More efforts by the council to rig the leadership consultation keep on coming out, the latest information being that they didn’t even tell the councillors that they were holding the consultation.The video of the meeting is very short and you can watch councillor Johnston saying that she hadn’t been informed of the consultation by council officers, but instead found out from the local paper when the consultation was practically over, that it had apparently been going on for some time.
The video to click on, is the top one, on the page at http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council_meeting_webcast.aspx considering that this meeting is about the future constitution of the council, watching it is an education in local democracy at work.
The council have finally managed to get both council meetings available on the internet, perhaps this had something to do with yesterday’s post, perhaps they were going to do it anyway.
As one would expect the council have opted to host the video files in difficult format, expensive for them and not easy for those with older computers. They have published them in a way that you can’t save them and view them at your leisure, they have also disabled the size expansion facility so you can only view them as thumbnails, presumably to make them as boring as possible, so people will be put off from watching them and the council can say that there was insufficient public interest and bring the whole project to a halt.
Why they didn’t publish them in ordinary video format to one of the free video sites like Youtube one can only guess at.
The one of the extraordinary meeting will form part of my complaints to various organisations, like the electoral commission, if you need it for this sort of purpose you can download it and save it to your pc by clicking on the following link http://www.thanet.gov.uk/files/ExtraordinaryCouncil.flv if you need any help opening it or converting it to a normal video file let me know. I haven’t bunged it up on Youtube as the council have published it with a copyright statement that I don’t want to infringe.
If you prefer to view the main council meeting video files this way and have overcome the technological problems with the file above, here is the one for the much longer main meeting http://www.thanet.gov.uk/files/webcast.flv 413mb so not that large.
A complete farce.
ReplyDeleteAt our expense.
ReplyDeleteMy computer tells me it is a 25 minute download and then I will probably not be able to view it why cant they make it easy for people I would love to hear from there IT guy and find out why his stuff is so hard when computers are ment to make people lives easier. Maybe his qualifications to do the job are as dubious as TDC councill meetings
ReplyDeleteBeen downloading for 5 mins and it says 23 mins remaining so just going to abort
ReplyDeleteCancelled it if anyone from TDC READS THIS WHY CANT YOUR IT DEPARTMENT DO ANYTHING THAT IS USER FRIENDLY , IT MAKES ME THINK YOU ARE HIDING SOMETHING.
ReplyDeleteDon after proffering bits of help to Thanet residents who frankly just don’t have the money for state of the art modern computers I now test out TDC web offerings with my old laptop – designed for Windows 98 and struggling to run XP – the sort of computer you could buy for well under £100.
ReplyDeleteYou should be able to view the tiny videos by clicking on the council’s website at http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council_meeting_webcast.aspx or for better results Matt has put some instructions at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThanetStar/~3/LfUeFaX-rU8/using-and-abusing-tdc-flv-files
Why should TDC or any other council, throw resources at a few folk who want to 'nit pick' or use up valuable resources trying to answer ever increasingly complex questions fro idiots who do not live in the real world?
ReplyDelete15.49 they absolutely shouldn’t, what they should have done was stick the thing on Youtube so anyone can view it, including the visually impaired who would have been able to enlarge the thing so they could actually see it.
ReplyDeleteThe gripe here is that TDC are using something expensive and bad instead of something free and much better.
"..increasingly complex questions fro idiots who do not live in the real world?"
ReplyDeleteThe only people living in a closeted artificial world are TDC and their officers. I console myself with the thought that they all have but a few months left before the new party sweeps them out.
That will be a party worth going to then!!!!
ReplyDeleteMalcolm