Futureproof meeting technology for Beringen’s new city hall

The city of Beringen in the Belgian province of Limburg transformed a historic school site into a brand-new city hall and administrative center. The eyecatcher in this ambitious project is the transformation of the old school chapel into a multipurpose meeting room, that is used for Beringen’s city council meetings, but also for weddings and other meetings and events.

Together with AV integrator Videocenter, Televic delivered a solution that respectfully introduced modern conferencing technology into the architectural renovation of this historically valuable chapel.

Futureproof technology

Mayor Thomas Vints and his council expressed the desire to make the most of modern conferencing technology and bring the city’s decision-making process closer to Beringen’s citizens. This was more than enough reason for Videocenter to recommend a comprehensive Televic conferencing solution – as they did for numerous Belgian city councils before.

After many previous collaborations, Stany Boussu, Videocenter’s managing director was quite familiar with Televic’s cutting edge combination of conferencing hardware and software, and our high level of support.

Accelerated digitalization

Just like most city councils, Beringen experienced a pressing need to move to digital and hybrid meeting solutions due to the covid-19 pandemic. But from a broader perspective too, the city saw promising possibilities in terms of citizen involvement, transparency of information, and streamlined minute-taking and reporting procedures.

Camera tracking and live streaming

All of the above led the city of Beringen to opt for a Televic conferencing system with an integrated T-CAM camera tracking system. This allows the city to live-stream all city council meetings, with automated fading between the room overview and close-ups of the active speakers, and an automatic ‘name overlay’ function, which displays the name, function and political party of each speaker.

The meetings are also automatically recorded, which eliminates the need for hand-written minute-taking. Instead, the city’s clerks can now use the recording as a starting point for transcription, reporting and publication.

Flexibility, scalability and ease of use

Given the multifunctional purpose of the room, Beringen’s ICT team emphasized the need for a flexible, scalable and easy-to-use system. A completely wireless configuration with Televic’s Confidea FLEX G4 Wireless tabletop units guarantees a quick and easy meeting set-up. Even without technical staff on site, the units needed for any meeting size can be simply taken out of the storage flight case and put into place. Once the batteries and identification cards are inserted, the units are ready to go. This is what we call ‘plug and play’.

The meeting management can be performed by administrative staff without any specific technical knowledge. A tablet is all they need to access and use Televic’s intuitive Confero software and offer every single participant a smooth and hassle-free meeting experience.