1) The majority is not always right
2) People don’t have time to become fully informed, so it should be beneficial to have representatives who’s full time job is to be fully informed.
3) There are times when information should be classified to the public, but our representatives should have access to this information.

I think the last point is the most important. My question is, how do you know a representative is voting the way you want based on information you don’t have access to?

Also, I agree that this sort of material should be public domain. Although my childhood hometown was significantly larger than Roseland (30k versus 0.7k) the town council meetings were broadcast on cable. Even then, I felt this fenced things off too much, since we didn’t have cable until the late 1990s.

This speaks to a fundamental principle of democracy. If the meetings are secret, then it’s not possible to have a sufficiently informed citizen population. The same is true of meetings that happen but that are not accessible to the citizens. In the 1700s-Philadelphia days of the US, this was clearly a major barrier to participation. Without a job to support your absence for several months, it would be impossible to be an active proto-US citizen.

Without an informed population, it’s impossible to have an informed democratic election. At a certain level, it also makes any notion of representation irrelevant; the representative of its constituency can never fully honor the will of the people it represents, because the will of the people is based on incomplete information.

It is very difficult to create a realistic model of the political situation based on incomplete information. If the constituency is out of touch with reality, then the democratic republic amounts to a mass, consensual hallucination, in the sense that:

1) the perception is of a distorted reality, and
2) it is accepted as if it were actual reality

A political body that:
1) values the will of its constituency must also
2) value informing its constituency, so that their will is realistic.

Unless both conditions are met, that political body will envetually drift farther and farther away from making its constituency happy.

Now that old-tech video cameras cost $100, and thanks to Internet video distribution (a la YouTube), it’s possible for even a town of 0.7k to reasonably distribute the proceedings of its council meetings. I think this is great, but the next step is clearly rights. I can’t think of something that more obviously needs to be in the public domain than the proceedings of public meetings.

In the same way that C-SPAN weasles out a private license for the federal video it creates, I imagine that the people at the Roseland meeting are the owners of the video they shoot, too. From the raw WNDU Roseland video, it seems like there’s a person holding the camera the whole time, and it seems like they’re sitting in the audience. I bet it was a private citizen.