Steve
Please see my 3/2008 cover story about options for local open gov and tech
in San Francisco
http://www.sfbayguardian.com/entry.php?entry_id=5872&catid=&volume_id...
<http://www.sfbayguardian.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=5872>
P <http://www.sfbayguardian.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=5872#>
Freedom of Information: More sunshine -- easily and at no cost
*Technology can allow the city to take a huge step forward in public access
-- right now*
By Kimo Crossman
Imagine sitting at home or in your office, or in your favorite cafι and
listening in on what are now secret, backroom policy discussions and
decisions in the San Francisco mayor's office. Imagine having access to an
immediate transcript of the talks. Imagine being able to read internal
e-mail discussions among city staffers about issues that affect you
without ever filing a public records request. In fact, imagine never having
to file another written request for public documents; imagine just going to
a city Web site, entering a search term, and finding all of the records
yourself.
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. Much of it is not only consistent with but
actually required by local law. And it won't cost the city more than a
modest amount of money.
Transparency is a common buzzword during this presidential campaign; the
Barack Obama campaign has even issued a white paper describing policy and
technological ways to embrace it. He's talking about live Internet feeds of
meetings about significant issues involving executive branch appointees as
well as for those of regulatory departments (a program that would go far
beyond what you see on C-SPAN).
So there's no reason San Francisco can't take the lead in using technology
generally simple, off the shelf, existing technology to dramatically
increase sunshine at City Hall and public participation in local government.
Proposition G, the city's 1999 sunshine law, mandates that San Francisco use
"all technological and economical means to ensure efficient, convenient and
low cost access to public information on the Internet." Here are five easy
ways to do that:
1. Fully adopt the voyeur concept for city meetings. This is the idea that
the public should be able to observe and engage in government decision
making all government decision making.
All policy meetings in City Hall should at the very least be broadcast as
audio on the Web and available via phone teleconference. In other words, the
meetings should be streamed online, and that stream should be accessible by
calling a free conference line. This is already standard practice in the
business world and is working well for many investors in public companies
that disclose financial information in compliance with Securities and
Exchange Commission rules. It can be done for little or no cost with
services like blogtalkradio.com, skype.com, freeconferencecalls.com, and
webex.com.
Today only a limited number of public meetings are broadcast, mostly because
the only outlet is SFG-TV and resources are limited. But audio streaming is
a no-brainer there's no need for a staffer to control cameras, the
microphones are already set up, and these days just about every room has a
speakerphone.
Currently, the SFG-TV video coverage isn't posted on the city's Web site,
sfgov.org, until two or three days after a meeting. That's too long; the
audio should be made immediately available online. And the Internet URL and
dial-in options should be listed on the meeting agenda so that news media
and citizen bloggers can instantly refer back to the URL with timecodes to
point out specifics, and include them in their stories and blog postings.
With streaming, you can follow along in real time when you are stuck at home
taking care of a sick relative, or at the office listening with headphones,
or you are disabled and can't cross town to attend in person.
The city already has a great contract for real time captioning the text
you see at the bottom of the screen for video. It's not 100 percent
accurate, but it's pretty decent. That could be expanded to cover streaming
audio, and the text could be computer translated (or translated by bilingual
typists) into other common languages. The advantage of media integrated with
RTC is that specialized search engines like blikx.com and everyzing.com can
be used to find relevant phrases and begin playback directly at that spot.
And transcriptions can be posted online in real time (somewhat like live
blogging!) so that if you are late for a meeting you can quickly scan what
has already transpired, and by the end of the meeting you will effectively
have a draft of minutes. That saves a lot of staff time and provides an
immeasurably more useful historic record.
Today, video recordings of city meetings can't be downloaded the only way
to review it or post a clip to YouTube is to order a $10 DVD, which arrives
a week after you send a check (and no, they don't take PayPal). And while
many other city meetings make audio recordings, you have to pay $1 for an
audio tape and pick it up during business hours or pay more for postage.
They all should be available as free podcasts.
The SFG-TV video shows more than just the speakers and officials; there are
other angles, and they ought to be available too. It's important to know who
attended the meeting but never said anything, who greeted whom, and even who
ignored whom.
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. If the room had a projector
and a screen, people who were unable to attend the meeting could still
comment, either through video or just by posting text messages that the
decision makers could read.
The audio broadcasting of meetings should be expanded to include all
meetings between the mayor (or supervisors) and city staff. The law already
requires public access to so-called passive meetings those between the
mayor or department heads and outside parties that influence city policy.
3. Make public most city emails and other documents as soon as they are
produced.
San Francisco city employees produce thousands of records a day e-mails,
memos, reports, etc. and the vast majority of them are and should be
public record. But many are deleted and others never see the light of day.
When a member of the public asks for all the records on a topic, just
finding those documents can be a sizable task.
But it's technologically simply to solve that problem: every time a city
employee produces a document, the computer system should automatically send
a back-up copy to a public web server. That way nothing would get lost or
erased, and anyone looking for public information could simply go to that
site and search for it him or herself.
For e-mails sent by city staff, one way might be to CC (carbon copy) an
online message board (for example Google or Yahoo groups, which would be
available at no cost to the city). Other approaches for instant messages,
text messages and voicemails could be adopted as well. The Palo Alto City
Council is already doing something like this for a narrow collection of
e-mails (although not in real time).
We all know there are some city communications that must remain private or
be redacted for example Attorney Client discussions or human-resource
conversations regarding personnel. But there are simply ways to make sure
those stay confidential: one approach might simply have the user tick a flag
or answer a Yes/No Possible Redaction popup when the message is sent.
Certain employees like the people who handle sensitive employee health
records and certain litigators in the city attorney's office could have
software that defaults to a confidential server.
The added advantage, of course, is that the computers could also make a
record of the title and date of every confidential document and that
information could be made public. If a dispute arose over whether the city
was improperly withholding records, the public would at least know that
certain documents existed.
All city files could be stored on network drives (not on local drives) with
one location for default public files that would not allow overwriting or
deletions and would be mirrored to a Web server and another drive for the
few that may require redaction first.
4. Save all the old records. After a very embarrassing lawsuit that is
threatening the Missouri governor's job, that state in January adopted an
email retention system that preserves all email for at least seven years
(based on federal requirements for financial records). And e-mail/instant
message/text/fax retention systems are standard practice now in the
financial industry (Morgan Stanley lost a $1.45 billion judgment because the
company failed to preserve e-mail).
In fact, we all know storage continues to get cheaper and smaller so San
Francisco should abolish any retention timeframes for electronic records and
keep them all into the foreseeable future. The world-famous Internet Archive
is right here in the Presidio: I suspect that group would love to archive
all the city information, and keep it online, free and forever.
When paper documents are part of the public record, they should be scanned
and converted to text and posted within two days. This would include
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