Remember: our rules allow pointed disagreement, but require respectful discussion.
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Hi Folks:
I appreciate that Vaman Pai of the City Communications department is
reading this list and appreciated his post. Alan Shilepsky gives the
following suggestions for reporting on City Council actions.
>Much more useable City Council information would be HTML based documents
>that were searchable, and that used hypertext links to separate summary
>information from the details. Preferably, the City would maintain a
>web-accessable database table that might have such fields as:
>
> Date of vote; Short Title; Category; Passed? (y/n); Yea Count; Nay
>Count; Absent Count; Sponsors; CM's voting Yes; CM's voting Nay; Absent
>CM's; hyperlink to an abstract; hyperlink to a full description of the
>item.
>
>I'd have to think about how I would handle this database's One-to-many
>relationships (e.g., Sponsors, Yea and Nay voters; Categories). But in
>any case I would have the database be searchable at least by keywords in
>the title, by date range, and by categories. The hypertext drill downs
>would allow a citizen to get the details, without requiring her or him
>to optically scan 40 pages of legalese to find the votes they are
>interested in.
>
>It would be interesting to hear suggestions from the City for Neighbors
>researchers about how the City Council information could have been
>arrayed to make their job of preparing a scorecard easier.
I'm not from the City for Neighbors -- but I did do some research on voting
records, and I'd agree with Alan's suggestions. I'm wondering if there is
a way for this information to be automatically extracted into the database
Alan is describing? I'd add that there should be aggregate attendance
records -- so it is easy to see if your CM is playing hooky frequently --
or is a good diligent CM.
The other thing I'd like to see is Recycling schedules on the city Solid
Waste website. I went to the site to look for recycling schedules -- and
was informed that I'd have to call to order one sent to me by snail mail.
This seems to be an obvious place where the web could be very useful.
I'd agree with Alan about long PDF documents -- I don't like them either.
Eva
Eva Young
Central
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