others and you can look at agendas google maps and listen to the meeting at the same time live or when ever suits.
Ok you can’t contribute unless arranged beforehand at planning meetings but at least you can see the twists and turns, manipulation of policy etc.
Planning is such an an emotive subject and financially very critical to every taxpayer that it needs to be very open, transparent and accountable.
It’s the one area of the local Council that can actually make money insofar as land value can jump form little to a hell of a lot in one decision,
therefore it is also open to corruption big time.
You are lucky Wales has taken this step, I wish we could put a toe behind Shropshire Council who are claiming they can’t afford to do this despite having just recently given most of our Councillors i Pads! Try and get the local paper behind you is a joke too.
Eric Pickles says what have councils got to hide? Well they’re not going to be able to hide behind him any more!
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