Hybrid city council meetings with remote voting in Koksijde

With its new hybrid conferencing system, the city of Koksijde is ready for the future of digital city council meetings, including a secure remote voting system.

The city council of Koksijde-Oostduinkerke embraces hybrid meetings and remote voting

Koksijde-Oostduinkerke is a Belgian coastal town counting 22.000 inhabitants and lots of tourists and visitors. Beside many other things, Koksijde is proud to be the home of Belgium’s highest sand dune. Another thing the town can be proud of, is its early adopter approach to conferencing technology. Something that we at Televic can only applaud.

First live streaming city council in the area

The municipality of Koksijde-Oostduinkerke has always been a frontrunner in terms of innovation and digitalization. Eleven years ago, they were the first municipality in the wider area to decide to stream council meetings live to citizens. In 2021 they decided to take the next step towards a future-proof, fully hybrid conferencing system.

The next step in digitalization: ready for the future of hybrid city council meetings

Completely in line with its pioneering spirit when it comes to digitalization, the municipality of Koksijde-Oostduinkerke chose to switch to a new Televic conference system. The main objective: to include a comprehensive hybrid meeting option, so council members get the possibility to participate and vote from a remote location with the same experience of a physical meeting.

New hardware set-up with full-color touchscreens and automated camera tracking

In terms of hardware, the existing conference system was replaced by Televic’s newest generation conferencing units, Confidea Flex. With this system, each individual council member has a personal digital unit with a full color touch screen.

To provide an automated camera tracking solution, the four cameras in the council room have been replaced with the new generation of Televic T-CAM point-tilt-zoom cameras. These cameras that automatically follow the speaker and offer a crystal clear view on each individual delegate, even in a difficult room setup. A big win here is that the video stream to citizens automatically shows the active speaker(s). Viewers can also see voting results and presentations without having to manually switch amongst different video feed sources.

Next-gen software for smooth meeting management

To answer the city’s desire to embrace full hybrid meeting capabilities, Televic – together with integration partner Whitemilk, built the renewed conferencing system set-up around the Confero MEET software. This is Televic’s newest hybrid meeting module, that offers city council members the ability to remotely participate in meetings and still securely cast their votes. For the general director, who moderates the council meetings, the software makes it easier to manage the microphones and voting results of all delegates, on-site as well as remote.