The upgrade is finished and it is good.

There are four cameras now where there was one, and the new ones can read a document held up at the rail. Captioning runs live and is accurate to a standard the vendor will put in writing. The archive is searchable by speaker, by date, and by agenda item, and it loads. Meeting packets post seventy-two hours ahead in a portal that works on a phone.

None of this is a gesture. It cost three hundred and forty thousand dollars, it took nineteen months, and it was pushed through by people who wanted it. A resident who could not attend a hearing in June can now watch that hearing in November, in full, and find the ninety seconds they were looking for in under a minute.

This newspaper wishes to state clearly that the money was well spent and that the room is, by any measure available, more transparent than it was.

The public still may not speak.

Not in the sense of being ejected. In the sense that there is no mechanism. There is no number to call in on, no queue to join, no field in the portal. If you cannot be in the room at the hour the item is heard, you may see everything and say nothing, forever, and this is not an oversight in the upgrade. It was not in the upgrade. It was not proposed for the upgrade. The upgrade was for transparency and every item in it was about the picture.

Twelve councils in this state do take remote comment. Coventry, Cranston, Cumberland, East Greenwich, Hopkinton, Lincoln, Middletown, Pawtucket, Portsmouth, Richmond, Scituate, West Warwick. Some of that is thinner than it sounds — in one, participation means emailing a comment while the livestream runs; in another it applies to non-agenda items and not to public hearings. It is still twelve more than here.

The state came close. A bill requiring remote participation passed the House fifty-nine to twelve in May and then died in Senate Judiciary without a vote. Its Senate companion was held for further study. There is nothing dramatic in that record and no villain in it. It simply stopped.

It is worth saying that this was once solved. During the pandemic every one of these bodies took remote comment, because statewide executive orders required it, and the orders lapsed. Nobody in Providence decided to end remote participation. It ended because the thing making it happen expired and no local decision replaced it. The capability was demonstrated, at scale, under difficult conditions, and then it went away on a technicality of expiry.

So the position is this. On the four things measured, the city now passes three. The three it passes are livestream, archive and packet. The one it fails is participation.

Every criterion it meets is about watching. The one it misses is about being in the thing.

We have been given a very good window.

Speak Up covers access. This column will continue until the mechanism exists, at which point it will be filed remotely.