Wirral Council has been using Public-i to webcast the majority of our public meetings for over two years. When the COVID-19 restrictions came in we decided we wanted to continue broadcasting via Public-i as a lot of residents were already used to finding our webcasts on the Public-I micro-site. We have been running our meetings through Microsoft Teams and broadcasting them through Public-I’s Connect Anywhere system.
We ran our first virtual committee on 28 April 2020 for Planning and have now held 21 public meetings up to 7 August 2020, including a full Council meeting, Cabinet, Licensing Panels and Sub-Committees and a Scrutiny Committee Call-In.
We have also been running the general presentations for school appeals through the same set-up and have held 27 general presentations broadcast through Public-I with the panel and presenting officer talking through Teams. We have set these webcasts to “hidden” and given them password access so that only the relevant parents can view them. We have run over 500 individual school appeals through Teams with parents invited to join the meetings via individual meeting links.
Learning
We chose to use Microsoft Teams because we were already using it (to a much smaller degree!) before the restrictions were put in place. Our legal and IT teams felt it was more secure than alternatives such as Zoom.
When we first started using Teams for public meetings it was restricted to showing a maximum of 4 video feeds at once. We developed a protocol for meetings with only the chair and lead officer keeping their video on and others only turning theirs on when speaking. Teams was rapidly updated to show up to 9 video feeds at once and the newest version can now show up to 49.
Chairs have been given an additional script for when they begin meetings to explain how the meeting will work on-line and what the expectations of members are.
All voting is done via role-call and verbal/video response. We also ask that members confirm that they have heard the full debate on each item before they cast their vote.
We organised multiple training and practice meetings before each committee meeting to ensure members and officers were happy with how the meeting would work on-line. The number of these meetings has reduced the more committees we’ve held as the majority of our members have now attended multiple committees.
Initially we had one officer capable of webcasting these meetings and have had to buy new equipment for other staff to ensure that multiple people can cover this role.
We have been using the webcasting officer to also facilitate meetings, i.e. making sure that the correct people have joined, letting guests into the meeting and creating private chat groups for the chair and lead officers. We have also made sure that there was IT support for the earlier meetings and for larger scale meetings like full Council.
Contact
Bryn Griffiths, Scrutiny Officer
Email: [email protected]