Parish Councils and Technology

Many would agree with the statement that parish councils can sometimes be slow at adopting technology that can make their lives much easier. An example of this is VOIP telephone systems which, for those councils who already had such a system, made life under the COVID lockdowns much easier than at those councils where someone had to physically go to the parish office once a week to pick up answer machine messages. It certainly made a world of difference at LRALC, as from day 1 of lockdown you still phoned the LRALC office number and spoke to a staff member, despite us all being locked down at home.

AI will also offer many opportunities to our member councils, and we will be looking at ways of supporting you in making the most of this technology over the year ahead.

AI is also an example of how adopting new technology doesn't have to cost a lot, or even anything. For example, a recording device like the one pictured (cost - just over £50), which can cope with small to medium size meetings, has the ability to plug straight in to a computer (it has an inbuilt USB socket) to download the recording, which can then be run through an existing function in Microsoft Word and in a matter of minutes it will transcribe a 2 hour meeting very accurately. Word can even distinguish between voices, and will separate out comments to "speaker 1", "speaker 2", etc. This provides the clerk with a starting point for the minutes.

With more and more councils recording their meetings (in a GDPR friendly way), why not consider using technology like this to make minute taking easier?

See here for how to use the feature on Microsoft Word: Transcribe your recordings - Microsoft Support