Chapel Hill Council meeting on YouTube

Yet another Chapel Hill video first created by Will Raymond, aka WillR. On his blog post Chapel Hill Downtown Development Initiative: The Debate, there are links to TWENTY ONE separate videos of twenty one different people speaking at a November 20th public hearing on downtown development. To make it real easy to choose which one to watch there are screen shots from the video of the people who spoke with their names captioned at the bottom.

I watched this meeting live on local cable access. It was incredibly long. So long that I can’t possibly remember all that was said. So long that I feel it excluded hundreds if not thousands of citizens from this important debate. How so? By requiring incredible stamina to watch and forcing people to catch it in a limited time window. (The hearing was one of many things on a long agenda.) Sure you can go to Town hall and borrow the VHS tape. But who is going to do that? (seriously) How many young people even have VHS VCRs anymore? Now with the video online the barrier to civic involvement is significantly lowered. Not just for residents of Chapel Hill but for the world!

Will’s blog post is also significant because it shows what local government information could be like. Didn’t the Town of Chapel Hill purchase, or consider purchasing, a video streaming server? Fact is the flash video post on YouTube by Will is more accessible than streaming video because the video player just works and the YouTube servers are highly effective. An expensive resource that many local governments can not afford.

Thanks Will for showing the way. Tell us all how you did it.