Savage Streaming?
City councils stream the Web:
Talk to Jeff Renner about the possibility of the city of Savage offering webcasts of its City Council meetings and he gets a little excited.
"This thing with the Internet has been a dream of mine for three years," said Renner, video production coordinator for the Scott County community.
Armed with survey results revealing a stunning level of interest in the council's cable-TV broadcasts -- 88 percent of subscribers had watched during the past six months -- Renner is taking the first steps in what he hopes is Savage's move into webcasting, the new frontier of citizen access to government.
St. Paul, too, is hoping to soon join a small number of Minnesota cities -- Minneapolis and Bloomington among them -- that have opened their City Council meetings to a worldwide Internet audience via free streaming video.
Although I don't see myself sitting down to watch too much of the Savage City Council and question whether 88% of cable subscribers really watched the meetings on TV or just gave the answer that they thought sounded good, I applaud the effort. More openness and therefore accountability in local government is always a good thing.
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