But no effort has been more central to this push than Channel 21.
Channel 21 Brings Senate Communications Into the 21st Century |
Outside my own office, a Channel 21 monitor serves as a "Welcome to the Legislature," with general news and information about what's happening here in the Legislative Building. Our custom-built homepage includes a news ticker, weather, building calendar information, and rotating content that gives visitors a basic orientation to the legislative process and key dates on the upcoming calendar. We suspect that this is among the first things many visitors will see when they enter the building, so this monitor is a jargon-free zone.
Outside the Senate Chamber, a Channel 21 monitor focuses on the Senate's floor sessions. Here, during floor sessions, you'll see live video and an up-to-date agenda viewer for the day's session. In between floor sessions, you'll see information here explaining what the different orders of business in a typical floor session entail, and a glossary of some of the more popular motions and language of parliamentary procedure.
Jargon Alert! The monitor outside chambers describes parliamentary language. |
Speaking of committees, the Channel 21 monitor in our central lobby on the second floor is focused on the committee process. Here, during morning and afternoon committee meeting times, you'll find a screen that shows live feeds of all four Senate committee rooms, so at a glance you can see which committees are currently in session, and who is speaking in each committee room. We've also developed an agenda viewer that shows you the committee agenda for each of the day's meetings.
The fifth Channel 21 feed is one you can see yourself right now, on Apple/QuickTime or Windows Media Player. This feed, which is seen on monitors in each Senator's office and on our online stream, is designed to be viewed by visitors to Senate offices and the Senate website. We've optimized this content to be viewable on a variety of smaller screens - so no small text fonts here.
Channel 21's Lobby View Shows 4 Committee Rooms at Once |
We hope you find the system useful, and invite you to tweet us feedback and suggestions to improve the system by using hashtag #c21nv. We're monitoring that hashtag and hope to include your great ideas in our future content.