Catching Up With Times

I believe I've mentioned a couple of these things before, but I think it's time to reiterate them, as we are winding down the interim city manager, and should be close to getting our next city manager.  Now part of these pet peeves is because I'm an IT guy, and know how easy some of this technology is to implement.  Part of it is because of the pain I know it is to obtain information sometimes about our city. 

And before I go on, I'm not saying any of this is standards any other city uses.  Honestly I don't know one way or another.  But I'm saying they are standards that are readily available to us that many industries are using to assist in their issues of getting information to those that use it.

So first is an RSS feed.  This is a way that the city would passively notify anyone who was interested in keeping up with meeting notifications.  By law the city must notify us when they are going to have a meeting.  They do this by letting newspapers and radio stations know, and in our case they also put it on the city website.

If you choose, you can go to the website every night and know what meetings were posted.  What an RSS feed would do is allow me to be notified when the website is updated.  How?  My computer knows that I want to watch the city's page, and every time I go online it will check to see if there have been any changes made and if so let me know.  There are many of you (over 200) that have RSS feeds tied to this blog.  It would work the same way.  I wouldn't have to go to the website to see if anything has changed, and yet as soon as it does, I know I can go check it out. This is inexpensive to set up, and honestly you would use existing code to update the website.

Second thing I would like to see is documentation put into electronic format for the public.  What the heck am I talking about?  Have you ever noticed the books that our councilmen carry to the meetings?  These are documents of information given to the councilmen so that they can make informed decisions.  The news medias also receive these packages approximately 72 hours before the meetings. 

Now to print these documents are something.  They are nothing shy of small books at times, and when things like the budget get put in them, they are large books.  You may request a copy and pay a small fortune for them, but honestly, why would anyone want to waste that much paper? 

It would take nothing for the city to 'publish' these documents in pdf format and place them on the city website up with the notification of a meeting.  Why should they do this?  Well to start with its nothing that's suppose to be hidden in the first place, all open for public dissemination.  The 'Freedom of Information Act' insured that.  Second it would eliminate a lot of questions the public has as to why some things have happened.  After looking at some of the information presented to the councilmen over the last year I know why they decided some things, even though I think had I realized that's what they were looking at I might have been able to shine some light not in those little booklets. 

Want to know what's happening on GEDC? Board of Adjustments? City Council?  These 2 very readily available technologies, would make those available to the public.  I'm almost certain that we already own and use the technology to scan and put documents to PDF, as most current copiers do this.  And our website would take a minimal of adjustments to make it RSS Feed capable. 

God Bless,
Dennis Nesser