New feature: voting
Connect Remote (our remote participation tool) has just been updated to allow voting. This feature was in high demand by councils during our user groups, as it is time-consuming to run votes online using roll-calls on Teams or other video conferencing software.
It is now possible for a moderator to create a vote for the rest of the room:
Starting a vote
As a participant of the meeting, a pop-up will appear on the screen (laptop or tablet) when the vote is started. Participants can then choose one of the vote options or select “I am not eligible to vote” (e.g. for operators or clerks):
Voting on the iPad app
Moderators of the meeting can see the results of the meeting as they are cast, and also how many people have shown their ineligibility.
Live results
export the individual results of the vote into Excel.
This new feature is usable now; book your test meetings with us to try it out. If you use a tablet, make sure you update your App from the App Store in order to be able to see the vote popping up on your screen.
This is a big milestone feature, and this is the first iteration: more improvements will follow. Our KnowledgeBase now contains all the details you need about the voting feature. Furthermore, we have created a document which lists all known issues, bug fixes and new features. You can find it here.
We are also working on other new features. Here is the road-map for the next few months:
Phase one (mid-July) – key functionality
- Speaker and queue management improvements
- Pause and restart the meeting for the public webcast
Phase two (early-august) – Security
- Lobby for adding/removing members of the public or any speaker
- Individualised invitations for participants, with added security
Phase three (mid-August) – tighter controls and further integration with Connect webcasting:
- Audit logging (recording attendees’ time of arrival, vote and exit, etc.)
- Sending agenda points live during the meeting
- Sending speaker names (profiles) automatically as different people speak
- Participant phones into the meeting
Phase four (longer-term: hybrid integration)
We’ll be working towards the unification of queue management systems so that a chair or clerk can manage the conference microphone queue system in the Chamber along with the online speaker queue.
