The City Council meeting on April 15th had a few technical difficulties reported. After investigating the problems that occurred, below are the answers discovered. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work through the bugs!
If you called into the meeting after 5:30:
For security reasons, the video conference technology automatically locked itself after 15 minutes from when the host started the meeting. Since the host signed into the meeting 15 minutes before 5:30, most new calls after 5:30 were put into a waiting ‘lobby’. The host needed to admit those in the lobby, but there was some lag time as the host was also running the agenda and coordinating with other participants. To fix this for future remote meetings, having a second host watch for new attendees can speed up that process.
On the Computer:
Some people had the screen freeze up, but could still hear audio. This is most likely due to bandwidth restrictions on either the hosts side or your own home internet. Giving the live feed some time could eventually fix the issue, and this worked for some.
If everything froze and went silent, quitting and re-entering into the meeting may have helped. You would have been put into a lobby and had to wait for the host to admit you.
To minimize bandwidth use for those not connected with high speed internet, it will be recommended that participants and the public turn off their video feed for future council meetings. We are using video primarily for sharing static documents, and if we minimize the number of video feeds to just one outgoing feed, that may help resolve bandwidth issues some of us experienced.
On a Smart Device:
If you joined the meeting on a smart phone or tablet that was connected via a cell signal you may have had more bandwidth issues like mentioned above, and its recommended to be connected to a Wi-Fi signal with a strong internet connection.
On the Phone:
If you called into the meeting but were not able to connect, it was probably because the meeting was locked at that time and the host wasn’t seeing there were callers waiting in the lobby for admittance.
If you tried calling in using the April 1st council meeting conference call numbers, those were the back-up numbers for the April 15th meeting and were not used. See below.
If you tried calling in using the back up numbers at the bottom of the council agenda, you most likely only heard waiting music. Those numbers were only provided in case the video conferencing system went down for all. Since the video conference meeting was still working for most, there was no monitoring of the back-up phone system. A fix to this issue is to have that back-up phone system monitored during the council meeting, and to notify callers to try the correct phone number instead.