Super-fans of our City Council may notice me laughing as I look down at the start of many meetings. My phone “blows up” with texts from residents complaining about the meeting video, audio, etc. As if I can do something about it. 😃 I have complained and complained and complained.
*But… I have not seen any letters to the City Council. And I’ll just tell you on this as on every topic.
- Do not text me. Especially during a meeting. Seriously, dude.
- Do not write the City staff. Not the Clerk, not the IT guy. Why? Because City complaints are not forwarded to the City Council.
- Instead, write the City Council, which is automatically read by the City Clerk.
- And when you do, please mention me. Not to feed my ego (my ego is doing just fine, thanks very much), but because, unlike my colleagues, I worked in IT for 25 years. Even if you don’t know how the correct way to fix it, I do. On many issues, there’s this ongoing back and forth where the City will say “we’re working on (x)” and my colleagues say “OK” because they know about as much about IT as I do about brain surgery. So nothing improves. For years. Your support gives me leverage in getting a better solution implemented.
If you don’t write to back me up, it’s assumed that I’m “just making shit up”
So please write citycouncil@desmoineswa.gov
The deliberator
I know the audio problems were particularly bad at last Thursday’s meeting. That may be because this was the first meeting where the deliberators were hooked up. I’ve asked the City Clerk about it because I am now blocked from even emailing the IT manager directly. I mean that literally. My emails are refused.
Closed Captions and Transcripts
But before that, one minor victory I’ve had while in office has been to encourage the IT dept to hit a button on Youtube which auto-magically creates closed captions for our meeting videos.
The last meeting was closed-captioned so you can see the transcript even for the bits you cannot hear. Hit the ‘cc’ button and re-watch. 🙂
But some are not. So I also upload every meeting to my Youtube Channel and make sure its closed-captioned just in case. That’s your backup plan. 🙂
You can have the captions move along as you watch OR you can see the entire transcript all in one go by clicking on the “…” on the line below the video with the “Like” and “Share” buttons.
The Law
Our Council’s Rules of Procedure #35 and #36 require that meetings be audio and video-recorded. However, the quality of the recording is not specified. Regular watchers may have noticed the wide range of audio and video quality both during meetings and -between- different meetings.
Eg. at this meeting both main cameras are out of focus. And the “1 shot” and “2 shot” (ie. where the camera zooms in on people as they speak) only worked for Tim George. When members of the Council are speaking it’s only the wide shot. It’s supposed to zoom on each CM as they speak.
Action Minutes
A bit more troubling for “democracy” writ large, the City shifted to “action minutes” about a decade ago. Action minutes mean that only the actions are recorded in the minutes, not what anyone said. The Minutes only tally the votes. They say nothing of the content. Which means that the video is the only detailed account of what was said.Â
Speaking of the content…
And it is the case that there are several meetings, as recent as 2017, where:
- There is audio, but no video.
- Or the audio and video are horribly out of sync.
- Or some of them are these horrible postage stamp size Windows 95 things.
- And of course, many of them were not closed-captioned. (Again, if you have difficulties, search for the meeting video at SeaTacNoise.Info. All those are closed-captioned.)
If a meeting falls in the woods…
Although the meetings must be recorded, there is (AFAIK) no retention requirements of any kind.
So I have no idea where many of those meetings are before 2006. I know for a fact that the City had a video system as far back as Kennedy (1990-ish), but the IT Manager (who started in 2002-ish) has no idea and because he is not required by law to care, he does not care.
SeatacNoise.Info to the rescue…
As part of SeaTacNoise.Info‘s ongoing project to document every aspect of the airport, we have tracked down many (but not all) of these older videos. So if anyone ever wants a trip down memory lane with people like Don Wasson and Terry Brazil, that’s the place to go.
(It’s slightly unnerving to think that I may be the only person left with videos of City meetings more than 15 years old.)
Why it matters…
We keep making a lot of the same mistakes over and over and I wonder how much of it comes down to the fact that nobody cares about the past. And that indicates a certain form of arrogance. What happened before is irrelevant because “this time will be different.”
Apart from that, with the end of detailed meeting minutes video is becoming the only reliable way to know “what happened.”
With video the truth at least has a fighting chance. Without it, democracy has none because then people can say whatever they want.
*26 June, 2022: Today, the City Council received its first complaint on the matter of my tenure. Congratulations!
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