After much discussion we made the decision one year ago to launch a pilot project to increase public access to local government by making City Council meetings more easily and widely accessible by archiving digital copies on the net. The idea had been promoted regularly by City Councilors Toomey and Rosen but has never been implemented by the City Manager.

The technicality of uploading a weekly video and creating a directory was simple, but the goal was to automatize the process as much as possible. Running over to City Hall to video record every meeting felt stupid when there was a multi-camera recording made weekly by Gov Ch 12. Using that video would be far easier, but there was a question about using that content.

Currently Gov Ch 12 claims “copyright” over the City Council broadcast.

We had a lot of questions about that claim. It didn’t seem right. Mike Benedetti summarizes the issue thusly,

“I suppose it's possible that a public broadcast of a public meeting paid for with public money could be copyrighted, though at the federal level this sort of thing is public domain. The question is: why would the City want to copyright this? What public purpose could that possibly serve? By claiming this is copyright, they're forcing people who want to archive meetings, like we've done, to be willing to risk breaking the law.”

In an effort to work with Gov Ch 12 and address the copyright claim, Mike made a formal request for clarification. We were told a response was forthcoming, but after waiting there was none. One year later there still has not been any clarification.

We decided to move forward after the good faith effort to understand the City’s copyright claim. The original plan offered to partner with Gov Ch 12 on this project as well, sharing skills, technical know-how and volunteers. There was no response to these email inquiries.

There was broad concensus among everyone to still move forward. Instead the archiving would simply be a Worcester Indymedia project which WCCA Ch 13 agreed to facilitate. Plan Two called for Mike to pick-up DVD copies of the City Council meeting every week at City Hall, but then Gov Ch 12 refused to sell us any of the DVD’s. [We can now add that refusal to Worcester’s current public records debate.]

This forced the project to Plan Three. Mike would record the weekly City Council meetings, upload them to the Internet Archive, the non-profit internet based library, and create an on-line directory at worcesteractivist.org to aggregate and help publicize the project.

The final plan, which has now run its full course of one year, was achieved without any major costs and on not much more than a shoestring budget.

Blank DVDs: less than $50
About an hour of hands-on time a week
One cheap computer
Internet access + electricity

In the end that was the full cost of this project.

As the project began to move forward there was uncertainty as to whether or not it would be challenged. It wasn’t. We wondered how long before Gov Ch 12 would follow-up by directly putting City Council meetings on-line, but sadly they never did. You can only imagine all of our reactions when the City Manager put forward a new contract and budget proposal in September which would strip $25,000 funding dollars from WCCA Ch 13 and tossing it over to Gov Ch 12. As part of his effort “to take government to the people”, City Manager O’Brien also proposed providing Gov Ch 12 with a new SUV for mobile broadcasts.

The project has been successful shining light on the need to make City Council meeting more broadly available. Local non-profits and graduate students as well as the general public have all expressed appreciation for the project. Digitalized Council meetings have also provided a record for community organizing campaigns and local activists seeking to publicize a City Council discussion, or hold public officials accountable for their actions and in-actions.

Such was the case when Worcester Indymedia used footage to expose City Councilor Haller’s stifling of the public records debate or coverage of the street vendor ordinance debate.

Much was learned and confirmed by the year long project. I asked Mike Benedetti what he really hoped would come out of the 12 month effort.

"I wish the City Council understood how easy it is to archive these meetings. They should say to Channel 12: why aren't you doing this already?"

If not, then maybe the City Manager or City Council can find a little bit of funding and we just might be willing to continue to pick-up this city service for another year.