One of the things that I’d like to accomplish with Richmond Sunlight is to provide an audio record of the proceedings at the General Assembly. At a minimum I’d like the audio of House and Senate meetings, though the audio from any meetings would be great. I think that this could be enormously valuable in the short term and in the long term, as a public historical record.
I have no plan whatsoever of how to accomplish this. Two facts seem relevant here. First, it’s my understanding that there’s a press room where reporters can jack into the audio feed from the floor. Second, the Senate has a webcast, though it’s not reliable because of insufficient bandwidth, or at least that was the case last year.
If anybody has any thoughts as to how to bring this about, I’d be grateful.
Well, long term idealism would say, “Put a computer in the recording room with any sort of net connection and have it upload the audio to a server nightly, which can then processed to remove empty space and served on a decent, stable connection with an rss feed and Bob’s your uncle.” That would require the least maintenance, could be done relatively unobtrusively if it can be arranged.
More difficult would be to have someone go there every day with a computer, record it, and then upload it to a server for processing etc. That is more likely to fit in with the existing system, but what a pain to organize and ensure it’s continuation.
Waldo, do you know or suspect how many different audio feeds there may be that would have to be monitored? My guess is that a G4 Mac Mini with a multichannel firewire or usb input could pretty much handle the recording and uploading without too much trouble, as long as it’s not too many channels.
The trouble is that there’s no way that the General Assembly would allow that. Year after year, House Republicans vote down such measures. 2006’s HR2 was killed in committee, and Del. Steve Landes’ HR45 this year will likely suffer the same fate. So anything to be done can’t require any sort of permission, accommodation, or public resources.
You could probably also use an older iPod or a cheap MP3 player that has some kind of a line-in and record it from the press room, I’d think. I had a family member that used to do that for old-time radio shows that play on WAMU in DC, used a cheap little MP3 player he got off eBay for less than $20. Although you’d still need the manpower to sort through all the recordings.
Cool idea though! Can’t wait to see…er, hear it :-)
Is it, and I understand that it’s government so nothing is ever easy, but is it possible to get this done without, oh, a new law? The difficulties as I understand it are:
1) Space to keep the machine;
2) Power to keep the machine running;
3) Internet connection to keep the machine connected;
4) An obstinate government body that doesn’t really want, as a whole, continuous recording of events.
I would think that the hard part would be the whole getting the recording setup working in the first place, but if there’s a room where reporters can connect to the feed, that *should* be the hardest.
The next hardest part is having something unattended be the reporter. Likely concerns are that someone could just make off with the computer, and wouldn’t that be unfortunate. Or that the audio would go out at different times because of some manner of faulty connection. In order to ensure that nothing happened to the equipment, we the government would have to assign manpower to keep a watch over the equipment and maintain it, and that hardly seems like an effective use of state funds blah blah blah.
After that, it’s seeing if there are provisions for leasing out access to utilities for non-state employees doing business in the general assembly, and trying to put those to work. Reporters need power and used to need phones, so there may be something in place already.
So, failing a fully automated solution, what you would want is something just this side of automated, with cheap but effective labor. For example, interns from one of the local universities or colleges in Richmond who would, every day it meets, march into the general assembly with a computer set up, hook up the wires, and do their homework etc for however long the assembly meets, then go home and hook up the computer to an internet connection, rinse, and repeat. After that, it’s just a matter of funding and logistics which, while not trivial, are significantly easier than getting a law passed under most circumstances.
This all assumes that there is a press room, and we can convincingly turn an Intern in to “press”, of course.
Plan C is to take advantage of the stream. If it’s truly first-come-first-serve as its site suggests, then it’s just a matter of waiting until one of the streams opens up, grabbing it, and holding on for dear life. Then you can record and rebroadcast as necessary. As I have managed to get a hold of one of the streams, this does not seem impossible, it’s mostly a questions of under which circumstances the stream will be lost, and how to pick it back up again. (Of course, I’ve lost the stream once already, so I’m not saying it’s a perfect plan.)
If the stream were hosted at some manner of commercial ISP, rather than at a government facility, then it might also be possible to co-locate a server there to take advantage of the close connection.
There are some damned fine ideas there, Brian. Thanks!
The ideas are the easy parts, but hopefully they can be worked into something useful. Glad to be of help.
There are some near-broadcast quality phone lines out there. (used for radio/tv) Maybe instead of doing the hard work at the GA bldg, send the audio, patched out of the internal audio feed, to another location where the recording/editing(if any)/storage/serving would be.
There are also “open when you pick up” phone lines to communicate between two places that don’t change. In the Navy we had one that was between the Personnel Office and the barracks.
This is a great idea, Waldo. Maybe daunting, but nothing like that has stopped you before, has it?
I’d love to see a media outlet do this. Not a soul would complain if the Richmond Times Dispatch had an intern plug in a $50 MP3 recorder every day, retrieve at the end of the day, and upload the audio.
Well, Sean Tubbs does have some sort of arrangement with Media General. Perhaps inroads could be made in that direction.
I could definitely figure out a way to organize all of this, if I had extra time and if I were located in Richmond.
There is a great clip on YouTube of the election of the new Speaker of the Senate in Tennessee, I had to watch it twice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKFbrVBJ_is
You’d think that people would find a way to get similarly interesting snippets from the Virginia General Assembly session posted there.
I know that many reporters are carrying simple voice recorders that can be hooked up by USB to a computer and transfer WAV files of what they record. Could these be hooked up to the press room jacks you spoke of?
I’m trying to get a news department up and running here at WVCW (VCU’s student radio station, I’m the GM) and am working with the paper The Commonwealth Times on doing that. We might be able to get something worked out for the recordings in the future, especially given that there’s a bit of a relationship with the classes that are covering the Assembly (forgetting the name of the program at the moment, though).
I could see if they’d be willing to help set up some sort of podcast if you want to get ahold of them…
I have a standard Olympus voice recorder (the VN-960PC) that can hypothetically store 16 hours of audio, but that’s at a really, really low quality. I intend to visit the GA next week — I should plug into the press room’s system and record at that quality, and see how it comes out. Good idea!
You may subscribe to the Senate web feed for additional coin — but I really believe it lacks broadcast quality.
However — in downtown Richmond it is possible to get a broadcast-quality audio feed of both chambers through the phone company.
You’ll need approval from the House and Senate clerks and then I think it’s about $200 for the labor, $200 for the “boxes” and $100/mo during session for the feed. My numbers are 2 years old so if they are wrong, I am sorry.
Well, that’s not so bad. Expensive, but that’s pretty much what I was hoping for by way of access when I proposed my early schemes. After that, one just needs to throw the video onto google video, and the world can see the excitement of commendation bills. Now that they’ve had a good year of seeing Virginia national politicians in action, they’ll be eager for that sort of thing.
And yes, the web feed that I’m looking at really is not very good, and I’ve rarely seen anything but text scroll by.