To stream or not to stream school board meetings

Plus the city is advertising to Vancouver commuters again, and UNBC joins the exciting world of particle accelerators

March 07, 2023

There was another article about the school board yesterday, this one in the Citizen. It was about how the last meeting wasn’t livestreamed and there is no guarantee that future meetings will be livestreamed, either, and even though videos will be posted online after the fact that might not include the public comment period. This is an interesting topic in local government because, on the one hand, we’ve hit a point where we sort of expect civic meetings to be available for us to watch both live and on-demand online, it really wasn’t that long ago that the only way to know what was going on at these meetings was to actually show up, in real time, in person. Sure, you could read the minutes afterward, but if you wanted to know what every single person said at every single point you had to be there.

And while having these livestreams has been beneficial for people who want to follow their local governments but don’t want to sit through hours and hours of policy to be able to stream things online while they do dishes or make dinner (I might just be talking about myself here), there are downsides, too.

When meetings are put online, it means literally anyone can watch, regardless of whether they are part of the community or not, and that can result in bits and pieces of these meetings being spliced up and used as parts of larger cultural wars that go outside the bounds of the local community. I reported on a case of this exact thing happening in which a random member of the public was allowed to speak at a meeting and shared various bits of disinformation but because it was on an official council livestream, it was given an extra aura of credibility, especially the further it was removed from the original context. So there are legitimate reasons to question whether having public comment periods broadcast and posted online are something local governments should be doing — maybe especially school boards where more and more people who have been misinformed about SOGI and sex and gender education are being encouraged to go and hold court… is that the sort of thing that school boards should be broadcasting live or hosting afterward? Or is it better to let them come and say their thing —- in person — because it’s a democracy, but not allow it to be a larger platform where it can be spliced up and shared outside the bounds of the immediate community? Basically, we’ve moved past the tech-utopia phase where the idea was that simply putting everything in line would be a net-good and we’ve moved into a far more nuanced stage of the conversation.

MIND YOU, we have no idea if this is what the school board is even thinking about because, once again, the board chair declined to comment on the matter to the Citizen. Not posting videos online is one thing but continuously declining to talk to local media at a point where you are — for whatever reason — becoming less publicly transparent is something else altogether.

“The violence against women was very covert and still is today. I think one of the things that I recall is just the non-response that any of this kind of testimony would get ignored and now we are sitting here and some of us are shocked. But, some of us are not shocked.”

Where should the visitor’s centre go?

CKPG reports that there’s work underway to potentially move the visitor’s information centre back to the Highway 16/97 intersection near Mr. PG away from its 1st Ave. location. While I agree the 1st Ave. location isn’t the most attractive spot, I’d be curious how well a 16/97 spot would work, as well. The trouble with where Mr. PG is right now is that if you’re driving through town and want to take the iconic shot posing with the mascot, it’s a bit of a hassle — you have to be going a certain direction and take a bunch of turns. It’s not intuitive. And it’s the same for much of that area —- it’s a busy, multi-laned stretch of highway which is good in the sense a lot of visitors go by but bad in the sense it’s not exactly the easiest place to stop. One place that might make a bit more sense is further up Vance Rd. toward where the icecream shop is —- especially for people traveling through in the summer. Not sure you’d want to move Mr. PG, though… although you do have a river view from there, too…

Advertising Prince George on the SkyTrain and advertising Vancouver at the bus stops

About a decade ago Prince George made headlines for running an advertising campaign on transit systems in bigger cities across Canada. Apparently, it’s back at it because this was texted to me from Vancouver:

Funnily enough, I got the text while I was out skiing five minutes away from my house so it’s a fair campaign. The city posted about it on their Instagram. Meanwhile, the Vancouver Police Department is running this campaign on our bus stops:

So I guess we’re in a recruitment war now.

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