In our new world of webcasting live meetings, either held entirely remotely or a hybrid (some attending in meeting room, while others attend remotely) it is important to walk through the process of conducting your meeting and implementing the appropriate contingency plans for your live event.

For additional best practices on conducting your remote council meetings please see the Best Practices to Facilitate Remote Meetings article.

For Customers who wish to have additional support in preparing for and/or running their remote/hybrid webcast meetings, eSCRIBE has put together the following package service offerings.

Setup & Testing

• • While the video conferencing tools needed are not eSCRIBE tools and are not actually supported by the eSCRIBE team, our team will do our best to ensure that you are best prepared for your live meeting (Zoom, MS Teams, Webex, and GoToMeeting - in order of recommendation).
    • NOTE: It is recommended that Customers purchase a video conference license that allows them to have a call in conference line for participants as well. As a best practice to have back up in case someone’s internet isn’t great & also in case their internet drops, there’s still a back up audio connection)
  • It is CRITICAL that participants conduct speed tests from their home network to early identify problems (the eSCRIBE/ISI Live team can assist in reviewing results if desired).
    • Should problems arise during a meeting, a common cause of quality issues is an increased usage at bandwidth at the participants home. As example, others might be working from home, attending school remotely, playing online games or watching Netflix - all of which will use that precious bandwidth.
  • For Customers that wish to have additional assistance, contact your Account Manager for a one time consultation and training package to assist your team in preparing for your remote meetings.
    • eSCRIBE will conduct one hours training  session on how to conduct best use eSCRIBE in a remote webcast of meetings scenario and rules of engagement for the meeting participants.
    • A one hour test and training session will be conducted with ISI Live & Customer meeting participants (meeting admin, Councilors and necessary staff). During this session, the audio video quality of each participant's connection will be reviewed and recommendations made to improve.

HYBRID MTG NOTE: for those that are facilitating a "hybrid meeting" it is recommended that both those meeting participants who are joining remotely as well as those who are present in the meeting room, join the video conference meeting with their webcam & audio mic/headset.

Having both groups of participants join the video conference the same way will make the transition easier for those that sometime join remotely and will significantly reduce the possibility for audio feedback and closed captioning quality issues that might occur when using a combination of in room audio equipment and remote attendees.

Option 1- eSCRIBE Manages Remote Council Meeting – Real Time Monitoring/Support

eSCRIBE has put together this package for Customers who wish to have hands on assistance in preparing for the meeting and live support during their remote webcast meetings, contact your Account Manager for additional details. The package would include the following services:

• COST: one time setup fee + per meeting cost
• Meetings will be scheduled with eSCRIBE/ISI to have an ISI Live team member attend the video conference and manage the remote stream throughout the meeting
• At the start of the meeting, ISI Live will start the live stream and switch the video conference stream over to the virtual encoder to start streaming to the public site leveraging eSCRIBE's Webcasting service
• Meeting Admin will start the recording then conduct the meeting as normal using eSCRIBE
• ISI Live staff will passively monitor the meeting & assist with major issues as they arise    
• At the end of the meeting, ISI Live will end the webcasting stream & the Meeting Admin will end the recording
• During this option, no staff are needed in the meeting room and it is entirely remote

Option 2 - Fully Managed Remote Council Meeting and Webcasting Production

eSCRIBE has put together this package for Customers who wish to have hands on assistance in preparing for and a hands on approach to running the remote webcast meeting, contact your Account Manager for additional details. The package would include the following services:

• COST: one time setup fee + per meeting cost (custom quote)
• Offering a fully managed solution with elevated production value, with option of ISI Live to complete the timestamps & quality control of the time stamps after the meeting for publishing to web
• Meetings will be scheduled with eSCRIBE/ISI to have an ISI Live team member attend the video conference and manage the remote stream throughout the meeting
• At the start of the meeting, ISI Live will start the live stream and switch the video conference stream over to the virtual encoder to start streaming to the public site leveraging eSCRIBE's Webcasting service
• Meeting Admin will start the recording then conduct the meeting as normal using eSCRIBE
• ISI Live remotely switches and encodes a produced feed & streams to the public feed
• ISI will actively monitor the meeting & assist with major issues as they arise
• At the end of the meeting, ISI will end the webcasting stream & the customer will end the recording
• During this option, no staff are needed in the meeting room and it is entirely remote

Option 3 - Do-it-Yourself Option – In House Technical Staff

eSCRIBE has put together this package for Customers who wish to have hands on assistance in preparing for their remote webcast meetings, contact your Account Manager for additional details. The package would include the following services:

• COST: one time setup fee only
• Requires the use of eSCRIBE's Webcasting Plus service with a staff member present in the meeting room to join the video conference with the onsite Presentation PC
• The Presentation PC will need to have both video and audio plugged into the onsite encoder (should already be in place if using already using Webcasting Plus)
• Meeting Admin will conduct the meeting in eSCRIBE as they do today, with the video conferencing screen being webcast for public consumption

*NOTE: with this option there is no real-time support of a/v quality as there is no real-time monitoring

*IMPORTANT: Physical webcasting encoders are the property of ISI Live, on lease to the Customer as part of the Webcasting service. Any changes to the configuration should be made in consultation through the eSCRIBE/ISI Live Support team.