Watch Your Government at Work in Your Boxers
October 31st, 2008
If you want to watch a video online of a cat opening a jar, that’s easy. A haunted Ouija Board? Not a problem. But if you want to watch the City Council hearing on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to reduce poverty, you’d be hard pressed to find it.
Councilmember Gale Brewer would like to change that. The Technology in Government Committee, which she chairs, held a hearing this week about a bill to offer live webcasts of all public meetings and archive them online.
The city developed a webcasting pilot six years ago, but Web video has developed increasingly farther since then. For example, live webstreaming is available for free to anybody with a digital camera and internet access (Brooklyn Heights Blog just used one such service to broadcast their debate between State Senate candidates Daniel Squadron and John Chromczak).
In fact, New York city is behind most other big cities on this front, as CityRoom pointed out.
Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, said in written testimony that webcasts are the “obvious next step” in the city’s efforts to use technology to promote accountability and transparency.
But she would also like to see that written testimony available on the council’s Web site.
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