Announcing Live Commenting for Virtual Public Meetings
Remember back in fall of 2017 when we announced the Beta Launch of our Public Hearing Engagement Platform? Since then we’ve won a couple awards (2019 National Planning Award, 2020 ELGL Haverford Award), keep getting invited to conferences and webinars (here’s the most recent one), and have made a lot of big improvements to the platform - but today may be our most exciting announcement to date!
Since the spring we’ve been working closely with customers to understand the pains in operating remote public meetings – we’ve listened and we’ve innovated. Today, we’re excited to share that Live Commenting for Virtual Public Meetings is now ready!
How does Live Commenting on People Speak work?
You can now use People Speak to enable Live Commenting during your meetings – this includes both text-based comments submitted via the standard comment form on your website as well as our newly released phone-in comments (that uses Google’s Speech-to-text technology to translate the voice recordings into text-based comments).
A bit of what makes Live Commenting special:
Live Comments are automatically attached to specific issues, your items and cases, so there is no manual labor involved in getting public input exactly where it belongs.
Live Comments can either be published automatically or moderated in real-time.
Staff and Decision-Makers get notification badges within the website interface transforming People Speak into a dashboard-like tool that can be used during the meeting.
You can control the commenting period for Live Comments, including setting a timer with a grace period to effectively administer comments for your Virtual Public Meeting.
Because it’s real-time, you can avoid Zoom-bombing, trying to manage remote citizen participants in your webinars, or staffing telephone operators to receive phone-in comments.
Here’s a few screenshots of Live Commenting:
