« Montgomery County Council Video On-Demand »

Montgomery County in Maryland finished their Meeting Efficiency Suite training and have already started broadcasting their public meetings live and on-demand for citizens to watch!

The clerk’s office has really excelled with the solution – Donna, Linda, Crystal, MaryAnn, Jill, and their IT staff - Michelle. Since MoCo has weekly council meetings, the clerk staff got ample time to practice using Granicus. They are getting into a nice rhythm for the technology and are working together to distribute their County Council meeting videos, minutes, and agenda packets to the web. They will use the system to do a lot of pre-annotation to their minutes before the meeting, which will make the post-meeting work load lighter. They will also capture motions/votes, timestamp the video, and edit and publish minutes. Three different staff members will use the Microsoft Word Add-in to make final touches on their minutes before getting them approved, printed, and published to the web.

I worked closely with them to solve common problems faced by many large government agencies when they move towards a completely open and transparent solution. There is always a need to modify complex agenda formatting so it can be read by a database solution and communicated out to the public effectively. After closely assessing their documents and working with the clerk’s staff, we’ve found a solution that works for everyone. Michelle from their IT department was a big help in this area.

Additionally, Donna will also be leading up the use of the new solution to schedule, record, and archive County Cable Montgomery (CCM) television shows on the web. The CCM channel is also streaming live 24/7.