Leaders’ Virtual Questions

The Leaders’ Virtual Questions meetings are essential for ensuring the continuation of democracy at a time when everyone, including government officials and ministers, are stuck at home. Scottish Parliament entrusted us to develop a workflow to bring in remote contributors, combine them into a gallery view and stream onto the Scottish Parliament website and other stakeholders.

The goal of these meetings and the streaming workflows are to ensure the continuation of open and transparent democratic proceedings in these unprecedented times. The workflow also needed to ensure social inclusion. Therefore, when British Sign Language (BSL) editions are required, these are also streamed. The workflow needed to accommodate feed to the Scottish Parliament website, and to other internal and external stakeholders. Scottish Parliament had never been in a situation like this before, we needed to ensure that any technical solution did not provide additional overheads or issues to the participants, the majority of whom are non-technical.

We devised a workflow to publicly live stream their Leaders’ Virtual Questions, including an additional stream with sign language translation, and make them available on-demand afterward. There are significant technical challenges to overcome in keeping everyone in sync and ensuring stable and high quality audio, especially when participants are on variable quality internet connections. We also provided feeds to broadcasters and a copy for the permanent record of proceedings.

Following the success of their first two Virtual Questions live streams, Scottish Parliament will be steadily increasing their participants from 6 to 15 and beyond for a variety of different types of debates, forums and meetings. You can watch the first Scottish Parliament Leaders’ Virtual Questions stream below, with the ability to clip and share parts of the video you find most interesting directly from the stream!