Originally Posted by
Zaphod
Firstly, let me be clear: my statements are from a technical support perspective, not whether Judith is correct or not.
Government departments do not conduct meetings at the same scale nor with the same procedural requirements as parliament does. A parliamentary session is like trying to keep a group of rowdy 3 year olds on task, not a small number of professionals, so the experience and controls required to execute this are quite different.
You may think that they do not have issues conducting meetings with multiple participants, but they do, and these issues are addressed by technical support staff as well as the end-user training already provided.
These departments also do not use Zoom as their primary technology platform for video conferencing, so do we change to that platform? What happens if one participant wants to use a different platform because their cousin recommended it? (Yes, that does happen) Who supports this? Do we stay with the existing MS Teams service? Who provides support during the session? Do we have enough staff to provide support? Do the participants all have enough bandwidth (some use cellphone connections, not fibre)?
Based on my personal technical experience establishing and supporting this type of environment, I've already highlighted a number of issues in the provision of the service and support in the post above, and there are numerous additional over and above these. All of these issues must be addressed beforehand to enable a smooth digital based session to be conducted, and this should have already been completed.