Via the Open House Project Google Group, the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s new cover story details an ambitious proposal to update the city’s 1999 “Proposition G” sunshine ordinance. While the original ordinance is impressive in scope, precisely defining the disclosure required of public information (worth a read on its own ), the Guardian’s article reimagines public access enabled through technology:
Imagine filing a complaint with a city agency and tracking the issue, minute by minute, as it works its way through the system.
Imagine listening on your cell phone to any policy body as it meets in city hall.
All of this is possible, today.
Blockquotes are insufficient here; this article is all substance. I suggest reading the whole thing.
Ok, one more:
2. Let the public do the broadcasting. All City Hall meeting rooms should provide wi-fi (and electrical outlets), and the system ought to have enough speed to allow bloggers or activists to upload high-quality video broadcasts of meetings that SFG-TV can’t afford to cover. It can be done using existing services like Justin.tv, Upstream.tv, and live.yahoo.com. This would also allow live blogging — and let people preparing to testify on an issue have access to the Web to do research on the spot.
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1 response so far ↓
Kimo Crossman // Apr 3, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Thank you for the enthusiastic response! We are now working in San Francisco to adopt these - we’ll let you know how it’s going!
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