Remote council meetings - Norfolk County Council

Norfolk County Council already have processes set up to broadcast Full Council, Cabinet and Scrutiny meetings on YouTube for public viewing. They are now doing testing to use Microsoft Teams to set up a Live Teams Event in which the Members would be “Presenters”.

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There will also be a “Production” role that will be filled by someone familiar with Teams to moderate the video stream and the chat messages.  Norfolk have used this approach many times before with officer groups but this will be the first time with elected members and the public.

 

The council will publish the link to the public such that they can watch a live stream of the Teams meeting. The public could use the Teams Web App but would be more likely to access through a web browser and do not have to sign up for an account to attend the meeting.  

 

The current processes to allow public participation in the meeting is to enable Chat messages in the meeting channel so the public can submit questions, which are only visible to the person fulfilling the ‘Production’ role who can pass them onto the chair if appropriate.

 

How is the new approach being sustained? 



The joint IT and Democratic services team are testing the technology and processes internally to simulate how the elected members and the public would engage in the scenario of the virtual meeting to see what could occur and how the team would deal with it.

 

Norfolk has now amended the Teams configuration to allow the public to link into the Teams Live Events (which was previously restricted to named guests only). 

 

Lessons learned 



That council staff and elected members remain open and able to innovate, taking an agile approach to trying out new technologies despite the challenging circumstances, as can be seen by the following quote from Cllr Tom Fitzpatrick Cabinet Member for Innovation, Transformation and Performance.  “This shows the need to embrace change and use technology to drive the transformation of the organisation so that we are in control, rather than just reacting to events.  Allowing public participation in the current situation is something we see as a necessary and positive move. We can deliver this now, because we had taken the decision to do something last year and are able to build on it, rather than being under pressure and having to start from scratch”  

 

Contact: Geoff Connell, Director of IMT & Chief Digital Officer

IMT, Finance & Commercial Services 

Tel: 01603 973230