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A Hall Monitor salute to our budding City Council archivers (and a quiet rebuke of the city for the fact that we need them to)
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A Hall Monitor salute to our budding City Council archivers (and a quiet rebuke of the city for the fact that we need them to)
Follow Hall Monitor Isaiah Thompson on Twitter.
You know what we need more of in this city? Data. Info. Stuff anybody can access and that lets us write better stories, investigate more efficiently, and get to know our city better. That's true for professional journalists, amateur bloggers, engaged citizens, and also robots that spy on us – but spying robots is just the price we pay for freedom.
With that in mind, CP salutes two individuals who've stepped up to provide better public information.
City Council Matters (@citycouncilblog), a blog started by local man (and Temple Law School grad) Timothy R. Holwick, has been doing yoeman's work covering City Council meetings and hearings (including sitting through hours of budget hearings - which are fascinating, but only to a distinctly geeky subset of the general population).
Currently, the only way to check up on a Council meeting you might have missed is to pull the transcript, which isn't available until at least a week, and usually longer, after the meeting itself. You can watch the meetings on-line via a live feed, a service overseen by the city's Office of Technology, but that service is sorely lacking: the site offers no archive of past meetings and no way to watch this taxpayer-paid-for footage on demand.
No way, that is, until City Council Matters began archiving audio of City Council meetings. This is an immense service to all of us.
Also getting a half-salute (a full one to come pending results) is Councilman Bobby Henon who, just weeks after embarrassing the city by developing a 311 app in a fraction of the time it's taken the city not to develop said app, has embarked on a brave mission to archive *video* of City Council meetings .
This initiative originated, by way of disclosure, via a tweet by yours truly, which read:
@BobbyHenon live-streaming Channel64 on his own website. Councilman, make it *even cooler* by archiving for public? Hm?
To which the Councilman responded:
Loved your idea of online archive of Council meetings. My staff's working on it. Stay tuned for launch. Keep ideas coming.
Welcome as these efforts are, they beg the question of why the city's Office of Information Technology hasn't done more itself to innovate. To be fair, we've never asked the city to archive videos of Council hearings or make them available on demand; still, maybe we shouldn't have to.
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