Plenar-TV

Project report:
One year of video archive and live agenda with seis akustik GmbH

The Lower Saxony state parliament maintains its own website for the public viewing of political debates in plenary sessions. This platform is also used in part for the public relations work of the parliamentarians. The focus here is on video documentation, with all individual contributions to the debates available to anyone interested by specifying the relevant session or speaker.

The result is a freely accessible source of information, in sound and image, about the plenary proceedings in the Lower Saxony State Parliament, the so-called ‘Plenar-TV’.

In February 2022, we were commissioned to reprogramme the website of landtag-niedersachsen.de/plenartv. The design had to harmonise with the new homepage of the Lower Saxony state parliament. We were happy to take on this challenge.

Our IT technicians had been familiar with the previous system for some time. They were immediately keen to develop a test page to demonstrate their skills. At the end of March, we were able to present the overview pages and the structure to the client, the Lower Saxony state parliament. Now the detailed work according to the client's wishes began.

The aim of the project was to make the plenary sessions and the topics of the deliberations available to the public as comprehensively and quickly as possible.

Based on the planned agenda for the respective session, a file is generated which is used to import the entire schedule of the plenary session(s) - number and start of the session days, total duration of the individual agenda items and the break(s), duration of the speaking times per parliamentary group and agenda item, etc. - into the so-called speaking time software (RZE), so that, for example, the planned start of an agenda item can be derived and presented to the public.

During a plenary session, the speeches, among other things, are recorded in the RZE. In the background, a target/actual comparison takes place continuously with regard to the planned start times of the agenda items. This means that an updated and extrapolated agenda schedule is always made available as a preview on ‘Plenar-TV’ (live TO).

The speeches recorded in the RZE are summarised for each agenda item or item under discussion and made available to the public on the ‘Plenar-TV’ platform together with the video of the meeting and the most important discussion documents. This gives interested parties the opportunity to follow the plenary debates and view speeches by individual MPs and meeting documents. Further speeches or the parliamentary page of the MP can be accessed via corresponding links. MPs can also download their speeches as a video or embed them as a link on their own homepage. This close linking of data between the video archive, the live agenda and the MPs' page of the Lower Saxony State Parliament increases the acceptance of the system.

There is also a data maintenance portal that can be used for the following functions:

• Adding subtitles to contributions at a later date,
• Correct errors,
• entering changes to the software.

During the work, the platform grew into a complex system, for example, videos were to be streamed simultaneously and segments were to be made available in extracts. To do this, it was necessary to retrieve parts of a film from the video file without having finished writing the file. Thanks to the right hardware and working with the right software, this was also possible.

Assigning rights to the users

A separate authentication service was programmed for the administration of the data by the different user groups and the management of the content by different service providers, in which the scopes can be made accessible to the different users via roles. This ensures that only the required functions are assigned to each user without being confused by the multitude of functions in the overall system.

Programming security

A two-stage security check was carried out to test the security of the system:

1. Code review by an independent software company: This involved checking whether the software architecture was understandable for third-party programmers so that others could also continue working with the code.
2. Security check according to OWASP-WSTG version 4.1: The aim of the security check was to rule out the possibility of the web application having critical security flaws that could allow the system to be disrupted by external parties, compromised with malicious applications or the web application's data to be manipulated.

Security against failure

In addition to protecting the data from unauthorised access, the failure of the system also had to be considered. Here, IT with software products has a clear advantage over all physical products: copy & paste! A second server was quickly set up and configured like its productive brother.

Data can be duplicated on this system (fail-safe due to redundancy), software changes can be imported and tested (test environment for functional enhancements) and training courses can also be organised. And if problems occur here: Import a backup! The system is then up to date again, the error can be analysed and the system can be further processed.

The arming process

On 1 January 2023, the time had come. The link on the Lower Saxony State Parliament homepage was switched to the new plenary TV page. And after around three weeks came the first endurance test: a plenary session in the state parliament! This meant three days of tension and monitoring in the control centre with a concentrated look at the monitors to check for errors and monitor the system. After the days of tension, the good feeling: it works. Here and there a change had to be made or a function had to be adapted more precisely.

The newly implemented functions have been accepted. Many MPs use the speeches for their presentation on the Internet.

Maintenance

Regular updating and maintenance of the software used is a fundamental prerequisite for the secure operation of any IT system. In this way, security gaps can be closed before hackers exploit them. Technical problems can be recognised and rectified without leading to a functional failure.

A care and maintenance contract is the decisive factor here. This is the only way to ensure that all functions can always be used without any problems and that there is no security risk.

Further development

In addition to this maintenance, user requirements are also changing. The software is becoming more complex, the possibilities more diverse and the technology ever faster. New requirements are constantly being placed on Internet solutions and new possibilities are constantly emerging as technology develops. Access devices and their resolutions have been analysed and optimised in order to achieve an ideal image display. For these reasons, further development of the software is necessary in the long term.

The market will be continuously monitored in order to be able to react to new habits. Just as every online shop has to adapt to the demands of the market and the customer on a daily basis, the same applies here: only by adapting and changing can we show that the system is alive and growing. And since you can experience open parliamentary democracy here on ‘Plenar-TV’, this homepage must also adapt to these requirements. It will have to prove this over the next few years.

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