The Yolo County Board of Supervisors Ensures Their Legacy of Meeting Transparency

In 2014, the County realized that the current system utilized by the Board to broadcast meetings on both the internet and local cable had become increasingly unstable. After extensive research, county staff recommended Swagit’s solutions (now part of Granicus) for their streaming needs.

One of the Yolo County Board’s concerns was their extensive backlog of legacy content with their previous streaming vendor. Would they be able to convert the Board’s seven previous years of meeting videos and content to the new on-demand streaming platform, and also maintain links to meeting agendas, minutes, attachments, timestamps and video indexing?

Swagit’s expert team of digital content migration specialists transferred almost 700 hours of meeting video along with meeting agendas, minutes, attachments and timestamps to the County’s new web viewer. These meeting videos and corresponding content can all be viewed on desktop computers as well as mobile devices, and do not require special browser plug-ins.

All the while, Swagit’s Managed Service Division (SMSD) maintained links to indexing of over 240 videos allowing viewers to continue to have the ability to search historical content for a specific item and step through by item headings and jump-to points giving users the greatest flexibility to find the specific content they need.

The County Board’s meeting client video is stored securely on the Swagit Content Network (now part of Granicus). Fault tolerance and high availability is assured through replication of audio/video content to multiple, geographically redundant, Storage Area Networks (SAN).

By navigating through the video library, residents can view a list of meetings chronologically; once in a selected meeting they can unleash the power of the jump-to markers to search for specific points within individual audio/video clips.

The County’s Value Statement declares, “We are committed to doing right by others through public service and maintaining the trust of our residents and peers.” One way the Board achieves this goal is through meeting transparency and the availability of previous meeting documents and videos for resident review. By continuing to make this information accessible to residents, the County strengthens the trust between residents and their government in action, increases community engagement, and boosts their public accountability.

Yolo County’s meetings can be viewed live and on-demand from any device that is connected to the internt.