The internet is changing everything, even local government. The Village of Shorewood is slowly but surely moving in the direction of more services available over the internet. You can already view your tax bill online on villageofshorewood.org, and more services are slated for online accessibility in the near future. Today, however, I believe there is another huge leap forward which we could explore as time goes on.
My idea would radically upgrade the accessibility of local government meetings to Village residents. The challenge with accessing Village Board meetings currently, is that you have to do one of three things:
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Go to the meeting and listen to what happens
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Read the minutes, which often are not published for weeks after the meeting
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Go to the library and check out the audio recording, and listen to the whole thing
This combination means citizens are often weeks behind in terms of their information, and many just choose not to participate at all.
I propose creating a podcast of all meetings of the Village Board. According to Wikipedia's definition, "A podcast is a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers." I believe that a well-organized audio podcast would bring our local government much closer to the citizens they represent.
How would it work? All Board meetings would be recorded in audio form, and posted online. The audio would be broken up into sections, which would reflect the sections outlined in the meeting agenda. So, for instance, this last weeks meeting would have had separate audio files on The Parks Commission, the Asst. Village Manager position, the intersection on Morris & Menlo, and the SHS National Award.
In this fashion, listeners would not need to listen to the entire meeting to get the to the section of interest. So, for instance, if I only wanted to listen to the part of the meeting specifically related to The Parks Commission, I could click on that part of the meeting rather than having to search through the whole audio file.
Audio content could be further organized through the use of "Tagging," a user-friendly technology gaining wider and wider use on the internet. The clouds of words you see in the right hand margin is an example of tagging. If you click on any of them, you will get all posts I have written on that specific topic. Village Board audio content could be similarly organized by topic, so citizens could click on a tag, and automatically see all audio content relating to a specific topic from current or past meetings. So this week's files might have had tags for "Local Parks," "Street Reconstruction," and so forth.
The final product would be a set of audio files that would be:
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Accessible online for anyone with a web browser
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Accessible by specific topic
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Searchable by topic, so Shorewood residents could easily find all instances where a specific topic was discussed
Is it practical? I am not sure yet. What do you think?
