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Running remote council meetings

In the past ten days we ran four council meetings completely remotely.

This included our special Full Council meeting on 29th April, with over 40 councillors in attendance, you can watch it below.


We're using Zoom Webinars and live streaming through YouTube, but this piece isn't about the technology, it's about the wider approach we took to enable us to deliver fully remote council meetings.

Here's what we did:

Involved everyone from the start

It needed a team effort to enable this to happen. Officers from Democratic, Legal, IT, and Digital teams, and senior councillors were involved in various aspects, including research, drafting guidance, drafting policy, deciding which platform to use, deciding how that platform should be used, and testing.

Researched and built on existing knowledge

We'd already live streamed council meetings before starting in 2015, and some councils were already ahead of us enabling remote meetings . This tweet by Peter Fleming, Leader of Sevenoaks District Council has some really useful advice
Councils like Worthing had already started running committees remotely



and Paul Brewer shared one of their trial run with us. The LocalGov Digital COVID19 channel on Slack also proved invaluable.

Used current protocols

Your council will already have existing protocols in place to deal with some of the situations that might arise during a remote meeting.

What if the Chair drops out and isn't present for example, what if the meetings become inquorate because too many councillors drop out and aren't present, what if an individual councillor drops out and isn't present for the whole debate?

Thankfully we haven't had to use them, but you should already have protocols in place if this were to happen in a face-to-face meeting; re-use and adapt them for remote meetings.

Practise, practise, practise

Peter Fleming's video mentions this, but I can't stress highly enough the need to practice. IT and Digital ran practice runs, trying out the various features of the platform we chose. A wider group of officers worked with the Chair of each meeting to make sure they were happy with the platform and protocol.

Iterated and improved

There are things we did differently from the first to the second meetings, like the "hosts" turning off their cameras once the meeting had started to make space on the live stream for others who were taking part in the meeting. 

Having run four meetings remotely we'll be reviewing how they went in more depth next week as there are probably other things we might do better, even using the same platform and protocol.

Planed for the future

Things will change, restrictions will be lifted, but we don't know when and for who yet. We may find that some people who need or want to attend meetings can't straight away, because they still need to socially isolate. 

The current Climate Change Emergency also means organisations should be looking to reduce unnecessary travel, and remote council meetings could be a small way to help achieve that.


I hope this is useful. Get in touch on Twitter, or if you work in or are a member of a local government join LocalGov Digital as I'd be interested to hear your approach please.


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