In an era where most of us carry a veritable TV studio in our pockets, we can reasonably ask why our councils and school districts don’t live stream their meetings. In 2017, frustrated by Jenkintown Borough’s glacial availability of their meeting minutes, I took it upon myself to livestream their meetings for the whole community. More than a year and a half later, the Borough finally started doing it themselves. Why don’t all government agencies do this? We’d like to find out.
By law, government meetings only need to generated written minutes. If they record them as well, they may destroy the recordings once they post the minutes publicly. This has been state policy since 1996.
While it’s long past time to update those rules, we see no obstacles, financial, technical, or otherwise to starting now. Tripod, smartphone, and a Facebook page is all you need.
We believe that live-streaming represents the gold standard in government transparency. Twenty or thirty years ago, that might have been cable access, but Jenkintown doesn’t have its own cable channel and internet streaming costs far less and reaches more people. Why not do it, then?
Here’s the run down so far:
Abington Board of Commissioners
Video Archive: Yes
Public Access Cable: Yes
Live-stream: No
The Commissioners do an excellent job of making their archive readily available on their website and do it in a timely manner. They also provide video archives of their committee meetings but not their minor committees, such as Planning or Zoning. All the videos and minutes for May meetings are already posted.
Abington School Board
Video Archive: Yes
Public Access Cable: Yes
Live-stream: No
The School District makes their meeting videos and minutes available within days of recording. Livestreams are not available but residents with cable may watch them live on the township’s public access channel.
Cheltenham Township Commissioners
Video Archive: No
Public Access Cable: No
Live-stream: No
Cheltenham’s transparency takes a major hit with the lack of any electronic archive or live audio or video access, which is a shame given that they meet in easily the most beautiful setting any municipality could ask for — Curtis Hall.
Cheltenham School District
Video Archive: No
Public Access Cable: No
Live-stream: No
Perhaps indicative the township’s distressed financial state, the school district also fails badly in its transparency efforts.
Jenkintown Borough
Video Archive: Yes, but…
Public Access Cable: No
Live-stream: Yes
The Borough’s video archive is mysteriously incomplete. While they’ve live-streamed for over a year now, they’ve left only three videos in the archive.
Jenkintown School District
Video Archive: No
Public Access Cable: No
Live-stream: No
Despite the fact that the Jenkintown School Board meets in its media center, it does not live-stream or provide video of its twice-monthly meetings. Instead, the District records the audio and archives it on Soundcloud. These recording usually appear the following month. Audio recordings simply aren’t sufficient because listeners can’t always discern who is speaking nor can they see body language or expressions.
Its minutes are also difficult to access online, especially from a mobile device. The district uses the Boarddocs system, which was probably state-of-the-art in the 1990s, but is hopelessly obsolete for end-users today. One of the better districts in the state gets a failing transparency grade.
To help the JSD get started, we provide the community with this archived video shot by our friends at Walkable Jenkintown. Enjoy!