for the record ...

Gosnells City Council uses FTR Gold® to improve the efficiency of
fortnightly meetings

Organisation Overview
The City of Gosnells, Western Australia is located 17 kilometres southeast of Perth, the state capital. It encompasses 127 square kilometres, an area about the same size as Paris, and continues to grow rapidly. About 40% of the city area remains undeveloped, but officials anticipate that over AU$1.8 billion commercial and residential development will take place during the next ten years.

Organisational Challenge
As the decision-making body of such a fast-growing city, it falls to the mayor and councillors to manage and facilitate the bidding and funds allocation for projects such as the revitalization of the downtown business district, the renovation of the civic centre and public buildings, and redevelopment of older suburbs to encourage new growth.

Council officers identified the need for recording meetings following several challenges by Councillors as to the accuracy of the minutes. On several occasions, it was alleged that what had been stated at a meeting and what was actually printed in the minutes was completely different, with the recording of comment being open to the interpretation of the minute taker. Consequently, in order to overcome unnecessary dispute, Council officers decided to record proceedings, and began to evaluate appropriate products.

Technology Solution
After considering several solutions, the council decided FTR Gold would best suit its needs. The product was far superior to any other assessed and was chosen for its: ease of use, excellent clarity of recordings, immediate playback facility, compatibility with existing software, instant access to previous recordings, ability to copy part or whole recordings with ease, and its capability of hyperlinking recording times into Microsoft Word™ documents.

The councillors were also impressed by FTR Log Notes,™ a component of the FTR Gold suite, because it’d enable them to take notes during proceedings or while listening to previously recorded audio, and use the notes to refer back to the record.

The Gosnells City Council installed FTR Gold on a standard PC along with Microsoft Office™. They linked the PC to a conference recording microphone system, plugged the microphones into an audio mixer, and configured the sound card in the PC to work with the microphones and audio mixer. The agenda for every city council meeting is created in Microsoft Word™ with hyperlinks alongside the topics for discussion. When activated, each hyperlink refers the listener to the location in the record where that topic was discussed so the listener can hear the corresponding audio. According to Pamela Campbell,

Manager Information Services for the City of Gosnells, there are no more arguments about what was actually said at meetings. “All we have to do is use the FTR Gold system to find and play exactly what was said,” she says.”

Operational Results
The Gosnells City Council has been using the FTR Gold system since August 2001 and has seen a marked improvement in the efficiency of its meetings. Besides solving the problem about “who actually said what at meetings,” FTR Gold has helped make council meetings more orderly.

as posted on ForTheRecord