Note from the MCA: We applaud this independent effort to place these important videos on the web. The MCA has been videotaping many public meetings in Moultonboro and began placed them on this website to an excellent public response.
MCA
The Meredith News September 18th, 2008
SARAH SCHMIDT
SSCHMIDT@SALMONPRESS.COM
MEREDITH — Whether or not voters approve funds for broadcasting their meetings on television, the Inter- Lakes School Board meetings are being taped and slated for broadcast via the Internet. Lisa and Steve Merrill, parents who attend meetings, brought videotaping equipment to the last school board meeting, Lisa Merrill working the equipment. Steve Merrill wrote a letter to the board earlier this year calling for them to begin broadcasting their meetings on the Lakes Region Public Access channel. The board has been wrestling with the question for a few months, given the fact that district residents in Sandwich and parts of Center Harbor have no access to cable. The board recently voted to bring the question to the Inter-Lakes School District Meeting in March. “This is somewhat of a first,” said Chair Jack Carty, beginning the meeting. “We’re being taped. It’s the right of anyone to tape public meetings.” Lisa Merrill said that she was taping the meetings with the intention of broadcasting them in sections on the YouTube.com Web site. Merrill said she will be linking the clips on YouTube to a new Web log (blog) of her own to allow parents to communicate on concerns about the school district. Merrill said that the equipment she used to tape the meetings was on loan, and another person was helping her work on the tape to ready it for YouTube. Afterwards, Merrill said she wants to bring the DVDs of the meetings to a local library in the district. “In the interim (between now and March), this is to let people know,” said Merrill. “There are a lot of concerns, and this way,we can get frustrations out and connect on the blog. People can connect on issues they see - basically, anything you’d like to write about.” Merrill said putting these clips of the meeting on YouTube and linking to it from the blog will show that “this stuff can be done for very little money,” and can reach anyone in the district with the ability to access a computer with an Internet connection. The work is still in progress, though, and Merrill said that she was still working on getting the clips online, and hoped to have them up soon. The clips will likely be of “hot topics,” she said, such as the recent debate about dress code. The board continued its own work on effective mediums of broadcasting their meetings in different forms. They watched about five minutes of a Meredith Board of Selectmen workshop that had been broadcast earlier this summer, in order to get a sense of the facilities available at the Meredith Community Center, and to see it met with their standards for audibility and visibility. Earlier in the year, the board listened to a presentation from District Technology Director Allan Hale, on the possibility of taping the meetings to air via media streaming server, straight to the computers of anyone with an Internet connection. The difference in putting the video on the Web instead of handing a tape to the LRPC, Hale explained, was in finding a host company to supply them with a media streaming server and bandwidth. The school would create the video and send it to the host company,who would provide a link on the school district Web site with direct access to the video, a service that would cost a flat fee per
month, unless more than a set number of people tried to watch the video. Merrill’s blog is at www.interlakescitizens.blogspot.com.
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