Regents: Have We Got a Deal for You!!

The image shown here is from a November 2004 video of a Santa Monica city council meeting, which appears to be the first such meeting the city videoed.  It is still on the web nine years after the event.  In contrast, the stated policy for Regents meetings is that video will be preserved for one year only.   

The current policy also seems to mean that audio of the event as a file is not being made available as a public document as it was before the current calendar year.  To obtain the audio to archive under current policy – as we have been doing – you have to play the video into a recorder in real time.  So every one hour of meeting time requires one hour of recording time.

Santa Monica's website also allows embedding as shown below and in fact allows embedding of just desired portions of the meeting. Thus, the video-related software available from Santa Monica is more sophisticated than that used by the Regents, even for their only-preserve-one-year model..

If Santa Monica can preserve its videos indefinitely and with better software, so can the Regents.  It might be noted that UC has more employees than Santa Monica has population.  The UC budget is something like $22 billion.  The Santa Monica city budget for all funds combined (not just the general fund) is a little over $0.5 billion.

So here’s the deal, Regents.  When you get your technology up to the level of Santa Monica, we can resume talking about the use of IT at UC for courses.  You know, MOOCs and all that stuff.  This is a very generous offer because we at UC are way, way ahead of you in use of IT as illustrated by your archiving policy.  But we understand you have problems.  How about it?

Video from the November 2004 Santa Monica city council meeting is below: [The actual discussion at the meeting begins at around the 29 minute mark.]

The video is also available at http://santamonica.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=4.