It was the best of Teams, it was the worst of Teams

In this age of wisdom and foolishness, our council require legal permission to hold meetings with residents virtually. The primary legislation needed to extend council virtual public meetings beyond 7th May will not be enacted according to this letter from the Minister of State. He suggests face to face Covid-safe, whilst implying the Council can use it's discretion.

HarringayOnline.com is a superb local resource, the result of an incredibly successful collaboration between the visionary, indefatigable, talented initiators and brilliant, creative local people with acuity and long memories. To pay for their level of contribution would cost millions. An open space where even the shy feel able to contribute to the local view is an awesome achievement. Makes old bores like me want to behave out of respect!

Significantly improves living in the whole borough. The first place I turn to network with neighbours and better understand what is happening in my own back yard.

Some HoL topics stretch back decades and this resource is often drawn on so we are not condemned to repeat the past. It is a living, cumulative record.

A recent video of a parish council meeting up north made one participant internet famous. Most of what is said at meetings is never minuted :)

Our council meetings are nothing like this of course but how would most of us who never attend them know? we pay for the Haringey Council video archive to be held on a private website by an outside contractor. Videos are deleted forever after a year. 

Look at the historic buildings in our borough - where are the meetings minutes, the architects drawings, the posters, the ephemera that can inform their preservation and enhancement? The archive can help us in quite a few ways, not least to avoid past errors.

Almost every single piece of council paper was destroyed by the council - they didn't think them worth preserving, couldn't afford the storage costs of the filing cabinets. Our archivists (Bruce Castle Museum) save a tiny fraction each year on almost zero budget but have very little from the past. We appear sometimes to be always crashing in the same car.

Meanwhile, the cost of preservation has dramatically lowered to almost nothing. When I started in computing (before Bill Gates) our 'stoned logic' went: what if computer power was free? What if storage was free, if memory was free, if communications were free? Now you can get free wifi access in a high street to access the world using a device more powerful than that used to put people on the moon etc etc

Storage is effectively free. Why then have the council stopped preserving the council video archive beyond a year? Why are they not archiving our teams meetings with them - how many have been held on which topics and for how long will the recordings be kept?

Decades of right-wing government has meant that the council are infested by large private corporates doing the work often badly at exorbitant fees, whilst the councils' own staff and resources are savagely cut and blamed. 'Custodianship' has become difficult. The ruthless insistence on 'small state' grinds the council down, even though it actually costs us more.

Our borough stores their 'promo' videos on youtube and residents do sometimes archive committee meetings themselves, so all is not lost thanks to them.  Some virtual meetings are being made available afterwards (to attendees only) but there is no register and they can be deleted by whim of any officer or, more likely, rust away over time then get moved to the bin.

There is a huge opportunity to increase the granularity of our democracy - to be able to look over the shoulders of participants in decisions that affect us all. To be able to search through a cross-referenced archive of what is largely missing from the minutes - detailed rationale.

Please, if you can, upload Teams meetings to youtube but more importantly, press the council to preserve every single digital record and make it available to our future selves.

We can't know which meetings are worth preserving, so preserve them all as it costs practically nothing. Bad enough that we have no paper records for the 70's. I would quite like to have seen Jeremy Corbyn at a local council meeting when he was a Harringay Councillor in the 1970's - was he a model and did he have influence over the Wood Green decisions?

Planning meetings are particularly important for much, much longer than the year the council keep them before deletion as planning matters can affect us all forever. We can't really know what will be important so, as it's so cheap, I say keep everything (and index it efficiently).

I guess that meetings attended by the public give the public some copyright.

If you are at a vidoed meeting, ask to have the recording made available to the pubic in perpetuity, will you?