Example: Staff were looking into the per diem rates. They got comparison from other levels of government. What the citizens wanted to know was: How much a year do we spend. Take a lunch we do. Why so much out of town travel. Stay home. That kind of thing.

The resolution prohibited video in any town facility. I had my own resolution to ignore theirs. They really didn’t like it when I went into their “open budget” meeting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XuLmtrhl3I

I plan on running in the next election (may 14 2013) on a platform of total transparency.

http://www.telusplanet.net/public/stonedan I have 1 video promise up on Youtube and will start doing more as soon as I do my press release.

They’re not making it easy though; they’ve banned filming public speakers, banned panning the camera so the individual speaking can be seen and not allowed me to sit next to my camera during the meeting. I’ve reported on my experiences at:

http://www.rtaylor.co.uk/recording-council-meetings.html

Also, if videos are uploaded to YouTube, then, eventually, Google will caption them and make the captions searchable, and translate them:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html

This technology is, of course, still in its infancy, so won’t solve our immediate needs.

Videos of council meetings are so lame, a bunch of talking heads – imagine a transcription were available… searchable, Google-able, listen to the .mp3 in you dead-time (mowing the lawn, driving, watching Masterchef with the wife, whatever…).

If you want to impress me, extract meaning from council meetings – and push it into my conciousness.

But linking to the original cite to provide comment on it is another “solution”, and one which is a) easy to do, b) provides a reference to the original “time” context (e.g. a meeting going on) and also the link’s source (webpage, organisation, etc). Both of these have value to both the linker and the linked.

I’m not necessarily saying Jason was *wrong* or “more democratic” in what he did – more that, as someone that actually wants to find out more information *easily* in a *networked* public sphere, copying rather than linking isn’t always the most effective method.

Assuming the council site doesn’t allow it, it would seem rather more useful to put the whole video on Youtube, and link to specific time points. One could probably build a whole content summary process round that. (I might actually watch my council meetings then

Absolutely, but the post was not (meant to be) about this. It was that by using something that the council had put on the web (the webcasts), Kitcat was using “the council’s IT facilities improperly for political purposes”. Not only is this nonsensical, I think James’s comment nails it — that’s democracy.