I am looking for examples of governments that have take public meeting notices to the next level.
Share away!
Perhaps even a government that encourages people to comment on upcoming agenda items. Someday I’d like to help create a network that allows citizens to look up meetings from lots of governments based on where they live and to be notified of agenda items based on personalized search alerts.
Steve, Do you know the people at Granicus? They are doing a lot of work in this area. We have a ton of clients in common. Some are on GovLoop and CEO, Tom Spengler, is very sharp. They are based in San Francisco and primarily work with local government, but do some work at other levels and have created some interest from federal government.
Hey there, I have heard of them, but do not know them. Thanks for the tip.
I am trying to imagine the head start on presenting aggregated starting points for public meetings notices, agendas, minutes, and documents if GovDelivery, Granicus, GovOffice.com and other companies in this space helped make real-time feeds about meetings available in a simple standard format. I *think* it would be a service governments would appreciate being done for them … hmmm.
Cheers,
Steve
We create feeds on everything that flows through us. We’re working on making that data more accessible and providing some aggregation, but first we’re working on tagging / taxonomy as right now we manage 44K + feeds / topics and only a subset are meetings. Granicus creates good feeds and only manages meeting related content. They do more with summarizing data than we do. Check their site and let me know if I can help make an introduction. Talk to you soon, Scott
We’ve been using Granicus for online video of our Council meetings for over a year and it works wonderfully. We just had a presentation today regarding online public commenting for agenda items through Granicus and are considering adding that function as well. The City of Arcata currently has that feature, it seems like it would be very beneficial to the public and perhaps gather more comments than the usual group that consistently attends Council meetings.
In Arlington County, Virginia, we have an RSS feed that allows people to subscribe to the upcoming agendas for County Board meetings (look on the right-hand-side for the RSS links). Anyone can email their thoughts to our County Board, but we don’t currently have a Web2.0 way that is equivalent to speaking in person during a Board meeting.
Through the Public Website Calendar feature, you can also subsccribe through RSS or email to be notified of events of your choosing – this is not to the level of agendas, but would include all the commission meetings, as in my example URL.
Katie, Heidi, awesome examples. I want to learn more about Arcata’s efforts. I like how they are simply proposing to use a Google Docs spreadsheet behind the scenes to gather comments. Go Granicus. Go GovDelivery. 🙂
A number of years ago I drafted an outline for an Online Committee Room for a UK-government funded e-democracy project. It is great to see elements starting to come alive.
E-Democracy.org actually has an invited grant in the hopper with a major foundation to in part explore ways to provide citizen-centric access to public meeting notices from all the public bodies serving an area. On top of that data we are also interested in exploring ideas for agenda items with commenting and rating that raise the bar with decorum, real names promotes, and civility as the standard. The local media sites and many local often anonymous watchdog blogs have cornered the “no one knows you are a dog, so act like an animal” market. No need to compete with that. Now fingers crossed on the base funding.
I am putting together an online working group on public meeting notices and agendas for something tentatively called PublicMeetings.Info. Join us here.
Lancaster County uses our capture and archiving solution for their Commissioner meeting videos: http://bit.ly/LancCo