Communicate, Communicate...

Yesterday I mentioned both the Charter Commission web site and the notebooks that are placed at the City Clerk's desk and library. Besides getting these notebooks out to additional locations, the web site can supplement this role of communicating with our citizens among those who use the internet.

For example, the Minutes section of the web site has all of the minutes for meetings of the Commission from November of last year through the last Public Hearing on June 1st of this year. These minutes are important for people who want to understand what is happening with issues before the Charter Commission. Similar information is available in the notebooks.

However, both of these tools need to be updated quickly after a meeting in order to maximize their effectiveness. We cannot expect our citizens to remain engaged if they have to wait until after the next meeting to find out what happened at a previous meeting.

The 2003 Charter Commission is a good model for this approach for a couple of reasons. First, each Commissioner used email so they could communicate. Second, they had a volunteer scribe who actually did the job of writing down the minutes. Our current Commission is also blessed with Commissioners who use email and a paid scribe.

The 2003 Commission's minutes were emailed to all the Commissioners within a day or so of a meeting. The Commissioners then had a day or two to respond with updates of obvious fact, perhaps a misspelled name or the identification of a spectator who was missed by the attendance roster. At this point, the Draft Minutes for that meeting were ready to be produced for the notebooks. The result was that within a week after a meeting, the Draft Minutes were dispersed into the community.

Our current Commission can do this even better. With their web site, the Draft Minutes would be available on the web within 3 or 4 days of a meeting. This is because the production delay is minimal since the document is already in an electronic form once it was first emailed.

The Official Minutes would replace the distributed Draft Minutes on the web site within a day after the next meeting in which the minutes were reviewed and approved, and within a couple of days in the various notebooks.

Timely and effective communications is an important function of groups like our Charter Commission which needs to work hard at keeping the citizens involved in the issues before them. If the communications to the public are delayed until after an issue is resolved, some citizens, who would have liked to contribute, will be denied their right to be heard. And the Commission may be denied hearing a voice that mattered during their deliberations.