Here I discuss with the mayor about the Valdosta City Council videoing their entire meetings and putting them on the web for everybody to see. The mayor indicated costs of streaming was an issue; I recommended putting it on YouTube or Vimeo and letting them handle that part. I think the AJC article he mentioned is this one: Meeting access video grows among city councils, by Patrick Fox, 18 Jan 2011.

This comment by the mayor was amusing:

The worst thing you could do would be to have one camera in the back that has room audio.

Touche, Mr. Mayor! :-) What do you think, is a noisy video from the back of the room more useful than no video at all? Can you see him waving his arms around?

Video by Gretchen Quarterman of the regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 20 Jan 2011
for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange

A handheld camera such as Gretchen was using or such as I was waving around in the front of the room can do panning and zooming, and if you put it on a tripod it would be steadier. Use more than one of them and you can cover the whole meeting from several points of view with redundancy in case one camera fails. That’s just one of several ways to do it.

Here are the videos of the entire 21 Dec 2010 VLCIA board meeting. There are some parts missing: I didn’t video when I was asking or they were answering me; I didn’t video the invocation; and the camera I was using has about 6 seconds delay between stopping one video and starting to record another. If the VLCIA board or other bodies did their own videoing, they could avoid these problems.

The mayor gave his cold to Gretchen, but she’s getting over it; I hope he is, as well.

-jsq

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