Skip to main content

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.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital best practice checklist

This week I finished the draft of a digital best practice check-list. It's not digital strategy, in fact I'm increasingly thinking organisations don't need a digital strategy, they need a delivery strategy. My draft has check-list of seven questions and recommendations, with one overall recommendation regarding best practice for delivering digital. Ideally it would be incorporated into a wider service and information delivery strategy. Below I've omitted the bulk of the content, the reasoning behind arriving at the recommendation from the question because it's still in draft, but here are the seven questions and eight recommendations: 1. Is the council properly promoting its digital services and content, to reduce avoidable contact? Recommendation: Establish a “digital first” ethos to the promotion of services and better targeting what, when and where they're promoted. 2. Are the digital services the council offers, especially where the design and...
5 comments
Read more

Carl's Conundrum of Internal Influence

I'm writing this partly as a reply to an excellent piece that Carl Haggerty published about the disconnect between internal and external influence and partly due to various conversations over the past month about how to make using tools like collaboration platform  Pipeline common practice. This isn't really about Carl though, or Devon County Council, or any other council specifically, it's more a comment on the influence of digital teams in local governments, or lack of, and how to resolve this. So here's the question that prompted this piece. How can someone who's been recognised nationally for their work, first by winning the Guardian's Leadership Excellent Award and who has more recently been placed in the top 100 of the Local Government Chronicle's most influential people in local government , "sometimes feel rather isolated and disconnected to the power and influence internally". First, let's consider whether is this a problem to...
6 comments
Read more

Pipeline Alpha

In September 2014, officers from 25 councils met in Guildford to discuss a platform to enable collaboration across Local Government. A "Kickstarter for local government" is the missing part to Makers Project Teams , a concept to enable collaborative working across different organisations put forward by LGMakers the design and development strand of LocalGov Digital . Based on the user needs captured at the event, LGMakers created collaboration platform Pipeline and by October people from over 50 councils had signed up . Pipeline is an Alpha, a prototype set up to evaluate how a Kickstarter for councils might work. It is a working site though, and is being used as the platform it is eventually intended to be, at present without some of finer features a live offer might have. So what have I've learnt in the eight months since we launched Pipeline? There's a strong desire to collaborate  LocalGov Digital isn't a funded programme. I wrote about how much it ...
1 comment
Read more

Superfast highways

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation This week we launched a new beta service to report speeding traffic. It looks fairly simple but to give you an idea of what's happening in the background I thought it might be useful to show you the before and after. So here's the before and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district. Here's the after What this doesn't tell you is that it's basing whether the request is for the parish or district on three questions. It's also doing a spatial look up to find the parish and returning the parish clerk details using the Modern.Gov API. Because these are already part of our platform this is data that we currently maintain, so there's no additional work to keep this up to date and we've reduced the h...
1 comment
Read more

Defining transformation to a wider audience

For the past month I've been putting together a paper on the next steps of digital transformation, for the organisation I work for. I'm proposing we look at two capabilities and two business areas, and if approved I'll be writing more about it. It's been a great exercise in gathering my thoughts and helping me to define digital transformation to a wider audience and how it fits into the bigger picture of service improvement. Here's some of the stuff I've learnt or had affirmed: Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied. It's unlikely a commercial operation would launch a new product without first researching the market, so why would a digital service be any difference? A couple of years ago I wrote how the phrase "digital transformation" was hindering digit...
1 comment
Read more