Danish Parliament Offers Transparency with Online Video
While many countries use video to make government deliberations accessible to their people, Denmark is leading the way in putting all of its meetings online and making them easily searchable. At the recent Streaming Media Europe conference in London, Henrik Skovmark, project manager for the Danish Parliament, explained how they're doing it.
"In the Danish Parliament, we have an ambition to be one of the most open and transparent parliaments in the world. Online streaming video from all our meetings is one way to try to obtain that goal," said Skovmark. "The service was launched October last year... We are streaming live from all plenary sessions in the chamber, and we are streaming live from all open meetings in the committees. All sessions and meetings are instantly available as VOD [video-on-demand].
"In the first year in service, we streamed 109 sessions from the chamber, 212 meetings from the committees. We produced 20 educational short films about Danish democracy, and we are not producing any editorial content."
But the Danish Parliament doesn't stop at streaming all sessions; it also makes that video usable by the people.
"For us, the context of online parliamentary video is just as important as the content itself. We often deal with very long videos -- a session in the chamber can easily take up to 10 hours -- and presenting the videos in their full length on our website is of course a way to create openness. But, in our opinion, we start adding value to the videos when we give users the possibility to find the exact passages in the video which are redolent to them," said Skovmark.
For more on how the Danish Parliament uses metadata and indexing to help people find the sections they're looking for, watch the full video below.
Online Video - At Your Public Service
From the Danish Parliament to 10 Downing Street, government offices across Europe are utilising online video to meet the needs of their constituents and advance public policy. Our panellists will discuss the unique needs of government video, from content creation to audience measurement and analytics.
Moderator: Troy Dreier, Senior Associate Editor, StreamingMedia.com
Laurent Briant, Head of Central Government, Thomson Reuters
Paul Tarplee, Managing Director, Twofour Digital
Henrik Skovmark, Project Manager, Folketinget - The Danish Parliament