New Calgary mayor sets bar for transparency with searchable vids and realtime audio streams of council meetings

Gordonmcdowell sez, "One of Calgary's newly elected mayor Naheed Nenshi's campaign platform was improving City Council transparency and accessibility. I'm illustrating how this can be done (has been done) with free services (YouTube Partner account) and open source software (IceCast2). The end result it what used to be only a brief summary of Council's minutes can be a complete, search-able interactive YouTube transcript. (And an MP3 stream for live monitoring of council via smartphone.)"

YYCCC 2010-11-08 Calgary City Council (Thanks, gordonmcdowell, via Submitterator!)

• [Willie McBride]

  It was about time! My city council started live-streaming and publishing the recordings of all of its meetings before Youtube even existed, and I live in a country who’s everything but technologically advanced…

  http://www2.comune.venezia.it/direttaconsiglio/videoseek/default.asp

• [eberon]

  The community I live in has been doing this for a very long time.

  http://www.youtube.com/cityofevanstonil#p/u

  The live streaming option is new, unfortunately flash based:

  http://www.cityofevanston.org/blog/2010/11/channel-16-now-streaming-on-the-internet/

• [Anonymous]

  what can happen when cameras are allowed in gov’t:
  http://www.theonion.com/video/filming-of-congressional-reality-show-disrupts-com,14404/

• [Anonymous]

  and yet keeps the meetings between himself and the city owned utility secret…

• [Anonymous]

  this is kind of brilliant, simple as it is. i wonder, if it becomes widely accepted and used if in the future youtube will come back looking for fees from govts. for storage space… google owns the people’s data?

  • [Anonymous]

    Yes I was just going to say there are serious issues to handing the handling of these records to a corporation with it’s own agenda that can easily run counter to the public good. I also wonder how this interacts with Canada’s sometimes aggressive privacy and data handling laws.

    That said, a good first step that should be encouraged.

• [orwellian]

  But how can they screw the public if everything’s out in the open? Won’t someone think of the poor lobbyists? Isn’t corruption protected speech?

• [emdubya]

  Much as I like seeing a moderate elected in Calgary, this really isn’t setting the bar for anything. Our legislative sessions are all available online at http://www.assembly.ab.ca and this looks like it is the work of a private citizen, not the mayor. Will this stop “the public” from getting “screwed”? Not in the least. Every “good” politician (in Canada) knows better than to say something of substance in a public meeting. And “the public” is unlikely to devote five hours of their personal time to a council meeting. That’s why we have journalists.

  All that aside, I found the Google transcript to be extremely entertaining. It’s like found poetry.
  For e.g.:

  0:55first of all this is our first date
  0:57as the new counselor for state with all this new technology so i ask everyone’s forbearance
  1:01in advance
  1:02uh to deal with any glitches of technology or of cherry
  1:06i’m sure that’s uh you will correct me if we go a little off
  …

  2:40community-based groups and citizens like civic camp in the house
  2:43who have contributed time and effort to the continual improvement
  2:47an innovation and making calgary great city
  2:52grandchildren crop
  …

  3:23uh and we have all been jones
  3:26viewership local believe the questions for mister logan
  3:29slogan that after an incident that happened between my knowledge of those work with the
  3:34in regards to the next ref streetlights
  3:37i’ve noticed in my work on fifty second street thirty-second annual thirty-six treat that
  3:41i have lost twenty five flights of the world
  3:43we have a contract with them that store
  3:46visit the site complaint basis for whatever placed
  4:03they’re not going to you
  4:04now

  • [gordonmcdowell]

    Yes, the entry title (which I didn’t create) does imply that Calgary is doing this. Calgary is NOT yet doing this, I’ve just created an example based on part of Nenshi’s platform to illustrate how it could be done ASAP.

    There was a discussion which touched on this at Calgary’s hackerspace (“Protospace”), and it is true that simply giving citizens lots of data of this sort doesn’t necessarily translate into better governance. Al Gore says U.S. politics went to shit as TV cameras started recording House & Senate, pols started delivering sound bites to the camera and stopped debating.

    I’m keen on this because I think it is the city’s responsibility to make as much of this information as easily accessible and searchable as possible. The ultimate responsibility falls on citizens and journalists to dig a little deeper, and to give a shit. But by making it EASIER to dig a little deeper, the overhead of trying to give a shit goes down, and it is possible for more citizens to be engaged.

    As far as the yes-it-is-funny transcript, it is flawed because my example depended on YouTube Machine Transcription. Calgary’s City Council does NOT need to depend on Machine Transcription. They’ve already got high quality Close Captioning being produced, that data just needs to be released by City Council, so it can be uploaded to YouTube.

    I’m just trying to illustrate how cheap & easy this is to do. The city still needs to DO it.

• [gordonmcdowell]

  eberon lives in Evanston, Illinois.

  Google Partner accounts can be set up for non-profits (in the states), or for commercial purposes in countries including Canada.

  While I expect/hope YouTube would have no problem with letting City of Calgary upgrade to a Partner account, if anyone living in a CANADIAN city which uses a YouTube Partner account to host municipal videos, I’d love to hear of it.