How Not to Run Public Access Audio for a Court Hearing
Wow. Had to laugh at phone audio problem at special master hearing today. Public access - audio only - was through a call in bank and listeners were responsible to mute their phones. What could go wrong?
1st mistake. What works for normal court business does not work for anything remotely close to increased profile. Method of delivery must be reconsidered strongly.
2nd mistake. Expect chaos. We shall call this the Baba Booey principle. Give a lot of people the chance to be idiots and they will surely oblige.
3rd mistake. You have to have a court rep listening to the stream and be ready to cut the feed at any time. This is just being responsible. You would hope they would test it first, but there is just no way to simulate the deluge.
This was a trap for court staff. They live in their own reality which is usually shielded from the political craziness outside. 500 callers is just not enough for a case like this. I would also argue that any phone bank software is not the right choice either. People were just saying "Mute the callers". It probably wasn't that simple. Typically these bridge line court phones are used for collaborating and that requires people have unmute capability by default. They are also usually not controlled by software. People just call in and they are live. This works almost always in regular court houses and was the way before Zoom and Covid.
Most of the video conferencing software like Zoom, Teams and GoTo Meeting have phone bank capabilities. As people call in, they appear in the software. NONE of these apps are made to handle 500 callers. Imagine being in that meeting and having a grid of 500 participants. Even if the phone bank can handle the calls, the operator will not be able to manage that meeting. Even having 50 people in a meeting can be crazy. Ask your kids.
If you need the phone bank, a better choice would be webinar software. These systems are built to push content and can handle thousands of callers. No chance of that audio cacophony that happened today - as all listeners are muted.
The real answer here was something closer to broadcasting. They should have set up a live audio stream on Youtube and let them handle the traffic. It is also imperative that the public access and participant access be clearly defined from the get go. Of course, in today's remote hearing world - it is common for participants to not be in the court room. The court staff has to establish that private meeting with participants and protect the heck out of that info. They could easily tell lawyers for one side, and the hack lawyers might turn around and release that info to their crazy supporters. Then they try to crash the meeting and the whole case gets delayed. They need to establish the public location for the stream - so it is known well in advance and people don't go hunting for alternates.
It is also super important that chaos does not keep the hearing from being available to the public. The conspiracy people will be the first people who say "what is the government hiding?"
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