League of Women Voters to expand Alabama Channel • Alabama Reflector

The platform captures videos of live meetings that are broadcast on the legislature’s website. The site also transcribes audio recordings of the meetings and allows users to enter keywords that the site then searches for in the transcriptions.

The site allows users to search for different types of meetings, which include discussions between lawmakers in both the House and Senate, as well as the various committee meetings responsible for discussing various issues that voters bring to lawmakers.

The League of Women Voters archives all videos.

The initiative began as a prototype developed by Tara Bailey, current director of the Alabama Channel.

“She came to me and said, ‘This is something I think would work,” Jones said of Bailey. “As a league, one of our top priorities for the League of Women Voters here in Alabama is government transparency because there is so little of it here.”

Bailey brought it to the nonprofit’s executives in April 2022, who then expanded it into an official role offered by the organization’s nonprofit arm.

“If you see a problem that you can do something about, I’m the type of person that wants to do something about it,” Bailey said. “That was a problem that you couldn’t go in, you couldn’t go back and watch the discussions, very lively discussions at these various committee meetings and in the House and Senate when everything is just broadcast live.”

Bailey first researched how other states archive video feeds and found that most states already offered the service. She then asked the Open Media Foundation, a nonprofit media and communications services provider, to help transcribe the audio.

She then obtained a domain name, designed the logo, and used her previous experience as a graphic designer to help develop the website.

Bailey and Jones also worked with the Legislative Research Service to ensure staff understood the site’s purpose.

“The Open Meetings Act allows you to record meetings,” Bailey said in conversations with lawmakers. “We took that and said, ‘We’re recording the meetings in accordance with the Open Meetings Act.’ They understood that probably a lot of other groups were doing this too, but they just weren’t doing it the way we suggested.”

The website was ready for the 2023 legislative session. The national office provided seed funding for the development of the Alabama Channel. According to Jones, grants have been provided by the League of Women Voters of the United States Education Fund (C3 Fund) for the past three years so far.

Jones urged the public to donate additional funds if needed.

According to Bailey, the site has a growing viewership, currently nearly 70,000 total views. Media outlets that use video footage as a primary source for articles to lawmakers who watch proceedings from other sessions to better understand discussions on various bills, Bailey said.

The organization also records meetings outside of the legislative session, including all meetings on Alison, the state’s legislative website.

“There are times when we send a videographer to a meeting that might not be at the Statehouse, but might be in Montgomery,” Bailey said. “We also host these meetings because these focus groups at various meetings often play an important role in legislation that is passed in the next legislative session.”

For example, the Joint Prison Oversight Committee meetings, which brought together family and friends of those who died in prison, were very popular with viewers.

“Our prison system in Alabama is a topic of great interest because of what is going on there,” Bailey said. “It’s not the best prison system, and that’s why a lot of people watch these meetings.”

The league expects to continue recording the sessions and archiving the footage in hopes of creating a library of the Legislature and the ways lawmakers have addressed issues facing the state.

“We use it in the classroom,” Bailey said. “We are told that we need to teach our students civics, and what a great opportunity to say how a bill becomes law and actually watch a bill become law in our state of Alabama government.”