The city council of Sunda – located on the Faroe Islands, North Atlantic Ocean – has turned to Vaddio’s live-streaming solution AutoPresenter to share council meetings with residents.
Comprised of about 18 rugged, rocky islands the Faroes occupy approximately 540 square miles of landmass, with a total population hovering around 50,000 people. The municipality of Sunda (known locally as Sunda kommuna) stretches across two of the islands and includes about a dozen small communities.
Island-based AV systems integrator Raclip was charged with deploying a system, which needed to provide the sparesly populated islands’ residents with the means of becoming more active in local governance.
Raclip selected a Vaddio system based on a single Vaddio HD-19 camera, two microphones, a Vaddio AutoPresenter, and Vaddio AV bridge. The Vaddio AutoPresenter interfaces with the HD-19 PTZ camera mounted in the city council’s meeting room. As a city council meeting gets underway, the mayor simply turns on the equipment and the event is live-streamed instantly.
Another key component in the Sunda kommuna live-streaming setup is said to be the Vaddio AV Bridge. This little box offers supreme flexibility in the choice of streaming platform. The AV Bridge functions as a digital gateway that connects the audio and video sources to the streaming software, be it Skype, Cisco Jabber, Microsoft Lync — or any application that supports USB 2.0 devices.
“We just input the camera and microphone sources to the AV Bridge, and the city council can live-stream on any platform they desire,” commented Raclip integrator Alvin Ellebye Andersen. “Again, we wanted to make this as easy as possible for them.”
Importantly, the AV Bridge also records the meeting for archival purposes. Instead of relying on a set of written minutes that could be incomplete or even contain innocently introduced errors, the Sunda kommuna city council can review the video archives of meetings to discern precisely what was said, done or decided.
The system also offers future potential as there are additional options for incorporating the presentation of other materials, such as PowerPoint slideshow. By harnessing this capability, the Sunda council could, for example, display a proposed budget using a picture-in-picture format while the city treasurer explained to viewers what each line item meant.
Although the meeting archives currently aren’t publicly available, the ability of a citizen to “sit in” on a live event occurring on another island offers great convenience to those who want to stay current with what the city council is doing. Ultimately, the system should stimulate more public input and involvement with local government.
