OpenGov

From Missoula Bar Camp

Missoula city council meetings online.

Video and transcript.

Sometimes we use a transcript , sometimes spech-to-text does it for us.

Website uses java applet to play the video, nothing to install for the user.

Open source tools, all of it. Seth's idea is that every piece of this should be open, and not for profit. No advertising, no fees, everything open source.

opengov.org

MCAT is doing something similar but using different technologies.

It would take a month or two for a talented programmer to get us to a point where the meeting video/transcript was 100% automated

metavid from univ of santa monica is taking C/SPAN footage – archiving it and including the transscript (which comes from the close-caption stream cspan provides).

Lance from the county IT staff was here, asked about how county could do this: linux server running apache, php, mysql. -- or have opengov host it.

theora – one of the ziph projects, the people who do icecast in ogg.

County could download theora, run it on their video, and then upload it to the opengov server, and opengov would take care of the rest.

Other ideas are to do this for quasi-governmental conferences like health care conferences, and also the state legislature.

No plans to make this a company, we will eventually ask for public donations to cover bandwidth costs.

Content must be open-licensed to stay consistent with everything else being open.