Live and On‐Demand Video Streaming RFP

Here is the RFP for South Kingstown's MEETING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: Live and On‐Demand Video Streaming, Agenda Management, and Minutes Automation. I found out about it only by listening to the broadcast of Monday's Town Council meeting yesterday (Wednesday) on the public access channel. The document was not on the Town's web site: That is, separate searches for "streaming", "video", and "rfp" did not result in any relevant page or document.

Re: Data.gov.uk Newspaper

It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for the first time. ¶ It gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics.

More at Data.gov.uk Newspaper

The Three Laws of Open Government Data

The Three Laws of Open Government Data:

1) If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist
2) If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage
3) If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower

More at the three laws of open government data.

The City of Nanaimo has been pushing the envelope on open data and open government for a number of years now.

"At first blush the site seems normal. There is the standard video of the council meeting (queue cheesy local cable access public service announcement), but the meeting minutes underneath are actually broken down by the second and by clicking on them you can jump straight to that moment in the meeting. [...]

"Given Nanaimo’s modest size (it has 78,692 citizens) suggests they have a modest IT budget. So I asked Chris McLuckie, a City of Nanaimo public servant who worked on the project. He informed me that the system was built in-house by him and another city staff member; it uses off-the-shelf hardware and software and so cost under $2,000 and it took two weeks to code up."

How to Engage Citizens on a Municipal Website...

Update: It looks like the City of Nanaimo made the wise choice to use a comprehensive content management solition with elementCMS rather than waste their citizens' money building in house a feature-poor equivalent.

City of Vancouver's open data and information motion

“On May 21st, 2009 the City of Vancouver passed a motion that directed City Staff to begin sharing the data and information the city collects, to share this data in open standards and to place open source on an equal footing with proprietary software.

“Below is a simple version of the motion - one that could serve as a template for other cities.

“Consequently, this page is designed to be a place where interested citizens, politicians and public citizens other cities can suggest changes, propose edits, copy and repurpose the template. If your city has passed a motion that addresses open data, open standards and/or open source, let us know and we will post the motion to this website so other cities can leverage the work of others.”

open city motion v.1.1

Suggestions on best practices for school web sites

I was asked for some guidance or suggestions on best practices for school web sites, specifically for a K-8 district. The demographics of the town are such that about 64% of the kids in the public schools are hispanic with a significant number of those students coming from homes where only the children speak English. Additionally, the website would be part of a larger strategy of trying to get out the message that the public schools are way better than most tax-payers/parents would tend to believe. [...]

The full posting is at Suggestions on best practices for school web sites

Citizens for a Better Providence

"Our mission is to promote effective, efficient and transparent governance in the City of Providence that fairly serves the best interest of all of the city's residents. We will • Hold elected officials accountable • Educate the citizenry • Mobilize citizens, promote participation • Work collaboratively w/ government"

Citizens for a Better Providence

MediaBugs rethinks corrections by taking a page from programmers

"Scott Rosenberg, best known as the co-founder of Salon, has been mulling this idea for a while, and last week, he received a $335,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to build MediaBugs, the first correction-tracking system for news outlets in the San Francisco Bay Area."

MediaBugs rethinks corrections by taking a page from programmers

New York City is leading the way on open records

New York City is leading the way on open records. In Introduction 991, a local law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to creating open data standards, section 23-302 reads

"All public records maintained by city agencies shall be made available for inspection by the public on the Internet through a single web portal that is linked to nyc.gov or any successor website maintained by or on behalf of the city of New York."

Let's congratulate Council Members Brewer, Lappin, Gonzalez, James, Liu and White,Jr.

Where can I play hoop around here?

Courts of the World (via) is a great example of grassroots data sharing. There is no need for municipal or school administrations to particpate but think how great it would be if every Parks and Recreation Director across the USA spent 20 minutes next week entering data about the courts under thier management. And do it again next year, same place, same time.

Establishing your identity authoritatively on the internet is almost impossible

Are you who you say you are? Establishing your identity authoritatively on the internet is almost impossible to do. Just because an email account, LinkedIn id, Twitter id, Facebook profile, Ning profile, AOL id, etc uses the letters A N D R E W G I L M A R T I N does not mean it is me. The only way to establish identity is to build a body of evidence online. So that when I search for you online I find a lot of information (bits) that link these online presences to your life of family, friends, work, and possessions (atoms). If you are a politician, administrator, candidate, or anyone with the need to have a public identity make sure you get online soon and build that body of evidence.

This posting is inspired by Twitter to verify accounts for politicians, agencies and other celebs. Which is an idea doomed from the start to failure.

You might also be interested in Geoffrey Bilder's trust tag on Delicious.

Waltham Forest's town map leads the way ahead

The town of Waltham Forest in the UK has a fine example of combining Google's mapping tools with its place data. You can use the map to find 31 categories of information including polling stations, parks, post offices, and road works. All information useful in an average person's day. Now compare this to South Kingstown's map which contains none of this information.

It is good that South Kingstown has an online map. This is a first step towards more citizen awareness but more needs to be done. More data is needed. More browsers need to be supported (Macintosh users can't access it with Safari). More standards and de facto standards need to be adhered too. And, above all, the "GIS Web Site Disclaimer" needs to be removed.

Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals

"Within both the government and large businesses, there is a huge cultural challenge to integrating collaborative technologies into a traditional, siloed organization to create more adaptive entities. But ultimately this integration needs to occur to some degree in order for the government - and by extension, the society it governs - to behave in an anticipatory manner (emphasis added) instead of the reactive one most are used to."

Mark Drapeau in Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals nicely characterizes the reasons and challenges of geeks and social media types have become interested in government.

How did the Town's new website come about?

Last week I made a written request for all the records concerning the Town Administration's new web site. The administration has 10 business days to respond to the APRA (§ 38-2-8 Administrative appeals) and so I hope to receive a response around June 4. I will telephone Stephen Alfred (Town Manager) tomorrow to get a status update.

RSS feed only for home page

This morning I noticed that the RSS feed for the Town's new website did not include the agenda for last night's Town Council meeting. It turns out that the RSS feed is only for the home page. Notice of changes within the website are not available. This situation is unexpected and unacceptable for an information website released in 2009.

Digging through my email archive I found that my first email to the Town Administration about RSS feeds was in April 2006.

Use postal mail to help inform Town Councilors

I have sent the posting Connecting printed information with web information as a letter to the Town Council. I am thinking of sending others over the next several weeks. Feel free to send to them any you find useful too.

...

Town Council
180 High St
Wakefield, RI 02879

Dear Councilors:

....

Yours truly,

Connecting printed information with web information

MedaShift has the story QR Codes Connect Print to the Web. It is a good story about using a common referencing system for linking an article in print to materials on the web. We use referencing systems all the time in our daily lives to link one item to another. Examples include page numbers, citations, social security numbers, surnames, UPC codes, etc. Using QR Codes to linking items in print to items online is the wrong system. In this blog I am interested in practical tools for use today, in the USA, and not the near future.

It is an unfamiliar mental leap to link a QR code with a web page. The QR code does not look like a URL or a domain name. For most people, the QR code looks like a United Parcel Service (UPC) tracking identifier. Perhaps the greatest obstacle, however, is that the user has no existing experience of coordinating the use of their phone's camera, an image identification service (with some parts on the phone and and parts on the internet), and the phone's web-browser to access information. I think these factors will lead to too either significant technical support costs or simply being ignored.

A better identifier for print is simply a short URL like the ones offered by bit.ly and Tiny URL services. A URL shortening service enables you to print a very short URL that when used in a web-browser will automatically redirect the user to the actual URL. For example, the short URL http://bit.ly/8iOGq will redirect you to http://www.southkingstownri.com/calendars/town-meetings/town-council-regular-session-work-session-begins-645pm.

The bit.ly service also provides some usage data about the shortened URL. There is nothing technically challenging to offering such a service and so the shortened URL can be closely associated with the Town or School. For example, the bit.ly example above could instead be http://skri.ws/8iOGq.

A shortened URL service offers all the advantages of QR codes as outlined in the MediaShift article with none of the experiential and technical problems. Plus, the reader can write down the short URL for use at another time and place.

So, the next time you see a public notice in print, like this notice on a tree on Saugatucket Rd, call Town Hall or the School Administration and ask why they did not include a short URL to get more information about the notice.

Audio of May 19 joint meeting

The audio from the joint meeting between the Town Council, the School Committee, and South Kingstown's state legislators (Monday, May 18, 2009) is available at Archive.org. Also, read Liz Boardman's coverage in the South County Independent.

FYI: Journalism and the new news origanization's three products

Readers of this blog might be interested in my posting Journalism and the new news origanization's three products in Calliope Sounds my (more) personal blog.

An additional way of thinking

I have been reflecting on why I was unsuccessful with my advocacy of automatic open records. This will take some time to work through, but as I make discoveries I will post them here.

One aspect that is becoming clearer is that my deep understanding of data, informed by 30 years of computational thinking and practice, is so natural to me that I did not address educating others. When I posted here good examples of open government I often did not explain how what was done addressed the fundamentals of what I was advocating.

One of the fundamentals is about data. Data has identity (an "address" at never changes), granularity (levels of detail and/or composition), and relationships (to data inside and data outside the system). Data is mostly available but sometimes it is missing. Data is mostly consistent but sometimes it is inconsistent. All these dimensions and their management are in play in my mind all the time. But I am not overwhelmed by this complexity nor the weight of the volume of data. I have the necessary skills to abstract, compartmentalize, and conquer the problem. This kind of mindfulness is not how most people think.

It is the mindfulness of the computer scientist. You can't use this name in public discourse, however. The public perception of a computer scientist, if any, is either someone who knows how to get their laptop to print or some esoteric mathematician. Neither of these perceptions encompass what is at the core of computer science. That core is problem solving and whole bunch of algorithms and data structures to be used systematically to approach problem solutions.

Within computer science there is the new discipline of Computational Thinking. This was kicked off in Jeannette Wings's manifesto. This essay is written for computer scientists so don't bother reading it -- just yet. Instead, listen to Jon Udell's interview with (South Kingstown's own) Joan Peckham.

Advice on making community

When people use your electronic systems to do anything, renew a fishing license, register a pregnancy, apply for planning permission, given them the option to collaborate with other people going through or affected by the same process. They will feel less alone, and will help your services to reform from the bottom up.

Top 5 Internet Priorities for the Next Government (any next Government) by Tom Steinberg.

Eight steps to building an ideal community information hub

In Building the Ideal Community Information Hub Mark Glaser writes about what is beginning to emerge from the comments to PBS Engage's What are your information needs? mentioned here in an earlier posting. Glaser lists eight steps to building an ideal community information hub:

• Crack open government data and access.
• Bring together all stake-holders in the community for face-to-face discussions.
• Teach digital media literacy as a basic course for all. Bridge the digital divide.
• Create an online hub that aggregates local information.
• Boost community radio with local reports, roundtable discussions, deeper looks at issues.
• Disseminate information with smaller run print publications.
• Rethink public access TV with online hooks.
• Make libraries an important real-world hub.

Update: My earlier attribution of these eight steps to Peter Shane, Knight Commission's executive director, was wrong. I read the article too fast and missed where Shane's quotation ended and Glaser's analysis began.

Twitter status updates explained

What is Twitter useful for? This presentation does a good job in a minute explaining that Twitter enables you to have a background-level awareness of what is happening in your social group. If you are an organization, like the Peace Dale School or the Neighborhood Guild, you can become part of these social groups. You can then use Twitter to keep informed the children's parents and the Guild's users of the day's buzz.

Status updates explained from quub.com on Vimeo.

Public Input: How Do You Get Local Information?

PBS Engage is partnering with the Knight Commission to seek public input and offer an interactive experience at www.pbs.org/publicinput from Tuesday April 21 – Friday May 8, 2009. Here are the questions and my responses to them. Please add your input even if it is only to answer one or two of the five questions.

1. Where do you find your information? Newspapers? Online? Television? Radio? What kinds of information do you wish you could find more easily?

I use National Public Radio and internet news sites (mostly the New York Times and Washington Post) for national and global news. I use town newspaper (South County Independent) and regional newspapers (Providence Journal) and some internet blogs for local news. However, regarding local news I do not have a general sense that I am informed about what I need to know.

2. In your local community, what kinds of information do you need to inform the decisions you make, and improve your understanding of the community in which you live? (For example, information about local election issues and candidates, the quality of schools, social services, tax assessments, etc.) Is it difficult to find the information you need?

There are many notices of public events and actions but no single means of discovering them or aggregating them. The municipal legal notices are published in a newspaper I do not read. I have no children in the public schools and so school events and actions are not communicated to me. Municipal meetings are limited to in-person participation; there is no means of effectively communicating one's position due to the 48 hour meeting notice lead time and no means of timely reviewing meetings after the fact -- minutes are not posted online for weeks, if ever, and there is no video/audio. Facebook and blogs help but notice of events and actions is very fragmented.

3. Local newspapers have always been distributors of information and catalysts for civic involvement, but as traditional forms of media evolve (and in some cases close shop), how can local governments improve public access to the information communities need?

I have written about this in the blog http://southkingstownrinow.blogspot.com/. The best way is to require all activities and digital artifacts of municipal and school administrations be created and maintained online. There they automatically can become open records. Administrative action is then necessary only to redact records. With the raw data available, community members can use the existing internet tools to assemble news and events feeds for themselves and others.

4. Do you think everyone in your community has access to the networks they need (online or in-person) to find important information? How would you improve the skills of people of all ages to take advantage of online information tools and networks?

Everyone has a cell phone. This is an information device. This device is becoming more capable every year. The cell networks are further reaching every year. It is this mobile platform that should be used for current awareness. A desktop/laptop computer should be used for long term awareness.

5. How would you improve the quality of information available to the general public? (For example, do you have ideas for making government more transparent or strengthening institutions that help distribute information, like libraries or news organizations?)

Having the information online is inevitable. What is less obvious is how we will make it discoverable and usable. The discovery can be addressed, in part, by search but without good cataloging a found item's context will be unknown. If the found item uses a data format not accessible to me (because I lack the tools) then it is useless. Further, if the data does not speak to me in my context -- poor and functionally illiterate and only able to use the most basic of diagrammatic, numerical, and written narratives vs the author of this posting -- then it continues to be useless. There needs to be public and private support for a new societal role of data librarian -- one part cataloger, one part arbitrator, and one part translator.

Designing for Big Data

As a follow up to the posting Transparency is bunk is Jeff Veen's presentation Designing for Big Data. The relevance to this web site is his statement at the end of the presentation that we need to have tools that don't tell specific stories about data but enable you to discover the stories in the data. It is my belief that the future of investigative journalism will combine traditional storytelling as static narrative and analytical storytelling as dynamic visualization.

Transparency is Bunk

Aaron Swartz in his posting Transparency is Bunk raises again the very real problem of fake-transparency

"The way a typical US transparency project works is pretty simple. You find a government database, work hard to get or parse a copy, and then put it online with some nice visualizations.

"The problem is that reality doesn’t live in the databases. Instead, the databases that are made available, even if grudgingly, form a kind of official cover story, a veil of lies over the real workings of government. If you visit a site like GovTrack, which publishes information on what Congresspeople are up to, you find that all of Congress’s votes are on inane items like declaring holidays and naming post offices. The real action is buried in obscure subchapters of innocuous-sounding bills and voted on under emergency provisions that let everything happen without public disclosure."

This is why I have been advocating for automatic open records. I don't want to have secondary information and data from South Kingstown's Town and School Administrations. I want the information work products of the tools they use to be automatically available to me. I don't want see an edited and polished representation. I want the actual thing.

Swartz goes on to say

[...] so I want to add a helpful alternative: journalism. Investigative journalism lives up to the promise that transparency sites make."

I could not agree more with him. This is the role of journalism. Let the role of "news" be handled by the services of machines digesting the data coming from automatic open records. Let the journalists do the intellectually stimulating and demanding job of investigation. (And the import job of cultural reporting.) I doubt that Liz Boardman will miss attending another pro-forma Town Council meeting.

Town of South Kingstown Council votes against the “Automatic Open Records”

Yesterday night the Town of South Kingstown Council voted against the “Automatic Open Records” petition funding the “Automatic Open Records” Committee outlined in my letter to the Town Council on March 30, 2009 [1]. The general tenor of the comments were that the goal is good but that funding it now is not good.

Each of the Council members gave their specific reasons for voting against the funding.

Councilor O'Neill said that he was discouraged by the “Bowling Alone” culture [2]. Having more people attend (in person) public meetings was important to him. My rebuttal was that this is a societal issue not reasonably to be addressed by one councilor. As our representative he should be going to where the people are rather than expecting them to come to him.

Councilor Eddy said she did not know if it was the will of the people. My rebuttal was that a petition is a statement of the will of the people. That over 95% of the people I asked to support the petition did so and signed. I am not sure how clearer it can be.

Councilor Hagan McEntee said that the Town Administration was preparing a new web site and hoped this would address some of what I have been asking for. My rebuttal was that I have been involved with advocating for automatic open records since the beginning of the budget process (November 2009) and during this time I have not seen a single request for public input into the new web site. This is a clear indication that the Town Council and the Town Administration sees this issue as a clerical one and not as an infrastructure one.

Councilor Fogarty spoke about the costs of delivering and supporting the tools and data. My rebuttal was that the physical costs of these are minor compared to the staffing costs. These are costs the town already incurs. I wish I had reminded her that she had the same objection at an earlier meeting and that my response then was the same as now: If you don't study the problem how will you know what the costs are and this is the purpose of the Committee.

I am afraid that I have forgotten Councilor Whaley's specific objections. She did touch on the issue of not understanding why a committee should be funded. Councilors Eddy, Fogarty, and Hagan McEntee touched on this to. (Councilor O'Neill did not object to the funding amount.) I did not directly respond to this objection during the meeting. I regret this because this was the actual issue at hand. Let me do so here.

An effective committee needs engaged members and adequate support. Support ranges from having expert testimony, to gathering option, to making photocopies. Remunerating an expert for time and expenses is an obvious cost. The making and tabulating an option poll has obvious costs. And there are the less obvious costs of advertising a meeting, turning the lights on and air conditioning the meeting room, photocopying the working documents, and recoding the meeting. (Many of these costs were enumerated in my letter [1].) The members volunteer their time and expertise but we shouldn't expect this of its support. And so from who's budget are these costs paid? A funded Committee adds further transparency to the process.

In the end, however, the lack of success for “automatic open records” is mine. In political terms my efforts was an “issues campaign.” An issue campaign's success is achieved by ever broadening the support. Each supporter needs to understand the issue from their perspective. This is something I will have to more steadily attend to the next time.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement. I look forward to our Councilors' commitment to addressing automatic open records later this year.

[1] http://southkingstownrinow.blogspot.com/2009/03/letter-to-town-council-30-march-2009.html
[2] http://www.bowlingalone.com/

Governing as Social Networking

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, recently gave the presentation Governing as Social Networking. While his speech is not available his slide deck is. The deck has lots of data to think about, but I really liked the set of slides starting at #33, "There is a new pattern of communication, influence, and support in a world of networked individuals."

He states that there are four steps in the flow of communication:

1) Attention
2) Acquisition
3) Assessment
4) Action

The slides that follow explain how to address the steps. Well worth reading and thinking about.

Governing as social networking

View more presentations from PewInternet.

IT is not a simple clerical matter

Today's Narragansett Times (22 April 2009) has an article about reinstating the live broadcasting of Narragansett Town Council meetings. The $30,000 to $40,000 prices quoted by Verizon and Cox are outrageous. For about $500 in additional hardware the Town could use its existing equipment to stream the meetings live over the web using Ustream.Tv. With a little more coordination the meetings could be made available for later viewing at Archive.org.

My research and experience over the last few months has told me that municipalities are not being given good technical direction. Municipal IT (Information Technology) needs to treated strategically and not as a simple clerical matter. Until that is done we are going to continue to see our money poorly spent.

Tufte on Recovery.gov

Edward Tufte -- the author of many fine books on information visualization and their understanding -- is consulting on Recovery.gov. Follow this at Describing and tracking stimulus projects totaling $787,000,000,000 on the internet: any ideas?. Thank to Ed Manlove for the reference.

Petition seeks budget funds to study more record access

The South County Independent newspaper had a good story about the petition this week. You can read the whole article at Petition seeks budget funds to study more record access.

Update: The South County Independent URL has been updated. Thanks to Brian Jepson for the error report and fix.

Practical Tips for Government Web Sites To Improve Their Findability in Search

Vanessa Fox's article Practical Tips for Government Web Sites To Improve Their Findability in Search gives good advise on making your site more useful to Google's, Yahoo!'s, and others search engines. In short

• Use XML Sitemaps
• Don't block access to content
• Avoid dead ends when moving content
• Use descriptive ALT text for images
• Ensure all links are working and that the server is responsive
• Ensure each page has a unique title and meta description that accurately describe the page
• Ensure links are functional with JavaScript disabled
• Use progressive enhancement best practices to ensure a usable experience with Flash, JavaScript, and similar elements disabled
• Understand the fundamentals of search engine friendly web architecture

Monica Guzman: Being an Awesome News Commenter

One of the difficulties of participation is knowing how to. Having more opportunities for participation alone does not make it any easier. Today you can speak at a meeting, write a letter, phone, TXT, email, instant message, twitter, blog, vlog, etc. Still, if the message is not crafted then it will likely be ignored. This video of Monica Guzman's Ignite presentation on Being an Awesome News Commenter is a good start at understanding how to craft your message.



The Ignite format is a great at focusing the speaker and the audience. The speaker has to tell the story in 5 minutes with 20 slides that auto-forward every 15 seconds. The audience contributes 5 minutes too. It would be very interesting to use this format in a public forum. I wonder if anyone has?

April 6 and 7 Town Council budget meetings not online

I was unable to convert the DVDs of the April 6 and 7 Town Council budget meetings for use online. The AoA software I use was unable convert past 8 min on one DVD and 40 mins on the other DVD.

These DVDs are copies of the original DVDs recorded using PBS's loaner recording equipment. The new recording equipment arrived a few days ago and so I hope we will be able to get an online version of the April 27 budget meeting.

Need to an explanation of redacted expenses

The first expense I looked at at the DEM was April's FEES: MISCELLANEOUS and every expense was redacted. The DEM spent $12,337.97 in April on unknown fees. If fees continue for a year then there will be $148,055.64 of expenses for no known reason.

If I understand correctly, based on the Attorney General's Guide to Open Government in Rhode Island, 5th Edition, the redactions do not need to be explained. However, given that $148,055.64 is no small amount of money, some explanation, within the spirit of APRA, should be given for redacted expenses.

State of Rhode Island's Transparency Portal

State of Rhode Island's Transparency Portal

"This website provides two methods to track government spending. The first is the RIPAY website; this allows users to search for expenditures by vendor. The second method is the Open Government expenditure search; this provides the ability to review spending in the context of expenditure classifications. The data presented for each method is updated weekly from the State accounting system and is presented in a user-friendly format.

"The information on RIPAY has existed for several years and relates to all State agencies. At this time, the open government expenditure search is applicable only to the agencies listed below. In the near future, expenditures for other State agencies will be available."

Smartpens and public meeting

How could a $200 tool dramatically change a public meeting? The tool is Lightscribe's Pulse smartpen. The Pulse is an ink pen that when used on specially marked paper digitally records the text written and the words spoken (actually, any audio within reach of its microphone). What is equally remarkable is that you can use the pen to replay the audio associated with any of the written text at any time in the future. When using this in a meeting you now have

1) an audio record of the meeting with its discussions, dissensions, monologues, etc,
2) a textual record of the meeting, including content such as minutes, notes, illustrations, etc, and
3) a timeline (or living graph) that connects the two.

Here is an example used in Michael Wesch's cultural anthropology classroom: [Show in full screen for best effect.]



Now imagine this tool being used within a public meeting. One scenario is to use it as in the classroom example above, a secretary uses the Pulse to record the meeting. The secretary would use the actual paper of the meeting's agenda [1] to record who and what is said throughout the meeting. A limit of this scenario is that while you hear many voices you can not (digitally) identify the voices and that the textual record is only that of the secretary. (And being a good secretary is a learned skill.) A second scenario is to give each public board member a Pulse and have them record their thoughts on the actual paper of the meeting. Since each member has a Pulse there is no need to record who is speaking. Instead, at the end of the meeting, collect the Pulses and the notes and then use an online tool to present (on the web) all the records as individual records and in combination.

Generally, the audio and notes of a meeting is far more significant than the video of a meeting. And this can be had for $200 and a little creativity.

[1] The Livescript paper is special only in that it has patterns printed on it (in light blue) that the Pulse pen understands as page location coordinates and others as commands. You can purchase sheets of the paper to use with any photocopier. In the future, Livescribe has said, you will be able to print both the agenda (or other "form") and the codes at the same time on normal paper.

AG cannot interpret or express an opinion on charter

I received a response from Laura Ann Marasco, Special Assistant Attorney General, in the Open Government unit of the Department of Attorney General to my email requesting a legal opinion on sub-section 4222.C of the Town's charter. The upshot is that it is a Town matter and so the AG can not interpret or express opinion. She suggests contacting the Town Council or and Town Solicitor.

The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory

O'Reilly Radar has the interesting posting The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory by John Geraci. The title alone characterizes what I hope is the near future for South Kingstown.

The idea of using crowdsourcing to provide or enhance government services is a very powerful one. Crowdsourcing aims to improve a service or data by enabling the users of the service or data to have a hand in improving it. The Wikipedia is perhaps the most widely known online example. The Great Backyard Bird Count the most widely known off-line example. Lesser well known examples, examples that many of you participate in, include adding new words to Microsoft Word's spelling dictionary and rating movies on Netflix. The goal is to use the wisdom of the crowd and the specific knowledge of an individual together. And usually at little cost to the municipality and little inconvenience to the individual.

Stumblesafely and quantifiable awareness

O'Reilly Radar has an interesting interview with Eric Gunderson of Development Seed on the Promise of Open Data. One of the projects Development Seed worked on is Stumblesafely which mashed-up bar locations with crime data to help Washington, D.C. area bar-goers pick the safest places to drink. Unfortunately, the mash-up shows there is no safe place to drink!

Being able to build these kinds of awareness tools with public data will objectively ground the conversation about the costs of safety for both the people and the police. They can both use the information to advocate for using money to an end that's success can be measured.

How to track changes in documents

Today I received an email from a wiki at PBWiki containing information about all the documents at the wiki that were changed yesterday. The information includes not only the list of changed documents but also a visual indication of the changes to those documents. I can't share the actual email but in image to the left you can see each changed page is given its own blue section in the email. The blue section contains the page's content (or a portion of the content) with deletions marked in red and additions marked in green.

This kind of document change visualization is commonly used in software development organizations for reviewing changes to all manner of document kinds. We should expect the same from our government when reviewing the drafts and final copy of legislation, zoning changes, etc.

The Versioning on Paper video is a enlightening and frightening example of what needs to be done today to track document changes.

Sign the petition to establish an automatic open records committee

We have the petition in hand. Come by Sweet Cakes tomorrow morning between 8 and 10 AM to get your coffee and sign the petition. If you can't make it then, send me an email, andrew@andrewgilmartin.com and we will coordinate a time and place for you to support this effort.

The municipal ombudsman

I wonder if any municipality has an ombudsman. How is this person (or group) selected? What is the legal relationship between the ombudsman and the municipality's elected representatives?

What happens when there is no paper-of-record

"The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816. ME 14:384

I have recently been thinking about what would happen if there was no newspaper of record? What if the only local publication that vaguely qualified was the weekly shopper? Would that become the newspaper of record? This would be absurd.

So what have towns done when this happens? I suspect they have used a regional newspaper, such as RI's Providence Journal. The question then becomes, what happens when, as might well soon happen with the Providence Journal, the regional newspaper goes out of business?

Without objective, neutral, and investigative reporting we would be a much sorrier society. Graft and corruption might not be the inevitable end but without the visibility into the activities of governance and administration that newspapers provide how would we know?

I am sure other towns and districts have faced this predicament. What was their solution. If you know please add a comment here.

Request for a legal opinion on sub-section 4222.C

I have decided to ask the Attorney General for an opinion on sub-section 4222.C of the new budget process. Here is my letter to Laura Marasco, Special Assistant Attorney General, at the Open Government unit:

From: Andrew Gilmartin <andrew@andrewgilmartin.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 7:28 AM
Subject: South Kingstown's new budget process
To: "Laura Marasco, Special Assistant Attorney General" <lmarasco@riag.ri.gov>

I am hoping you might be able to help me or direct me to the appropriate office within the Attorney General's offices. The Town of South Kingstown recently adopted a revision to its town charter replacing the Financial Town Meeting with a new petitioning process. This is documented in [1]. I am now engaged in using this new process to have a Committee formed to make recommends for, what I am calling, Automatic Open Records. See [2] and, more broadly, [3].

When I read sub-section 4222.C in [1] I understood this to address the needs of citizen-lead budgeted initiatives. Yesterday when I applied for the official forms for a petition I found that the Town Administration's interpretation of this sub-section was quite different. Their reading is that I may request funding but not specify now that funding is to be used. This seems absurd to me. However, I am not familiar with the established legal perspective of this kind of budget process.

Would the Attorney General be able to offer and opinion in this matter? If so, I how do I begin the process of getting this opinion?

Yours truly,
Andrew Gilmartin

[1] http://www.southkingstownri.com/upload/TSK_tenative_budget.pdf
[2] http://southkingstownrinow.blogspot.com/2009/03/petition-to-establish-automatic-open.html
[3] http://southkingstownrinow.blogspot.com/

Waiting for the petition to be officiated

I dropped off, to the Town Clerk's office, the original text of the petition and the paired down text concerned with just the funding:

New Line Item:  Automatic Open Records Committee
Funding: $1000.00
Purpose of: Supporting the Committee's activities.

It needs to be reviewed and a financial code associated with the new line item before I get the official petition. I was told that it shouldn't take more than a day to complete this work.

Letter to the Town Council, 30 March 2009

Here is my letter to the Town Council requesting the review and recommendations Committee to be formed. To support this cause, please send your own letter to the council referencing mine. Thank you.

An unhappy resolution to the petition issue

Colleen Camp called me about the petition issue. The opinion of the Town Administration's office is that my petition is actually two requests. The first request is for a Committee to be formed with a specific charge. The second request is to increase the municipal budget by $1000. They are separate requests and are processed separately. The request for money is via the petition. The request for the committee is via a letter to the Town Council. There is no way to legally link the two.

The Town Council can follow the spirit of the new budget process and honor the goal of the two requests. Or they can check the goal by either not forming the Committee or not funding the Committee.

I will send the letter to the Town Council requesting the Committee and get the partition for the Town Clerk. Luckily, I am not restricted in advocating why I want to spend $1000.

First steps in having an official petition

This morning I went to the Town Clerk's office to have the petition placed on the official documents for petitions. I was initially told by Susan Flynn (unsure) that the petition could only be used for changes to line items, that the Clerk's office would reword the petition's text, that the text would have to fit the 2/5 of a page of space allocated for it, and that this needed to be done in the Clerk's office. Needless to say, this was unacceptable. So I took the empty official documents upstairs to Stephen Alfred's, Town Manager's office. There was much concern in the Clerk's office that I should take the empty, unsigned documents upstairs!

I explained my predicament to Colleen Camp, Executive Assistant to the Town Manager, and she spoke with the Clerk's office.

According to the Clerk's office, the petition can only be used to allocate a dollar amount to a line item or to a new line item. The actual use of the money can not be specified and, perhaps, more to the point, restricted. The analogy I used with Colleen was that if you wanted to increase the budget by $500 to cut down a specific tree you could only increase the tree warden's budget and not direct which tree was to be cut. If the is how the new budget processes is to be interpreted then there is no means for effective citizen-lead budgeted initiatives.

Colleen is going to bring this situation to Steve's attention. I expect to hear from his office later today.

Community informatics

A friend sent me this link to the, relatively new, academic discipline of Community informatics. The Wikipedia article states:

"Community informatics (CI), also known as community networking, electronic community networking, community-based technologies or community technology refers to an emerging set of principles and practices concerned with the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for the personal, social, cultural or economic development of and within communities. CI as an academic discipline (and as a practice) is often located within Information Systems presented however, in conjunction with community development and other social academic and practice areas. It can be considered as a cross or interdisciplinary approach utilising ICTs for different forms of community action in the real as well as, increasingly, within the virtual spheres."

I knew of some work being done in Second Life but it seemed a little distant for practical use within the context of RI's open records and, especially, RI's open meeting's rules. However, we all need to be open to new means of achieving the ends of awareness and participation.

Putting very big images online

Today I wanted to take the USGS 7.5 Minute Series map of the Kingston, RI quadrangle images and allow the user to pan and zoom on the web. Within a few minutes I discovered Microsoft's Image Composite Editor, Photozoom, and Seadragon. These tools worked quickly, without error, and at almost no effort on my part. This is very impressive.



Note: When zooming it can take several seconds for the images to update. I believe this is the result of the volume of activity on the server.

How can the government make data more accessible?

O'Reilly Radar has the interesting article Transforming the Relationship Between Citizens and Government: Making Content Findable Online. In it, Vanessa Fox writes that 70% of citizens expect that their government has the data online but that the data is often unavailable due to it being unreachable by the internet search's engines -- Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft's Live, etc. -- and other categorization tools. She goes on to tell of efforts to address this by both past and current federal offices and administrations. Well worth reading.

Petition to establish an automatic open records committee

Update: This is an update of the original petition wording. The petition has far less unnecessary words. There has been discussion that my milestone dates were too aggressive for a government body. I have thus replaced the end date with a preliminary findings date early in the new year.

The following is the first second draft of a petition to establish a committee to bring about automatic open records to South Kingstown. Please review and send changes to andrew@andrewgilmartin.com

This petition requests the Town Council of South Kingstown to assemble a Committee to review and make recommendations regarding the normative use of online (internet) tools by municipal departments, their staff and their contractors, for the purpose of disclosing records and supporting materials (including, but not limited to, documents, drawings, diagrams, blueprints, models, audio recordings, video recordings, and maps) automatically and immediately online, without cost, for public use. The Committee's recommendations will identify activities of governance and administration, as well as the records associated with them.

The Committee's recommendations must conform to Rhode Island's Access to Public Records Act (APRA).

The Committee will establish requirements and practical guidance based on, but not limited to, reviewing existing departmental processes and tools and reviewing best practices by other organizations both public and private.

The Committee may be composed of members coming from, but not limited to, the public, municipal government, municipal boards, and school administration. The Committee will have no less than 5 members and no more than 7.

The Committee will be formed no later than June 1, 2009 and it will report its preliminary findings no later than February 1, 2009. There will be a joint public meeting between the Town Council and the Committee to present the Committee's preliminary findings soon thereafter.

The Town Council will allocate $1000 to the Committee for the purposes of holding meetings, gathering information, and other normal administrative activities associated with a committee such as, but not limited to, advertising, record keeping, photocopying, travel expense reimbursements, and speaker renumeration.

END

Revision 2 | 27 March 2009.

Budget hearing and meetings page updated

The budget hearings and meetings page has been updated to include the March 3, 4, 5, 12, and 16 hearings and meetings.

How to use Archive.org for hosting municipal video and audio

I have been using Internet Archive to host the video and audio of the town budget hearings. This is a free service and the only one that I know of that does not limit the size of the upload or how much is uploaded over a specific time period. It is also a little rough for the uploader to use.

The tool ccPublisher is a good tool to uploading content to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, for long duration uploads, as is common with large video files, I have not found it reliable. For short duration uploads it works very well. I am sure it will get better over time but for now I have been using the following process.

This following process is both long in number of steps and long in duration. However, the amount of your actual time is very little -- around 15 to 25 minutes.

1. Prepare content

Place all the files you want to transfer into the same directory. Make sure the file names have the correct format -- MP4 for video and MP3 for audio are widely usable -- and have names that, when sorted by name, order the files in the correct sequence. The files uploaded in this example are called

DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp3
DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp4
DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-02.mp3
DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-02.mp4
DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-03.mp3
DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-03.mp4

These names are the names given the AoA tools I used to transfer the files from DVD to my computer. The names of these files are not significant to archive.org. If they are going to be significant to your users than a common practice is to name the files will a leading two digit numeric prefix, for example

01_SK_RI_USA_TC_BUDGET_HEARING_4_AUDIO.mp3
01_SK_RI_USA_TC_BUDGET_HEARING_4_VIDEO.mp4
02_SK_RI_USA_TC_BUDGET_HEARING_4_AUDIO.mp3
02_SK_RI_USA_TC_BUDGET_HEARING_4_VIDEO.mp4
03_SK_RI_USA_TC_BUDGET_HEARING_4_AUDIO.mp3
03_SK_RI_USA_TC_BUDGET_HEARING_4_VIDEO.mp4

2. Upload request

Connect to http://archive.org/.

Create an account for yourself.

On the home page follow the "contributions" link (to http://www.archive.org/contribute.php)

On the "Contribution Center" page follow the "Create and upload a new movie, audio recording, live concert recording, or book." (link to http://www.archive.org/create/)

On the "Create Item" page follow the "files over 500 MB" link (to http://www.archive.org/create.php?ftp=1)

On this page enter the identifier for the uploaded content in the "Enter a name for your item (no spaces please!):" and then press "Create Item". The identifier requested is used to name and group all of the uploaded content. For example, if you have one video and one audio file they will be collectively be named with the identifier. This identifier is public and must be globally unique: Use something that is globally meaningful such as 1) to always including the location "SK_RI_USA", 2) always include the date in YYYY_MM_DD format (eg 2009_01_31), and 3) include a very short description (eg "TOWN_COUNCIL_MEETING", "PLANING_BOARD_MEETING", "BUDGET_HEARING", etc). Mixed letter case and numbers can be used in the identifier.

If all goes well you will then be presented with

checking for item identifier availability...
Identifier is free. Setting up FTP upload directory for you...

And then the page "Your item is now checked out and ready for FTP". This page contains two suggestions of how to upload the content. The following method describes using the "ftp" command line utility available on all operating systems. The ftp utility is ancient (in computing terms) but is also very reliable. I did use a few Microsoft Windows ftp clients but all failed to be reliable enough (even ones that I use often in my professional life!). If you have not used FTP before try to have have someone work with you the first time you use it.

The "Using an FTP Client" directions tell you what host to connect to and how to login in. However, once logged in it would be useful it they also told you to 1) place the file transfer in binary mode and 2) tell ftp to not prompt for confirmation. The following is log of upload the three video and three audio files associates with Budget Hearing #4.

3. Upload content

Connect to the FTP server from your computer. Make sure to start the ftp command from the directory containing your files.

ftp ia331416.us.archive.org

Connected to ia331416.us.archive.org.
220-Welcome to Pure-FTPd.
220-You are user number 8 of 500 allowed.
220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity.

Enter your archive.org account name -- which is usually your email address.

Name (ia331416.us.archive.org:ajg): NAME@ADDRESS.DOMAIN

Enter the account name's associated password.

331 User NAME@ADDRESS.DOMAIN OK. Password required
Password: **************

230-User NAME@ADDRESS.DOMAIN has group access to: 5000
230-This server supports FXP transfers
230 OK. Current restricted directory is /
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.

Set the file transfer mode as binary.

bin

200 TYPE is now 8-bit binary

Turn off the tool's prompts. Doing this will allow you to transfer multiple files without needing to confirm each one.

prompt

Interactive mode off.

Change directories to the one to hold the transferred files. The name of this directory will have been given in archive.org's ftp instructions.

cd SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4

250 OK. Current directory is /SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4

Transfer the files.

mput *

local: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp3 remote: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp3
200 PORT command successful
150 Connecting to port 52602
226-File successfully transferred
226 1544.853 seconds (measured here), 33.45 Kbytes per second
52908408 bytes sent in 1536.93 secs (33.6 kB/s)

local: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp4 remote: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp4
[...]

local: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp4 remote: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-02.mp3
[...]

local: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp4 remote: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-02.mp4
[...]

local: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp4 remote: DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-03.mp3
[...]

Confirm that that are all there and have the right sizes.

ls

200 PORT command successful
150 Connecting to port 49219
-rw-rw---- 1 2001 5003 175 Mar 22 18:43 CLICK_HERE_WHEN_DONE.htm
--w--w---- 1 2001 5000 52908408 Mar 22 19:12 DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp3
--w--w---- 1 2001 5000 357488815 Mar 22 22:07 DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-01.mp4
--w--w---- 1 2001 5000 2062890 Mar 23 09:38 DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-02.mp3
--w--w---- 1 2001 5000 11799828 Mar 23 10:29 DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-02.mp4
--w--w---- 1 2001 5000 7758106 Mar 23 09:52 DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-03.mp3
--w--w---- 1 2001 5000 52444588 Mar 23 11:49 DVD_VIDEO_RECORDER-03.mp4
-rw-rw---- 1 2001 5003 198 Mar 22 18:43 SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4_reviews.xml

Done.

exit

If any of the above steps should fail to complete you can start again any number of times within a 48 hour period. If you have successfully transferred more than one large file, you can avoid re-transferring it by using the "put" command instead of the "mput" command. This command requires that you name the file to transfer. You can also not use the "prompt" command and so you will be asked which files to transfer with a simple "yes" or "no".

The video files are large and so their upload will use most of your available upload bandwidth and so it is best to perform this hours long activity over night.

4. Providing meta-data

Once the upload is complete you follow the link in step 4 of the "Using an FTP Client" directions. If you are concerned with loosing this web page then save the page to your local disk. Following the link (to http://www.archive.org/checkin/SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4) will lead to the page

Not ready yet. Waiting 10 seconds for checkin...
Not ready yet. Waiting 10 seconds for checkin...
Not ready yet. Waiting 10 seconds for checkin...
You may now see your updated item at: http://www.archive.org/details/SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4

At this point your audio and video content has been accepted buy it needs some legal and descriptive meta-data. The page at http://www.archive.org/details/SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4 will ask you for this.

The defaults at this page are generally acceptable. So, for the video accept that they are "Open Source Movies".

The next page is "Metadata editor for SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4". The only two meta-data that I have been adding is the title and the license.

Entering the titles is done at the "title" field.

South Kingstown, RI, USA Town Council Budget Hearing #4

Entering the license is done at the "licenseurl" field. I have been using the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

licenseurl: Choose license

In the pop up window select "No" for both "Allow commercial uses of your work?" and "Allow modifications of your work?". Now click "Select License" and then the link at "You may now proceed"

You are done setting meta-data. There are other meta-data areas that could be used for, for example, agenda and minutes.

To complete the process press the "Submit" button.

After a few minutes you should be able to refresh your SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4 details page and see your changes. If you continue to see the "???" form then archive.org has not finished processing the meta-data.

Initially, the details page will only have the audio ready for streaming.Within a few hours the video will also available for streaming.

5. Finishing up

At that point is is worth making a web page on your web site that embeds the video and video. It is also very helpful if you include a link to an RSS 2.0 feed suitable for use with iTunes. You will have to manually create this file or use one of the commercial packages that aid in this file's creation and, sometimes, hosting. (I think the costs associated with these tools are too high.)

I will update this page with corrections and more detail as time and feedback permits. Archive.org does allow you to do test submissions. Try one yourself to confirm that the process is only long and not complicated.

Revision: 1.1

South Kingstown Budget Hearing #4 online

The South Kingstown Budget Hearing #4 -- the missing one -- has been uploaded and will soon be available for use. The original video recording of the hearing had no audio. (The reason for this error is not known.) However, the Town Clerk's transcription tapes did have the audio. The Town Administrator's office transferred the transcription tape's audio to the video. There is poor synchronization between the two but, at the very least, we now have both the audio and the video record of the hearing available online. I want to thank the administration for doing this for us.

Later today I will update the budget hearings page on this site and the iTunes podcast feed. In the meantime, you can get the video and audio at at http://www.archive.org/details/SK_RI_USA_2009_03_12_BUDGET_HEARING_4.

The video and audio is split into three parts. I do not know why. I will ask for an explanation the next time I contact the Town Administrator's office.

How much money do does the Town spend on communications and on participation?

There is so much interest and action being taken to opening government. It is becoming difficult to keep current. I don't object to this at all as it clearly indicates the need for a different kind transparency in our governance. The old systems, put in place in a far different time than our own, need to be replaced. Now is a good time. As South Kingstown's town manager has said "recessions provide opportunities for re-evaluating services and the cost of services."

How much money do does the Town spend on communications and on participation? How effective is communications and participation? A commercial business would want to see a steady increase in brand awareness and consumer preference with each dollar spent. What are the evaluation criteria for towns? I dare say that towns and schools don't have any. If it is people at meetings then we have something near three ten thousands of a percent participation (0.0003%). That is, of the 21,000 registered voters in South Kingstown about 5 will attend a public meeting.

16 March 2009 South Kingstown Town Council meeting is now online

The 16 March 2009 South Kingstown Town Council meeting is now online.

video audio

Audio missing for budget hearing #4

The Town Administration office telephoned me this afternoon to inform me that the DVD recording of last night's budget hearing between the Town Council and the School Committee has no audio! It makes no sense to upload the video without the audio. The audio, is after all, the most substantive aspect of the recording.

I am deeply disappointed with this situation. I had company at the house last night and so had to miss the hearing. I had been satisfied, however, that I would be able to listen to it this weekend. I suspect others had expected this also.

Imagine a 311 application for the iPhone

The New York Times has the forward thinking article Imagine a 311 Application for the iPhone. 311 has become a great way for cities and, someday, towns to help citizens and provide information. For more information about 311 services see American City & County's HELP! 311 Centers, 911 Relief.

Existing South Kingstown online information sources

I have been gathering a list of online South Kingstown information sources. I have been using the tools at Friend Feed to create a stream (aka feed) of this information. You can view the stream at http://friendfeed.com/southkingstownri. If you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to the feed from there too.

If you know of additional information sources you would like to have added to the feed notify me by adding a comment to this posting with the source's name and URL.

Town of South Kingstown's budget hearings and meetings

Here are the links to Town of South Kingstown's budget hearings.

To listen to the hearings on your iPod or other MP3 player you can download the audio using the podcast at http://andrewgilmartin.com/share/sk-rss.xml. See iTunes and the budget hearings.

Note: This posting replaces the previous postings about the hearings' availability.

Budget Hearing #1, 3 March 2009

video audio

Budget Hearing #2, 4 March 2009

video audio

Budget Hearing #3, 5 March 2009

video audio

Budget Hearing #4, 12 March 2009

This hearing is split over three files.
video 1 of 3
video 2 of 3
video 3 of 3
audio 1 of 3
audio 2 of 3
audio 3 of 3

Town Council meeting adopting the budget, 16 March 2009

video audio

iTunes and the budget hearings

Use the http://andrewgilmartin.com/share/sk-rss.xml URL with iTunes to subscribe to a feed that contains the three budget hearings's audio. Since the URL is not part of the iTunes store, you will need to use the iTunes Subscribe to Postcast... menu item under the Advanced menu to add the feed.

Cancellation of tonight's administrative budget hearing

Due to the weather conditions, tonight's start of the budget hearings has been rescheduled to start on Tuesday and continue on Wednesday and Thursday. The new calendar is

Uploaded Town Council budget workshops

The council have agreed to let me place online the forthcoming budget workshops. Due to the length of these meetings I am not sure which video distribution service to use. If you have advice on uploading videos to YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, AOL, Yahoo!, Blip.tv, or a dirt cheap CDN I would appreciate hearing from you. Send email to andrew@andrewgilmartin.com.

Operations budget and its presentation Mar 3, 4, 5, & 12 (Revised)

The South Kingstown Town Manager will be releasing the operations budget this Thursday (26 Feb 2009). It will be available for downloading from www.southkingstownri.com and there are usually a few copies available at his office for borrowing. Then on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (3, 4, and 5 Mar 2009) the budget will be formally presented to the council and the public. There will also be a joint meeting on Thursday, March 12 between the town and the school. The school accounts for just over 80% of the town's budget.

This budget will be severely constrained by the downturn in the economy, the loss of specific state funding, the general changes of money transfers from state to cities and towns, and even the continuing reduction of auto tax revenue. It will also be somewhat tentative as the state's supplementary budget has yet to be finalized.

Please put these meetings on your calendar. If you can't come then choose someone among your friends and/or colleagues to attend the meetings to represent your position as members of this community.

Open Government Data Principles

The following principles are taken from OpenGovData.org which itself resulted from the Open Government Working Group (December 7, 2007).

Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that complies with the principles below:

1. Complete: All public data is made available. Public data is data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.

2. Primary: Data is as collected at the source, with the highest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

3. Timely: Data is made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.

4. Accessible: Data is available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.

5. Machine processable: Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

6. Non-discriminatory: Data is available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.

7. Non-proprietary: Data is available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.

8. License-free: Data is not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Compliance must be reviewable.

Definitions

1. "public" means: The Open Government Data principles do not address what data should be public and open. Privacy, security, and other concerns may legally (and rightly) prevent data sets from being shared with the public. Rather, these principles specify the conditions public data should meet to be considered "open."

2. "data" means: Electronically stored information or recordings. Examples include documents, databases of contracts, transcripts of hearings, and audio/visual recordings of events.

While non-electronic information resources, such as physical artifacts, are not subject to the Open Government Data principles, it is always encouraged that such resources be made available electronically to the extent feasible.

3. "reviewable" means: A contact person must be designated to respond to people trying to use the data. A contact person must be designated to respond to complaints about violations of the principles. An administrative or judicial court must have the jurisdiction to review whether the agency has applied these principles appropriately.

Recovery.gov: Transparency and Expectations

With the roll-out of Recovery.gov there is some useful coverage of how its use will raise the bar on access to public data. Read The Sunlight Foundation's piece Recovery.gov: Transparency and Expectations.

Track my tax dollars

THE taxpayers do their part, and faithfully fling their hard-earned treasure into the gaping public maw. Surely they should be allowed to know what happens to it. So why not put government spending online?

in The Economist's Track my tax dollars.

Rhode Island Treasury's Online Checkbook

Today the Rhode Island Treasury opened a web site that reports on all Treasury department expenses. Treasurer Capria calls it the Treasury's Online Checkbook. In the opening video he says that the software has been designed for use by any of the state's departments. Hopefully it can be used by town and school administrations too.

Update: The Treasurer's "realtime" claim about the data is a little disingenuous. As the FAQ says "Data is extracted from RIFANS once weekly, and the website is updated to reflect cumulative figures." Weekly is realtime if your clock ticks only by weeks.

Also, as far as I can tell, you can not get the raw data. Governments, as a general rule, should first provide the data and secondly provide tools to use the data. If you make the data available then most people that want to use the data can use the tools they already have (such as Excel, Access, FileMaker, Matlab, SAS, etc).

Customer support should start with self-service

Edward M. Mazze, professor of business at the University of Rhode Island, has the opinion piece "Customer manifesto for public employees" in today's Providence Journal. While I agree with him that giving good customer support is important it is addressing the issue of access to information with a past solution. Customer support should start with self-service and then, should that fail, continue with personal interaction.

Most people today use internet tools to initially address their problems. They are comfortable using self-service because it has proved to be successful. When I need a fishing license my first step is to use Google and search for "rhode island state finishing license." The page it takes me too, DEM's Regulations, is a little confusing but soon I am led to the answer. If the regulations pages doesn't answer my question, it should offer me the choice of using personal support for immediate resolution or to allow me to open a ticket for later resolution.

Making your site Google friendly is far more cost-effective than hiring and training support staff for front-line customer service.

Call for joint, state and local, budget meeting

Tonight's Town Council meeting will address Jonathan Daly LaBelle's request to schedule a meeting with the local legislative delegation for the purpose of discussing the budget. I am sorry that I will not be able to attend tonight's meeting to further support this request. If you can please do. If you can't then email the Town Council at

• Mary Eddy salaam1@cox.net
• Kathleen Fogarty bingfog@cox.net,
• Carol Hagan McEntee chm.law@gmail.com,
• James O'Neill coastal4ri@aol.com,
• Ella Whaley ellawhaley@cox.net
• Dale Holberton dholberton@southkingstownri.com
• Jonathan Daly-LaBelle jdl@rihomesearch.com

Stimulus Watch

Stimulus Watch is a fantastic example of open government. Line by line of the plan is available for review, commentary, and voting. It would be wonderful to have this for every municipality at budget time.