Thanet District Council Webcast 19th January Council Meeting about the budget, Margate Football Club and so on.

The thing with local government here in Thanet is that one is inclined to get something that is both not very good and expensive, the webcasts of the council meetings fall into this bracket.

For the rest of us who live in the normal world outside local government, putting a video on the internet costs us nothing and the end result is something that is much more usable than what the council have done.

You have to appreciate that apart from the times when their equipment fails the council makes video recordings of their meetings anyway, they even produce dvds of these meetings.

What they have put on the internet is only slightly larger in size than a postage stamp and after a very short time of trying to peer at it with my reading glasses I looked for alternatives.

They have disabled the facility to enlarge the video and don’t provide the embed code for it either, so to view their very small version go to http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council_meeting_webcast-1.aspx

Alternatively download the video file from their website http://www.thanet.gov.uk/files/CMmeetingJan12.flv right clicking on the link and selecting save target as should do the trick. You can then open it with one of the free video players, the best one of these is http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ mind you untick the boxes for the stuff you don’t want on the way, or you will make something your homepage and put some strange programs that you probably don’t want on your computer.

Doing it this way you can at least identify the people in the webcast although the quality is still fairly poor.


The message that publishing the webcast in this way sends out to me is that either the officers are ashamed of the councillors or they are ashamed of the democratic process.


As you can see from the video below, published by TDC to their youtube account, the council do have a youtube account and what they publish to it has good quality definition and all of the usual versatility associated with youtube. 

I do wonder if the intention here – no press release, only a small link with no picture on the council’s homepage, the small size and poor quality – is intended to minimise the number of people viewing it, so the council can say that the interest is so small that it doesn’t justify webcasting these meetings.

I will write some more about this when I have seen more of the webcast.

Last Thursday’s Council Meeting Webcast

Click on the ink to view, http://www.thanet.gov.uk/council_meeting_webcast.aspx

Questions to the council

This is by way of an update on the questions I put to the council a while ago.

It’s strange really the council must waste so much time answering questions, whereas if they put the information on the website in the first place it would save so much of their resources.

I make a considerable effort to try and avoid official complaints, the freedom of information act and the local government ombudsman, the object being to get them to become more open in their attitude.

Click here for the questions and their responses

Click here for more pictures of Royal Crescent

I also asked them about deleting the leaders email address, which to my mind is just plain stupid, yes anyone who uses it gets an email back saying it was undeliverable, what they don’t get is an alternative email address to send his mail to.

I really don’t understand why so much of government has to handle IT so badly, TDC seems to excel at this.

Nor can I understand why there should be such delay answering the questions about the Sericol leak, if the vapour is coming out of the ground at Westwood and the expert advice I have taken concluded it must be then it begs some very difficult questions. Not the least of which is, is it safe for the people working there?