Council webcasting policy not as confused as we thought (I think)
The Cornwall Council meeting of 7th September is now The amendment from councillor Mike Eathorne-Gibbons, which sought to limit expansion of the webcasting project, was carried by 44 votes to 37. It also limited the meetings which can be covered to full Council and to Cabinet. The crucial part of the amendment was paragraph (b), which appears to have survived intact:
"arrangements include the Trelawney Room so that meetings of Cabinet are webcast from October 2010."The Trelawney Room does not yet have webcasting facilities, but I don't see how any rational interpretation of these words could mean anything other than that these facilities should now be installed. As the council's top lawyer, Richard Williams, observed at the meeting:
"It just means the equipment necessary to webcast the Cabinet meetings will have to be installed in the Trelawney Room."A consequence of this is that the crucial Cabinet emergency budget meeting on 13th October should be covered live on the web. Bizarrely, the resolution means the new webcasting facilities in the Trelawney Room will be used only for Cabinet meetings and not for planning, which is often where councillors would benefit from greater scrutiny.
I'm ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio Devon’s Graham Smith, blogging on news, views and some fresh insights into West Country life, particularly the way government works locally and nationally.
Comment number 1.
At 14th Sep 2010, Peter Tregantle wrote:Do they produce any figures of how many people view these?
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Comment number 2.
At 14th Sep 2010, Graham Smith wrote:I reproduce the following information from the official council analysis paper on the webcasting experiment:
"Altogether, there have been over 17,000 views of the meetings of
Cornwall Council in the past three months. Even assuming that
some of these are repeat viewings, it nevertheless is an impressive
figure. According to Public-I, these figures put Cornwall at the top
end of the range. Some other unitaries are getting viewing figures
for their council meetings in the hundreds rather than thousands.
"It is interesting to see in the second table that people are still
viewing the webcasts months after the meetings. Despite some
initial teething problems, the overall quality of sound and images is
reasonably good although clearly it could be improved with a better
sound system in the Chamber. With clear indexing of speakers and
agenda items the archived webcasts are easy to use and viewers can
go straight to the items and speakers of interest."
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Comment number 3.
At 15th Sep 2010, Peter Tregantle wrote:Wow that’s a lot more than I expected, I take it they expect to offset this against lower expenses being claimed?
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