Web access to public meetings

The California Dept. of Technology has started making video and audio of their meetings available online. The Utah Legislature has been posting audio for committee meetings for a few years now. You can even get an RSS feed.

I remember when we proposed streaming the legislative session in 2002--there was considerable angst from some members about being heard in real-time by anyone, anywhere. That's a natural reaction, but one that's at odds with the notion of "public meeting." Like many things in government, the whole idea of "open" has expanded considerably with the Internet playing a larger and larger role in our lives.

The California system includes an indexed video archive that's probably useful if the meeting is long or has multiple parts. This would be useful in audio as well (and quite easy to do). I wonder about why they seemed to need to outsource this to Granicus. This isn't rocket science--it's basic Web stuff. I'd bet they've got tons of people on staff who could figure this out.