Politics and political debate are part of our everyday lives and events of the last few months have seen a renewed interest – for positive and negative reasons – in what goes on in our political institutions.

I remember back when I worked as an intern at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, being fascinated by the rich array of political debate taking place behind closed doors and wishing that the public could see the robustness of the debates which were creating the EU guidelines which affect us all. Perhaps then they could feel part of the system rather than being kept outside of it.

Back in August I had the chance to meet up with Democracy Live’s Launch Editor Mark Coyle and the BBC’s Head of Multi-media Journalism Pete Clifton to get a sneak preview of the BBC’s new political portal.

The site which was soft launched towards the end of October is in my opinion possibly one of the most innovative and technically complex projects that the BBC has launched in recent years, second only to the fantastic iPlayer site.

Democracy Live brings together, for the first time live and on-demand video coverage of proceedings in our national political institutions and the European Parliament.  The portal builds on previously available content in the form of video streams, guides and biographies.

The website covers the main chambers of the House of Commons, House of Lords, Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly, Welsh Assembly and full sittings of the European Parliament. It also covers Westminster Hall and Select Committees at Westminster. When there is no business in the main chambers in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff, it covers committee meetings. Each of the institutions has its own section on the site together with a full explanation on what it does and how it fits into the bigger political landscape. You’ll find guides to each institution and a guide to who makes decisions in the UK’s devolved system of government scattered around the site.

On the top right of these sections, you can see a list of items of business which are being covered that day. The site is extremely well designed and a testament to the skill and commitment of the development team which has sweat blood and tears into delivering this feat of technical genius.

“DL”, as it’s become known in the BBC, is the result of about 18 months of development work which is not surprising when you take a look at what has been achieved.

For me, the most innovative aspect of Democracy Live is its search facility which completely blew my mind when I first saw it in operation. It works by using a “speech-to-text” system jointly built by Autonomy and Blinkx which creates transcriptions of the words spoken in the video.

After a clip is made available to watch again, the BBC system adds words spoken in the video for you to search on. When it finds a word you’ve asked for, it gives you a link straight to the point in the video where the word is spoken. You can also search for representatives by name, place and postcode.

For example, if you search for the phrase “interest rates”, then you will be given a list of all of the instances when those words were mentioned in any one of the featured institutions and you will be presented with a link which directs you to that exact moment in the video archive:

Generally speaking, the industry standard for accuracy in speech-to-text systems is reckoned to be about 80%. In Democracy Live tests, the BBC reckons it has seen slightly higher than that. Impressively, DL has managed to deliver good results for speech-to-text in Welsh, which is also a first in this emerging field of auto-transcription.

The search filters bring about the potential for politics to become much more accessible to the electorate. You would have to be seriously obsessive about constitutional affairs to sit through a six-hour long video debate from the House of Commons. But if you could cut out the irrelevant noise and party political point-scoring to get to the real bits of the debate that genuinely interest you, you could arm yourself immediately with all of the facts.

I like the way that you can also “Follow” a representative and be kept up to date when s/he addresses an issue in session. Choose a biography (these come to the BBC from the parliamentary experts Dods) either by searching for it or getting there from the ‘Your representatives’ section and click on the button in the top right. In this capacity, DL holds our elected bodies accountable for their promises. It is easy to see a particular member’s parliamentary speeches on certain topics and to search for any inconsistencies or failure to deliver on points openly discussed in session.

Here is the biography of my former boss and one of the European Parliament’s leading figures Michael Cashman MEP (yes, he was in Eastenders many moons ago). It’s really easy to follow all of the debates and speeches that he makes and to be kept up to speed with what he’s currently working on:

Want to blog a video? No problem. The Beeb is making mostof the video footage fully embeddable into blogs and HTML websites. At the moment, Democracy Live does not have permission to enable the embedding of video from the House of Commons or the House of Lords although this is more of a legal point rather than technical. Discussions are continuing with officials at Westminster.

Another innovation is the video wall on the home page. You’ll be able to spot quickly when proceedings are live, and when they’re not you can click through to an earlier item of business. Just to get all of the screens simultaneously running video without draining bandwidth was a huge technical victory in itself and something which could be implemented by other websites.

The Historic Moments section of the site contains a selection of key moments since the 1980s: a brilliant resource for any student of politics or contemporary British history. Below is an screen grab of Gordon Brown from 1992:

OK, so I’ve gone into extreme hyperbole to describe a site which most of the population will probably never visit. But the point is that the BBC, empowered by its unique funding model has opened up the corridors of power to us mere mortals and is making it really easy for us to follow political debate. For the first time in history, we have access to archives of video footage and are being given the means to filter the data by our interests. So if we want to see what our local MP or MEP has done for our community, we don’t just have to take their word for it.

I urge you all to go and explore this wonderful website and to watch this space. From what Mark Coyle told me back in August, there’s plenty more to come.

Thank you BBC.