Council meetings on website

The city of Thousand Oaks' website (www.toaks.org) has been enhanced to include live and archived streaming video of city council, planning commission and other public meetings. Citizens are now able to observe these public meetings over the Internet, or view specific portions of meetings by clicking on selected agenda items.

Citizens may also do keyword searches to view items of interest, or view by selected meeting date. In time, support documents such as staff reports associated with related agenda items will also be linked to the videos.

"The city is committed to communicating with residents via TOTV, Channel 10, Thousand Oaks' government television channel. Now, city council, planning commission meetings, and other programming will be available, on-demand, on the web. This will be an extremely helpful tool by measurably im

proving public and internal access to information," said Scott Mitnick, city manager.

The city council meeting on Tues., May 9 was to be the first meeting to be streamed live over the Internet for the public.

Each archived video is published to the web with a searchable index that measurably improves usability by allowing users to go directly to a video segment on the specific agenda items that interest them.

Publishing videos of city meetings and other public interest events to the web allows community members and city employees to directly access information and valuable content.

The city's technology partner in this endeavor is Granicus Inc. of San Francisco. Granicus specializes in working with municipalities to provide streaming video services.

For more information, call TOTV Cable Operations Supervisor Carl Jarecky at (805) 449-2112.