Blog the USG meeting
Remember back during the election in 2004, we had bloggers on every political pundit web site giving almost real-time news on the latest events coming off the news wire, the mood and reaction of the crowd as each state's electoral votes were being announced, either for Bush or Kerry. It is basically a hacked version of your 24 hours live coverage. Of course, a blogger trying to do that in the middle of Hurricane Katrina may have trouble holding on to his/her laptop.
Since USG meetings are public to the students (unless they vote to close it), it would be kinda interesting to blog the meeting as it goes on. Obviously, because of one reason, there is currently no access to their agendas and minutes of their meetings of the web site. It is much like the press box in the U.S. Senate and House at the Capitol.
It would introduce a different perspective to how the meeting is run by your elected reps instead of reading the formalized minutes. Think of it... reading about how the reps argued for most of the meeting about whether the chairs should be arranged in a classroom or circular configuration (that has happened 2-3 times in the last several years). Get the reaction of reps as they scrutinized the huge mass funding bill and get antsy over funding a series of weekly discussions for a student group for just 80 dollars. Read the rundown as reps argued about constitutional amendments. Perhaps a few insults here and there, though a fight would highly be unlikely (except in the Indian and Taiwanese parliaments).
Who knows, it may get students more interested into USG to do their part, or even get some to run if they felt the meetings are going all wrong.
A podcast would be a great idea for the running commentary. The blog is useful for those that have gotten to the meeting late and want to see what happened at the beginning of the meeting.
For archived media, should there be a creation of both realplayer and windows media? I know you guys want to automate the archival process, but putting the links up manually would still help the uninformed student.
Comments
Posted by: Gregory Szorc
Posted on: December 14, 2005 02:45 PM
The minutes will soon grace the web site again. A CMS solution for the USG web site should be deployed within a month. It is a long time coming.
Posted by: Brian Gray
Posted on: December 14, 2005 03:19 PM
Maybe a podcast or video cast would even be an interesting supplement to the meetings and those that can not attend.
Posted by: Gregory Szorc
Posted on: December 14, 2005 03:23 PM
Case USG was the USG in the country to have the meetings streamed live over the internet. You can watch them in real-time every Tuesday at 7:30 at http://usg.case.edu . We are still working out the issues with watching archived meetings.
Posted by: Aaron Shaffer
Posted on: December 14, 2005 04:17 PM
I agree, a podcast version would be pretty sweet. They are very easy to do and you already have a host on blog.case.edu.
Posted by: Aaron Shaffer
Posted on: December 14, 2005 07:56 PM
Heck, if someone will just get me the audio and/or video in any format digital or analog I can put it online as a podcast for you.
Posted by: Gregory Szorc
Posted on: December 14, 2005 07:59 PM
Someone needs to talk to MediaVision, the people who do all the recording and broadcasting, about creating automatic podcasts. They could probably even whip up something that uses this blog's API to automatically post entries.
Posted by: Aaron Shaffer
Posted on: December 14, 2005 08:37 PM
It is automatic already. All I do is link to an mp3 file and blog.case.edu generates a podcast-compatible RSS feed. There really is nothing to it.
Posted by: Mike Welling
Posted on: April 17, 2007 03:30 PM
Agreed with the RSS opinion just above. Think about it...just put out your feed and let others reply to it. If your stuff is good, you will be found out and people will come back.