Difference between revisions of "Public Meetings"

Revision as of 21:48, 21 December 2009

Back to Participation 3.0

Special Update: As this pilot initiative is launched, we decided to submit it's full implementation into the Knight News Challenge. The idea made it to round two and requires additional questions to be answered by mid-January, 2010. If you would like to either help execute the outline below or help us draft our submission to the Knight Foundation, join our new Public Meetings online technical working group.

DRAFT

Public Meetings

A model open and transparent "Participation 3.0" effort to create an open standard for distributing public meeting notices, agendas, documents, etc. across the Web 2.0 world.

Imagine services across the Internet where the public can enter their address and keyword interests and be pro-actively notified online about public meetings and agenda items that matter to them from ALL the government bodies that serve/represent/govern them.

This project will test our open source-style design process designed to bring together democracy/participation experts, government staff/interest elected officials, and technologists/geeks in a group process that leads to the most effective results that actually serves the greatest public good with a sustainable "move the field" design as an end goal.

Project elements include:

1. Project outline

A two page project outline that will also serve as a model for our Next Generation Ideas open specification process (this might be described as the first of ten big ideas). The outline will include a "PublicMeetings.org" data sharing network and an "AgendaNow.org" site to quickly build a proof of concept Minneapolitan-centered prototype.

2. Public meeting notice and agenda open standard draft

We will seek to engage the W3C E-Government Interest Group (initial pre-project engagement), the eCitizen Foundation, and others to craft a draft standard that will promote a long-term, distributed solution to help governments and government-oriented technology vendors automate the process of providing public data sets with real-time public meeting information. This is likely the best path to universal distribution of this option to many local communities over the long-run.

3. AgendaNow.org prototype and data scraping initiative

Quickly demonstrate the power of a geo-aware tool for personalized alerts about upcoming public meetings from the dozens of public bodies that serve Minneapolis. This inform and seek to utilize the open standard draft but in this case the data will be "scraped" by us and converted into XML before being used by our site. We are exploring options to work with the new UK-based OpenlyLocal.com open source-oriented site to scrape these Minneapolis sites in the near term.

4. Public meeting comments and ratings experiment

Depending up the resources available, AgendaNow.org will explore hosting specific public comments/questions/requests for more information and rating of comments/questions/requests to determine those agenda-items with expressed community support, opposition or simple concern. A comment summary/tracking tool for local elected/appointed officials and staff would notify decision-makers on recent comments prior to meetings (comments would be allowed within an hour of when the government body releases the agenda and it is pulled into our system automatically). We will further connect awareness of new meetings/agenda and public comments directly into the 1,000+ participant online town hall Minneapolis Issues Forum.