Estonia is known as an IT country, for which almost every presentation mentions that Skype was built here, the government has been paperless for years, and Wi-Fi even spreads in the forest. In reality, we have been running at a brisk pace for years, and there are fewer and fewer success stories and good examples.

There are 215 municipalities in Estonia that is, more than 200 places across Estonia meet once a month or more often 3000 people, who democratically decide on local issues. Council meetings are generally public, i.e. anyone interested can participate in them if they wish.

By law the council's decisions must be published on the municipality's website. The law does not oblige the council to hold sessions video transmissions or provide it possibility of follow-up. However, it is good to observe and recognize that some are already doing this, The city of Tallinn since 2007. 

The Ministry of the Interior launched 4 years ago information system of local government sessions WILL, which allows you to easily and cheaply broadcast live broadcasts of council meetings and upload them for follow-up viewing by those interested. Today, only a few municipalities use the opportunity.

Tabivere, Pajusi and several other smaller municipalities make video broadcasts of council sessions, why can't Viimsi, Harku, Rae and other much richer municipalities do the same? Estonia could be the first country where all discussions of both national and local issues could be watched live and watched on video. Technically, it is already possible and feasible today.

If and how local government units use video transmissions in sessions, some political science bachelor's student could do their thesis, below is a quick overview.

Tallinn

of the sessions of Estonia's largest local government video recordings have been available since 2007, but in order to see them, on average, 1GB video files need to be downloaded to the computer. Interestingly, there is a small brake somewhere in the pipe or server, because even hanging on Starman's 200MB internet, it takes over 45 minutes.

It is interesting that the City of Tallinn, which from time to time properly invests in IT solutions (for example, over EUR 400,000 for the Old Town 3D application), cannot share council meeting video files better than .wmv format and downloadable.

For those interested in politics, the city council sessions are a real school of humorists, where anecdotes are also told (for example, try to suggest which agenda item or speech would be suitable to characterize the story in which the lover, who escaped through the window, runs naked in a group of runners. "Do you always run with a condom on?" - "No, only when it rains" 20.02.2014). The speeches of Märt Sults also form an opera in themselves.

Tartu

Since October 2013, the Tartu City Council has been in session video clips on the YouTube channel of the city of Tartu. Moreover, the video is properly edited, i.e. each point is in a separate video clip, and the agenda of the session includes a relatively unobtrusive video at the end of each point, which opens the clip in a new window.

At the same time, the Tartians are the only ones or one of the few who make the videos of the sessions available for viewing on YouTube. The city of Tallinn has several channels, but the videos of the sessions cannot be found on them.

Pärnu

Pärnu city council sessions are held Live broadcasts on the website of the city of Pärnu on the day of the session. At the same time, it is not possible to follow up council sessions afterwards.

Narva

As exciting and interesting as it may be, no matter what Narva city council sessions are taking place, cannot be found in the video. Of course, the minutes of the sessions are available on the website in all local governments, but this is already the result of the law.

Other municipalities and VOLIS

announced in 2010 The Ministry of the Interior is expanding to facilitate the administration of local governments e-state to local governments.

For this purpose, a software solution monitoring the best practices of e-governance was created WILL, which makes it possible to take part in the sessions of local government councils virtually, and shows interested parties live video broadcasts that can be viewed afterwards. For example, you can see how it looked in retrospect in the video Willow tree or The last session of the Tabivere parish council.

To date, only 6 of Estonia's 15 counties have joined VOLIS (Harju, Jõgeva, Lääne, Lääne-Viru and Tartu), and that too only to a limited extent - for example, only 4 municipalities from Harju County have joined the solution, and none of them use the possibility of video transmission or recording.

Summary

I remember that in 2004-2007, as a member of the Harku municipal council, I was the only one against the introduction of alcohol sales restrictions.

If afterwards there was a video recording of the session, you could see that I was against it because the decision created 2 different restrictions on the small territory of Harku municipality - alcohol could be sold until 23:00 in the "densely populated area", 24 hours in the "sparsely populated area". (Alcohol sales in Tallinn ended at 20:00). When some time later Harku was erected on the border of the municipality Alkolavka, then in a few months a national restriction of 10:00-22:00 was created.

The result of the sessions of the councils of local governments should not be only adopted decisions and regulations. Voters want to see who discussed what and how they did it. Video is the easiest way to convey this.