Peanut butter and jelly. Rhythm and blues. Batman and Robin. Some things were just meant to go together.
Rock Solid is on a mission to improve citizen engagement for local government and so we brought together two powerful industry-leading solutions; OneMeeting Meeting & Agenda Management and Swagit Hands-Free Video Streaming. The newest dynamic duo doesn't fight crime, but will assuredly improve your public meeting process.
OneMeeting
OneMeeting, formerly known as PrimeGov, was born when several jurisdictions—dissatisfied with their current agenda management software options—began looking for a company committed to the legislative process. Built on modern technology, with flexible configurations and countless integrations, OneMeeting’s custom forms, complex workflows, and incredibly responsive customer support continues to meet and exceed the expectations of local government leaders.
Swagit Video
Swagit video provides governments with an affordable solution to stream their own content in an overpriced, complicated, and hands-on video industry. By focusing only on the latest trends, emerging technology and new avenues of distribution — Swagit video ensures local governments are able to share their message to the largest audience possible – with the least amount of lift from their own team.
Better Together
Each solution addresses key pieces of the public meeting process. Where OneMeeting automates the tedious task of compiling and sharing public meeting agendas and digitizing the live meeting process, Swagit captures and spreads the message of the meeting itself. The dynamic pairing of the two solutions together is where the real magic happens, and can be seen across each phase of the public meeting process.
Pre-Meeting is about preparing the agenda; collecting agenda items and supporting documents, and routing them through the correct channels to make certain the agenda packet is prepped and ready. Sounds easy, but how many times have you encountered the last-minute scramble to accommodate changes, find the correct version of a document, or hunt down missing approvals? With OneMeeting's custom forms and the most dynamic workflow options in the industry, Clerks are able to save themselves last-minute headaches and leave the office on time, even on agenda publication days.
During the meeting is when the two solutions really start to work hand-in-hand together. OneMeeting captures role-taking, voting, and minutes as well as managing speaker lists - all in one screen. In the meantime, Swagit producers are remotely recording the meeting, switching between installed broadcast-quality cameras to capture the best views of the podium, presentation slides, and dais. The hands-free broadcast system even offers PIP and split screen as well as selective panning, close-ups, and wide shots to enhance the meeting recording's production value.
Post Meeting the teamwork continues as videos are time-stamped and integrated with the meeting’s written agenda before being published to a municipality's custom-branded meeting portal. The public can easily review full meetings or use the search functionality to jump not only to agenda terms but to spoken words and phrases as well.
Working Together to Expand Your Audience
Participation in public meetings continues to be a challenge for local governments. At the local level, the government relies on regular public meetings to discuss public issues and make decisions, but citizen participation is abysmal – often only a few, but loud voices skew the broader group’s opinion.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
Municipalities look to digital solutions to facilitate greater citizen engagement in today's world. OneMeeting and Swagit meet this challenge head-on.
Busy and Remote
Traffic is worse. People work longer hours. Schedules are jampacked. Residents continue to prioritize technology to provide access to government meetings and overcome the challenge of simply physically attending, according to the 2022 What Citizens Want report.
Streaming meeting videos live and providing the on-demand recording is the first step to amplifying engagement, but OneMeeting takes it one step further, also enabling the public to speak and provide feedback remotely during meetings.
Non-English Speakers
While the majority of the United States population speaks English, there is a large and growing percentage of whom English is not their native or preferred language.
In San Antonio, nearly 42% of residents speak Spanish and of those almost 30% are not fluent in English. Swagit video enables the City of San Antonio to simultaneously broadcast their live meetings in both English and Spanish.
Santa Ana, California also boasts a diverse population, with nearly 77% of their residents identifying as LatinX. There, OneMeeting allows HTML agendas to be viewed in English and Spanish, as well as in over 100 different languages thanks to Google Translate.
Hearing Impaired
Swagit video offers captioning services to help you expand your reach to underserved audiences that are hearing impaired, and avoid litigation by providing these FCC-mandated services. The PIP functionality can allow for a live ESL interpreter, and Real-Time (Live) and Post-Event Captioning services for broadcasts provide legible text context. Additionally, a transcript is created by voice-to-text technology, allowing citizens to search the archives for the spoken word in a meeting that is synced to the video.
OneMeeting + Swagit is the latest dynamic duo, here to save the day for public meetings! The best part is... this is only the beginning. Rock Solid continues to explore and strategize how to simplify public meetings for local governments and improve citizen engagement - so get excited as this public meeting pairing continues to integrate and expand. We can't WAIT to see where it goes next.
