Block Party — An Independent Civic-Tech Project

How to Use YouTube to Make Meetings Accessible Online

Technology for Community Board Meetings

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Create an Account
2. Live Stream Meetings
3. Upload Recorded Meetings
4. Enable Closed-Captioning Text

Looking to make your Community Board meetings accessible on YouTube?

This guide will walk you through the steps for using YouTube as a public resource to record and share meeting information.

Why YouTube?

New York City Community Boards can use YouTube to stream, share, and store their public meetings.

YouTube is free to use, there is no limitation on the number of videos, and they are stored indefinitely. It also enables people to access the meeting information. With automatic subtitles and translation capabilities, publishing on YouTube is a great way to make Community Board content more accessible to the public.

As New York City adapted to virtual civic engagement in 2020, more and more Community Boards began using YouTube as an additive resource for hosting meeting content.

Although, YouTube has been used by Community Boards before there was a need for virtual meetings. With just a video camera or phone, the YouTube channel for Manhattan Community Board 7 has been active since 2015. Their oldest meeting transcript we have on record is from an in-person Transportation Committee meeting held on Tuesday, April 14, 2015.

Regardless of the meeting format in the future, whether in-person, hybrid or held virtually, using YouTube can help more people stay informed and engage with their Community Board.

In addition to public record and online access, YouTube provides automatic transcription and closed-captioning using speech-to-text to create subtitles. Not only does this make content accessible for viewers, but this text is also what allows Block Party to recreate and share the full transcript directly from the meeting conversation.

1. Create an Account on YouTube

1. To get started, use an administrative email account for the Community Board to sign in to YouTube.
2. Click on your profile picture and Create a Channel
3. Create a channel using the name of your Community Board.
4. In order to Go Live or upload videos longer than 15 minutes, you must activate and verify your account.
5. YouTube will request to enter a phone number and will send a verification code by text or voice call to that phone number.

Once you have a channel your Community Board now has a public presence on YouTube and you can now upload and manage videos.

2. How to Live Stream Meetings on YouTube with Zoom

If your Community Board uses Zoom to host virtual meetings, YouTube can be connected to live-stream directly to YouTube. This allows for public viewers to listen to the meeting in real-time.

1. Make sure your account is verified ahead of time, as it takes 24 hours for YouTube to process.
2. Log in to Zoom. Please note Zoom requires a Pro, Business, Education, or Enterprise account to be able to Livestream.
3. Configure settings on Zoom account.
4. In settings select In Meeting (Advanced).

5. Locate the Allow live streaming of meetings setting, check the YouTube option, and click Save to save the changes.

6. Enable closed captioning.

7. Start a live stream to YouTube by starting the meeting as a host.

8. Follow Zoom’s instructions for starting a live stream depending on Windows or iOS.

3. How to Upload Recorded Meetings

Rather than live-streaming the meeting, your Community Board can also upload recorded videos.

1. Log in to YouTube and Select Upload video from the top bar menu.

2. Select the video you would like to upload.

Details

3. Add a descriptive title to label the video, such as the type of meeting (full board, bylaws, executive, etc.) or committee name.

4. Add the meeting agenda to the description box, this will allow viewers to know what was discussed in the video.

5. It is required to indicate if the target audience of the video is children. Because community board meetings are not content designed specifically for kids, we would recommend selecting ‘No, it’s not made for kids’

6. Locate and click on the SHOW MORE setting.

7. This is an important step: select the meeting video’s language. This is what enables automatic closed-captioning to turn on.

By selecting the English option, YouTube can then auto-generate the subtitles. Please note, it takes time for YouTube to process and generate the automatic captions, so they may not be ready at the time that you upload a video. We found that subtitles are usually available within 24 hours of upload.

8. Add the video date and location of your Community Board district.

Video Elements

Once the details are filled out, you should see the following screen.

The Add subtitles option is actually a subtitle editor for manually adding captions or uploading pre-written/professional subtitles, YouTube will generate automatic captions without selecting any option.

If you want to use the automatic captioning feature, there is nothing to do at this point. Click next.

Checks and Visibility

Click next as YouTube checks for copyright infringement or other violations of their Terms of Service.

9. Select Public and then you’re ready to hit Publish 🎉

Limitations on YouTube’s automatic closed captioning

As defined by YouTube, they “use speech recognition technology to automatically create captions for your videos.”

This technology is dependent on machine learning algorithms to detect what was said and transform the speech into text.

With the benefit of this automated capability, there is also the risk of transcription errors. YouTube encourages creators to manually add professional captions first due to the potential that “automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise.”

The manual process of adding captions can be streamlined by first enabling YouTube’s speech-to-text transcription and then reviewing the generated output.

How to Review and Edit Automatic Captions

1. Once the automatic captions are processed, you can review and edit any parts that haven’t been properly transcribed.
2. Select the Manage Videos button

3. Select the pencil icon next to the video you would like to review.

4. On the right-hand side, select the Subtitles pencil and edit the raw text that was created. This will bring you to the caption editor, where you can update and save the closed caption text to fix any transcription errors.

Quick Tip — How to Fix If YouTube Doesn’t Generate Automatic Captions

In most instances, automatic captions are available within 24 hours after uploading to YouTube.

If your video doesn’t generate the subtitles, it is likely because there is a long period of silence at the beginning of the video. To fix this, you can use YouTube’s video editing studio to trim the meeting recording.

We hope you found this post helpful — get in touch if you’d like to continue the conversation by emailing Block Party at blockparty.meeting@gmail.com.

To learn more about our independent civic-tech project for community boards and how Block Party creates and shares the meeting transcript using closed-caption text, here is a quick explainer.