Posted by John Borst on Sep 11, 2019
Buried in a single sentence in a Staff Report at the September 9th Committee-of-the-Whole Council Meeting on “Electronic Participation” by members of council that “The IT Department ...have sourced the required hardware and software solutions to implement this project including webcasting.” 
 
 
That means Dryden Council’s public meetings when in open session will be live streamed to your home via the Internet in real time. The equipment is actually in place and is being “soft tested” during September.   
 
The camera is on the ceiling. It is a PTZOptics NDI model. The PTZ means pan, tilt, zoom. The councilors and managers will have individual microphones which are wirelessly connected to a sound board so that the audio quality will be excellent. The video will be processed for streaming using a Teradek encoder through a private City of Dryden YouTube channel.
 
The City already uses a company called iCompass to manage their meetings electronically and through them has in place a Civicweb portal on the City of Dryden website at https://dryden.civicweb.net/Portal/  as shown below.
 
 
A video record of a meeting will be held by iCompass in the cloud for two years so that a citizen can go back and review what position a councilor took on an issue. The videos will be time-stamped so you can search for individual points of a meeting.   
 
Money for this project was in the past years budget in the amount of approximately $15,000.