Granicus® Solutions for Government

Solutions for webcasting and managing public meetings

From local municipalities to federal agencies, today’s governing bodies face mounting pressures to perform critical public services under intensifying scrutiny and transparency. Too often, expectations must be met without enough funding, or with technology inefficiently or inaccurately delivering information to public stakeholders. Often, technologies are neither intuitive nor economical, with staff spending more time learning and configuring it than using it to make their lives easier. Granicus solves these challenges with a platform for making government more transparent with an integrated public record that links webcasts of all public meetings and related documents. With a straight-forward workflow that saves staff time and taxpayers’ money, Granicus solutions offer unprecedented communications and community engagement opportunities, driving strong financial, administrative and political returns for your community.

At the heart of the Granicus platform, powered by the company’s award-winning and time-proven technology, is a solution for webcasting live and on-demand streaming video content such as public meetings, hearings, staff training and even emergency response briefings. Hundreds of towns, cities, special districts, counties and state agencies have turned to Granicus to improve external and internal access to public meetings beyond traditional and limited cable broadcasts. Many are also using Granicus to more efficiently and economically deploy internal staff training, meet educational accreditation requirements, and more. The Granicus platform is easily expanded beyond streaming video to include fully integrated modules for more effectively managing the complete public meeting process – preparing and annotating minutes, speaker management, recording motions, votes, roll call, and much more.

Reduce costs and administrative burdens of public meetings, minutes annotation, and minutes publishing — making clerks and administrative staff significantly more efficient.
Enhance government transparency with a single, integrated point of access to the complete, formal public record—at home, at work, at the local library, on the road, or anywhere in between.
Engage the community with 24x7 access to public meetings, events, campaigns, debates and other public functions across all government departments and special districts.
Seamlessly integrate with existing systems for document or agenda management without adding undue costs or complexity to IT operations.
Improve public communication with the most comprehensive public records retention system on the market — fully indexed, searchable, and cross-linked to all related public documents and broadcasts of public meetings.

Granicus Player View with Integrated Minutes

How Granicus Works
The core of Granicus integrated solutions is nothing new — it builds on top of your existing infrastructure and operations investments, rather than replacing or duplicating it. Video and audio feeds from your cameras, videocassettes, or compact discs are captured and converted to Microsoft Windows Media or Silverlight format. This is done with a small hardware device called the Granicus Outcast® Encoder, converting any of your audio/video signals into a digital format ready for streaming over the Web. Once the encoder has digitized your signal, it feeds it to a server connected to the Granicus datacenter. Whether you have one or many signals to feed, our datacenter receives all the signals and delivers it live or on-demand to all users requesting it — anywhere, anytime, with true cross-platform compatibility between PCs and Mac’s using a single media format. By default, Granicus will maintain archives of all webcasts for twelve full months following the meeting, but can transparently extend this with a Granicus MediaVault™ server stored at your location — limiting storage only to the amount of disk space you choose to maintain on the server. Especially when combined with Granicus StreamReplicator® for redistributing broadcasts to your own internal audiences, Granicus is intelligently designed to use local storage and bandwidth when desired, or our fully managed datacenter — your choice.

Granicus MediaManager™, a hosted Web-based application, works to make the process of setting up and automating recordings for webcastings as easy as possible. With a no-nonsense user interface and straight-forward simplicity, government staff can setup recurring public meetings, automatically index recorded videos live or following a meeting, and publish videos automatically.

From the viewer’s perspective, Granicus is completely transparent. Streaming content plays smoothly, quickly, and side-by-side with any related documents and completely in-synch with indexed minutes. All this information is cross-linked and displayed in a Web page that the Granicus design team builds to look as precisely identical or different from your own site as you prefer. With indexing and cross-referencing, viewers have the freedom to view only the parts of a meeting that interest them the most: clicking an item on the agenda or from the minutes jumps straight to the relevant portion of the broadcast and displays all related information side-by-side.

Highly modular and customizable to the unique requirements of each customer’s jurisdiction, this basic core of the Granicus platform is easily expanded with Granicus MinutesMaker® to add functionality for annotating and publishing meeting minutes, recording votes and more. Granicus VotingSystem™ can be added for automating vote taking from touch-screen or push button consoles on the dais. VoteCast automatically compiles the formal public record while providing the full board and clerks with access to all the same information. This information can be displayed on public screens overhead and is seamlessly integrated with the minutes and voting record of MinutesMaker. Other modules are available for storing archives for longer periods of time, podcasting public meetings, integrating closed captioning circuits on streaming video for ADA compliance, and more. Of course, all modules are seamlessly and smoothly integrated with each other, and also integrate with agenda and document management software from our partners. This seamless integration allows customers to build the most comprehensive integrated public record, retention and video streaming system available for government today.