Cross Referenced Hansard-HM Parliament Video Database

FROM: Tim Carpenter

What NEED does this meet?
Desire for people to quickly and simply see what has been said and discussed in Parliament without the pre-filtering of news organisations.

What is the APPROACH?
Hansard produces accurate records of every sitting in parliament and both houses and committees are captured on video. This video can be digitally archived. Hansard to be indexed and stored in a searchable form online for all to read.

Hansard shall add timestamps to their text. Thus, when a search pulls up a match in Hansard (e.g. all references to Crossrail or Haig), the time and date can be used to locate the video file and play the appropriate section.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
it will allow people to see debates, speeches and votes on demand and in a form they wish. The current mechanism of pre-digested video-bites on news programmes is open to abuse and often does not convey the full picture. People may want to observe the behaviour of an MP and see all their appearances and voting in the house when deciding how they wish to vote.

Such a mechanism could be extended to local authorities to bring transparency to all levels.

What is the COMPETITION?
HM Parliament and Hansard are dominant and no competition exists.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
Storage of the information will be important. Hard drives are getting to £1 per GB, and a GB providing around 3 hours of 320x200 video means 3GB per house/committee per day.

200 days per year, Commons, Lords and two committee rooms means 2,400GB or under 2.5 terabytes per year. A RAID unit storing this costs £9000. Depending on usage the number of copies and front-end servers will increase.

The cost to Hansard should be incremental.

A video retrieval mechanism can be fairly simple as it only need seach for house, time and date as defined by the search results or by free entry.