Getting on teh Interwebs

One moment of interest during last weeks full council meeting was a question tabled by Cllr Flude about recording and broadcasting Council meetings on the web.

I thought this was an excellent idea.

We have the following problems:

* There are constant debates about when and where to have meetings in order to get most of the public involved.
* We get concerned when the press don't attend because the Guardian Media Group fat cats won't pay their petrol money.
* We expect the public to sit through a 3 hour meeting if all they want to do is find out about one agenda item and then wonder why they decide not to turn up at all.

Therefore, the idea that the full debate could be available for public perusal really floats my boat. I think it could be one of the best things we ever did to promote democracy in Cheshire East.

Regrettably it was dismissed as too expensive, which is a shame because it wouldn't be very difficult to do. It could be done with a cheapish camera, one of the officer's laptops and then hosted on youtube. Total cost under £100.

Another alternative would be to make the sound only available - we had two sound engineers present last week to run the PA system so it should be easy to knock up an MP3 from the output with no additional technology required.

But what would the public be subjected to if this was the case? Well unfortunately there were a lot of moments at the meeting last week that were more Shakesperian farce than Churchillian grandure.

One of the opposition leaders couldn't phrase an amendment in a way that anyone could understand - which was regrettable considering he only wanted to change "£1 Million" to "£500,000". When he did get it straight half the Council couldn't hear (this is a frequent issue), and once everyone had eventually heard there was still one particular member who still said she didn't really understand (this is a frequent issue, also).

We had many many referrals to the legal officer with regards to process and procedure, including a near riot when speakers waiting to speak were told they couldn't be heard because we had inadvertently let the mover speak for a second time which signaled the end of debate.

Then there was the vote that was taken 4 times because we couldn't work out who had their hands up - or perhaps the problem was that a couple of us abstained which meant that they couldn't make the numbers add up.

It would be quite entertaining if it wasn't so serious. But it is serious. This is the only level of representation for my household before we get to Parliament. This body is responsible for a budget in the region of a quarter of a billion, all of it your money.

We need to tighten things up a bit.