COMMITTEE PARTICIPATION: A MULTIMEDIA APPROACH


viewership and which had heretofore been unavailable save for in-person attendance at the meetings. An additional benefit of the


chat feature is that it added to the public meeting’s important question-and-answer component. The annual public meeting has a question-and-answer segment of approximately 75 minutes in which, traditionally, in-person attendees ask questions of the committee. With meager in-person attendance prior to the advent of the online chat, meetings were frequently adjourned early because there


were no further questions from the audience. In the 2011 and 2012 meetings, respectively, online chatters contributed seven and 19 questions and comments for the committee’s response.


Significantly, this contribution was approximately half of the total number of “interactions” made during the meetings. Put in another way, without this


input it is likely that the 2011 and 2012 public meetings would have run out of discussion material and would have had to adjourn earlier than they did.


54 | The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue One


Therefore, the online chat proved


to be of considerable importance in filling the gaps left by the in-person audience. We conclude that the marginal


cost of implementing the online chat feature yielded significant results in terms of providing for direct citizen interaction with the committee on a real-time basis. The television broadcast and


the webcast and online chat, taken together, helped the committee achieve its objective of increasing public meeting participation, expressed both in terms of passive


viewership as exemplified by the television audience and active or, better put, interactive participation by way of the social media tool of the online chat room. Additional benefits are that


social media generally are a cost- effective and increasingly popular way of reaching the public; appeal to a younger demographic; level the playing field in that video broadcast alone has limited reach while social media are available wherever there is an Internet connection, including extra-provincial access; and are effective tools to get the message


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