by David Dahlbacka in Beat Reporter, Government Reform
Posted on November 10, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Last Modified on November 10, 2010 at 7:26 pm
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[Ref: 11/9/10 Teleconference on Standards for Public Meeting Notices and Agendas]
This teleconference dealt with new exciting work on addressing a perennial problem: how do people who want to participate in government find out when issues they care about are being discussed? Currently, one has to visit a dozen or more web pages (all in different formats) or get oneself to a physical bulletin board. Initiatives such as Somerville Voice’s Beat Reporter rely upon individual initiative to “scrape” information from multiple sources and consolidate them onto separate pages. This is very labor intensive.
This working group, associated with e-democracy.org and eCitizenFoundation.org, is assembling a set of technical standards and best practices that, if widely adopted by city, state, and federal governments, would allow citizens to subscribe to a set of meetings they care about and receive timely notifications and agendas early enough to participate. If fully developed, citizens could even comment in advance on issues, and their comments be bundled as part of the meeting materials.
At this teleconference, we commented on the October 29 2010 version of their guidelines. The requirements have three aspects: business, legal, and technology. Key standards:
- All pages should be both human and machine readable.
- Each page should have a unique URL.
- Each use of the page should link to a single authoritative version.
- Each jurisdiction should have a unique URL
- If printed, each page should have a machine processable barcode.
As the presenter demonstrated, bar codes are easy to produce online. This is the QR code for Somerville Voices, which I generated in under a minute at http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/generator/:
Among the points I raised was that meeting notices should not only be presented accessibly but should include information about meeting location accessibility. Others suggested physical descriptions of locations and aggregators by accessibility.
There was strong Massachusetts representation at the meeting. One of the conveners, Daz Greenwood, taught at the Media Lab at MIT and worked with Somerville City Hall on open source presentation of notices and agendas. Another mentioned the new Open Government law out of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office. Another, out of Cape Cod, is working with ustransparency.com. Elsewhere, people are working on projects like a Vancouver open data initiative, a New York City universal lookup service, and efforts such as federalregister.gov, xml.org, and publicinfo.org.
The group is looking for:
- Input on the current proposal, particularly from government agencies that announce meetings.
- Current examples of online meeting notices and agendas.
- A pilot project for a group that wants to start publishing meetings and agendas on line or wants to improve how they are doing it.
- Input on accessibility issues.
- Input on making this information usable by nontechnical people.
For more information, see:
- P3: Public Meetings – Open Standard and Prototype Technical Working Group Home
- http://forums.e-democracy.org/
- http://www.ecitizenfoundation.org/open-public-meetings.html
- Public Meeting Notices and Agendas Wiki Page
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Great information, thank you, DaviD! I will send along a note to the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology at http://www.coataccess.org/ to see if there is already a resource on board to provide Communications Accessibility guidance. And the Community Access Project will get onboard to participate with structural accessibility input.
As usual, you’ve provided us all with a valuable peek into important Beats, DaviD.
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The recent change in the Open Meeting Law has made learning of meetings in advance somewhat easier. The enforcement of this law was recently taken out of the hands of the DA and centralized in the Attorney General’s office which updated the law in July of 2010 and is continuing to “tweak” it to be applicable to today’s technology. One of the requirements of the law (among others) is that meeting information and agendas have to be posted 48 hours in advance with holidays and weekends not included. The recent implementation of the City’s Meeting Portal has made it easier for media people (like me) to keep a calendar of meetings that pertain to my target audience (in this case, Ward 5 residents). Meeting information also has to be posted outside of the Clerk’s office.
Open Meeting Law: http://to.ly/81LK
You would think that the Meeting Portal in conjunction with the Open Meeting Law would bring a level of transparency and promote public involvement, but I have noticed an annoying practice that happens daily. When trying to access the Meeting Portal online, I get an “Internet Explorer Cannot Open This Website” error message that comes up for hours during the day. Once can speculate that the website is being updated, meetings are being added, videos are being uploaded, and agendas are being increased, however, the information remains unchanged when I view it (yes, I am that detail oriented).
City’s Meeting Portal: http://to.ly/81LL
In an ideal world, I would love to see all Somerville-based groups create an online Google Calendar that could be accessed and downloaded for those interested parties and included on one Master Calendar. Calendars could then be added to the Masters of Community-based websites, like mine, to keep our readers informed. From what I understand, the City is going to be updating their website, but will not be using the Google Calendar format although their chosen format will be downloadable to be synced with Google and Outlook.
The other piece would be locations throughout the city that would have a billboard featuring all the meeting information for groups across Somerville. Even I, as a website & Blackberry person, know that not everyone is online and would need to see a physical calendar.
This would take a massive amount of coordination, preplanning, and transparency. Someone or a group would need to “own” this job as cancelling/relocating a meeting would require an online change, as well as changes to all the calendars on billboards across the city. Maybe billboards could be featured in each Ward, cutting it down to only 7.
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To echo Eila…
Great job, David!
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Earlier this week I sent the following e-mail to John Long, the Somerville City Clerk. So far he hasn’t responded.
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John Long:
Earlier this week I participated in a web conference on Standards for Public Meeting Notices and Agendas. Daz (David) Greenwood, who used to work for Somerville on web access, was one of the conveners and was interested in working with a city government that was engaged with putting meeting notices and agendas online. Somerville is in the process of upgrading its system. Could you refer me to whoever is involved with this? I’d like to see if I can connect him up with Greenwood and maybe get some useful cross-fertilization going between Somerville and eCitizenFoundation.org.
Here’s a link to my SomervilleVoices writeup:
http://www.somervillevoices.org/2010/11/10/government-reform/11910-teleconference-on-standards-for-public-meeting-notices-and-agendas-beat-report/
Thanks!
David Dahlbacka
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