Remember: our rules allow pointed disagreement, but require respectful discussion.
--
Ok, so now that this is at a technical level I'm quite at home. I don't
know what sort of IT infrastructure the city has right now so I don't know
what works best. That said here's a few ideas:
* PDF documents aren't readable without a proprietary piece of client
software. There are significant federal constitutional issues regarding
the people trying to make these formats more prevalent. A standards based
implementation will be more citizen friendly.
* It's a hot buzzword these days but I'll jump in for this situation. How
about doing this stuff in XML or some other SGML derivative. The idea is
to encode all the appropriate meta data and their relationships. This data
set can be made available as database tables for citizen post-processing,
maybe HTML via a XSL transform.
* Once you've got CM's activity/votes encoded successfully why not go the
next step and do the same thing for campaign finance reports or other
data? This becomes a sort of rinse/repeat thing.
I don't know about the rest of you but it's a serious pain to take time
out of my work day in Woodbury to go down to city hall to do things. To
the extent that I'm expected to show up in person during business hours
the city makes it difficult for me to work with it.
Joshua Jore
Minneapolis Ward 3, precinct 10
On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Eva Young wrote:
> Remember: our rules allow pointed disagreement, but require respectful discussion.
> --
>
> 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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