What's New at IRC?
Monday, November 28, 2011
The International Roll-Call (IRC) team is proud to announce that we have received notice from the good folks of the West Virginia legislature that they have chosen to implement, using the iPad, IRC’s Chamber Automation System in the Senate and IRC's Committee Automation System in four Standing Committees in the House of Delegates.
The IRC "Crawler" application is the integration point with the existing state legislative management system and goes out to retrieve all the required documents and pulls them into the SQL database for the members to have real-time access using the iPad. The Chamber and Committee Automation systems are also integrated with International Roll-Call's voting applications to provide real-time display board information, vote totals, request to speak information and voting data to the members.
From anywhere within the Capitol complex, the members will be able to access bills and journal information, mark important documents and send notes to other members using the system’s “Sticky Note” function. When in-chamber, the members will be able to follow along with the current bill under discussion while also being free to research bill and journal documents. Display information such as the current bill can be pushed to the member’s iPads also.
West Virginia, which is the first in the country to implement such a system and International Roll-Call are excited to begin this ground-breaking journey together toward further streamlining their legislative process.
For more information about the Chamber and Committee Automation System with iPad integration, click here to download an information sheet .
Thursday, November 10, 2011 Recently, International Roll-Call technicians returned from the great state of Oregon, having just installed an upgrade to their Request to Speak System. The upgrade consisted of new Request buttons at the Senators’ desks as well as replacing the old incandescent lamps used for Summoning with long-lasting LED indicators. The most significant change to the system, however, comes with the implementation of IRC’s Request to Speak Software in an environment which has, up until now, been very manual in nature.
“This is about making the jobs of the staff easier and making the process run more efficiently,” explains IRC Senior Engineer, Arnold Snelson. “In the previous manual environment, Requests were difficult to manage and there was no way to tell the order in which the Requests were being made. The IRC software changes that and gives the Secretary the ability to see the Requests not only in a geographical layout but also in a queue that displays them in the order that they come in.”
The RTS software is highly customizable and can be configured to display member Requests in several different ways, including chronologically, alphabetically and by party just to name a few. Control of microphones is also a feature which can be used as part of the system.
With the process of managing Requests to Speak streamlined, IRC expects that the Oregon Senate will see the pay-off in their investment immediately in the form of quickly and efficiently dealing with Requests and allowing the staff to capitalize on that most valuable of resources in the legislative environment; TIME.
It should be noted that in a number of state legislatures we have put in place buttons (SPK AMD & SPK BILL) to allow members to request to speak to either the "amendment" and or the "bill". Through our Request to Speak application, legislators' names will appear under the “Speak to Bill” list or the "Speak to Amendment” list on the Presiding Officer's monitor in the order in which the request was made. This greatly improves the efficiency of the legislative process in allowing the Presiding Officer to recognize first the members wishing to speak to the amendment before speaking on the bill.
For more information about IRC’s Request to Speak system, click here .
Friday, August 26, 2011
This August, the IRC team headed to San Antonio, Texas for the 2011 NCSL Legislative Summit where we unveiled our new Chamber Automation app on Apple’s iPad2. The Chamber Automation application enables legislators to stay connected with the current calendar items, amendments, and a complete overview of current bills as well as providing the ability to search, view and print archived legislation. This software is currently available for use on both Apple and Microsoft tablet operating systems. Tablet PCs and the enormous flexibility and portability they bring to the table may well be the way of the future and IRC looks forward to incorporating more aspects of the legislative process, like voting and roll-call, on tablets computers.
In addition to the Chamber Automation app for the iPad, we also shared information regarding our new and improved xmLegislato.net software, which not only includes our latest .net voting applications but all the applications to support the entire legislative process. Our team of developers has worked feverishly on updating our xmLegislator.net system to a level of functionality never seen before, further proving that our IRC’s software and hardware remains superior to any other product on the market.
With the new products on display, it was no surprise that we received a large amount of interest at our booth. Old friends and new faces alike were welcomed by IRC staff in attendance; Howard Jorenby, Richard Physioc, Tyler Schaeffer and Jessica Hayashida. Throughout the summit, we constantly engaged booth-goers, sharing our knowledge with legislative staff, other vendors and even our competitors. It was wonderful to see so many of you and we look forward to seeing you again next year in Chicago where we can once again cement our standing as the industry leader in voting and legislative management systems.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Recently, IRC met with the good people of the Iowa House of Representatives to put in place a plan for IRC to install an automatic camera system in the House. This system will work in tandem with the Request to Speak system and be used to capture video and sound of members speaking from the floor when their request to speak is recognized and their microphones turned on. The cameras – five of them mounted at strategic points in the chamber – utilize IRC’s software and the RTS system to pivot and tilt to the exact position of a member once that member’s microphone is activated by the system. Camera personnel and those working in the video booth have plenty to do as it is and the automatic camera system provides an immediate, sleek, and accurate transition to capture video of speaking members and prevents duplication of effort on the part of the staff. As well, in the circumstance of two members engaged in a debate, multiple cameras will be used to capture the action for the video booth staff.
Though the Iowa House does not have full-color LED displays, this would be an instance where the video feed could be displayed live on the chamber displays .
The final, single stream of video will be continuously transferred to a third-party website where the video and sound will be both stored and made available for streaming on the internet live and as archival footage. As per IRC’s recommendation, the Iowa House has chosen Granicus as the entity to provide storage and live streaming of the video/audio content.
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