Residents of Prince Rupert who like to tune into the live stream of City Council's work every two weeks once again were left outside the circle of information sharing on Monday, with the City's live stream once again unavailable from City Hall.
The technical woes of two weeks ago seemingly not yet addressed, leaving the live account of the Mayor, Council members and their staffers in attendance as we all as any community participation on the night unavailable through the civic website.
The night of civic governance one that became a CityWest exclusive for the second time in the last month, the Community Television feed reportedly not impacted by the ongoing technical issues.
The City posted a note on the issues following the March 28th session, but as of yet has offered no explanation as to the status of ongoing issues and when they are anticipated to be resolved.
The information stream from the City has suffered a few issues so far this year, in addition to the live stream troubles, the delivery of the Council sessions to their You Tube archive also suffered an unexplained delay in early March.
That session did air live through the video stream from the City's website on March 14th, however it took the city another nine days for the presentation of the Council session to make it to the YouTube archive page.
The lack of attention towards resolving the live feed issues comes during a rather important period for Council with the Council members directing residents to follow their work on the Civic Budget process, which wrapped up with last night's Council engagement opportunity.
Beyond that somewhat important part of the public engagement process, just the basic effort on transparency of council work should be some kind of a goal for the City so as to ensure that the proceedings of the elected officials are available as they conduct the city's business.
They could take a page from the Town of Smithers which has made use of its Facebook page for their live streams and other key elements of engagement with the public , such an arrangement for Prince Rupert may help to ensure that residents have access to the work of the Council members whenever they wish to review it.
Terrace as well makes use of multiple options for their Council sessions, with Facebook just one of two options for residents to keep up with their elected officials.
For the moment it seems those with an interest in the work of the civic initiatives of the Prince Rupert council will have to wait for the in house information sheet to be posted to the City's Facebook page, with the highlights the city wishes to put forward for public review, or the eventual posting to the YouTube Archive of the full council session.
More notes on past Council themes is available through our Council Discussion archive.
Here is City Hall's response to your article regarding basic effort, transparency, and accountability.
ReplyDeleteWe don't do that here.
The city is very good at losing Committee of the Whole Meetings. The transparency there is take our word for it it wasn't important.
ReplyDeleteWell to be fair, they do eventually post the Council sessions to the YouTube archive so there is transparency, somewhat delayed as it is.
DeleteStill, it seemingly isn't hard to live stream these days, so it's puzzling as to how they continue to have troubles with proving a basic feed for what normally are mundane council gatherings
NCR