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Transparency Advocates React to U.S. Open Government Action Plan (by techPresident)

• “President Barack Obama on Tuesday led the public unveiling of national open government action plans from the eight countries participating in the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral coalition on openness and transparency.”
• Find out what some advocates have said about it.

September 2011 Municipal Cost Index Released (by American City & County)

• Find out if the costs of goods and services purchased by local governments went up or down since last month.
  

August 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings (by comScore)

• “comScore, Inc. … released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 180 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 18 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in a record 6.9 billion viewing sessions.”
• More data here…

NY Governor launches transparency website (by CivSource)

• Find out how the Governor is trying to interact more with citizens.

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Open Gov Links of the Week

citizen participation, communication, engagement, gov 2.0, government transparency, local government, online video stats, open government, public information, public relations, stats, transparency, video, video stats

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“As Citizens Look for Hurricane Information Online, Governments Scramble to Deliver”

“3 Earthquake Takeaways for Government & Social Media”

• So what can government communications learn from the east-coast earthquake that happened on Tuesday?
• Here’s three things:
  • be where they are, be official, be fast.

“New reports on citizen participation and rulemaking offer open government guidance”

• “AmericaSpeaks released a new report, ‘Assessing Public Participation in an Open Government Era: A Review of Federal Agency Plans.’ This represents the most comprehensive review of the public participation aspects of the federal open government initiative to date.” (link in original)

“Court rules White House visitor logs subject to FOIA”

• A bunch of info in the story by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

“comScore Releases July 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings”

• “comScore released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 180 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in July for an average of 18.5 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in a record 6.9 billion viewing sessions.” (emphasis added)

Which way did the August 2011 Municipal Cost Index go? Find out here!

“Working Together Towards Transparency in Local Government”

• The author “shares with us his organization’s venture at creating metrics for government websites that officials and citizens can agree on.”

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Open Gov Links of the Week

accessibility, citizen participation, collaboration, communication, engagement, FOIA, gov 2.0, government transparency, local government, online video stats, open government, public comment, public information, social media, stats, transparency, video stats

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This is a collection of links that I’ve come across recently related to technology, transparency, and government. Not all of them came out this past week, but they haven’t been included in former Friday posts like this. Know of any that should be included? Add them to the comments below!

“Illinois, New York City move forward on open data, apps”

“Social Media and Elections: Using New Media to Manage an Election & Communicate with Voters”

• How can election officials use social media? Why should they? The U.S. Election Assistance Commission held a roundtable discussion throughout the day on “Voting Goes Viral. Using New Media to Manage an Election and Communicate with Voters”. Here’s some takeaways…

“comScore Releases May 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings”

• “comScore, Inc. … released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 176 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in May for an average of 15.9 hours per viewer.” (emphasis added)
• “83.3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.”

“Report: Best Practices Guide for Local Governments”

• “Seismic shifts in the economy are forcing dramatic changes in the nation’s cities and counties. Many jurisdictions have made deep cuts across the board, eliminated entire functions, or both, while seeking new means of support and collaboration. This is a time when relevance and adaptability of government — and by extension, the public-sector information technology community — is being subjected to a very real-world test. What’s more, this test is being conducted in full public view, every day and with every encounter between citizens and their government.The urgent question is around how well, how nimble and how agile government is at adapting to the current environment while never losing sight of the future. This special report offers some answers in the form of best practices gleaned from our extensive local government surveys.”

“June 2011 Municipal Cost Index shows steady increase”

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Open Gov Links of the Week

communication, elections, engagement, local government, online video stats, Open Data, public relations, social media, video, video stats

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This week’s version isn’t the shortest ever, that’s for sure. Feel free to add more links in the comments section!

• “New York Releases ‘Road Map for the Digital City’” (HT Alex Howard’s Tweet on Twitter)
  • Also see: “With a new road map, New York City aims to be the nation’s premier digital city”

• Report: “Using Online Tools to Engage – and be Engaged by –The Public” (PDF, from IBM)
  • “Deciding how best to use online tools to engage the public may be the ultimate moving target for public managers. This is not just because of the rapid development of new tools, or ‘apps,’ for engagement. The main challenges now facing government managers are understanding:
    • The increasing complexity of how people organize themselves online
    • Citizens’ evolving expectations of government”

• “3 Ways Government Could Save Time & Money if They Used Social Media”
  • “You hear it all the time: Facebook this, Twitter that, social media… blah, blah, blah. But why should government care? … Well for starters, two words: Time & money…”

• Where does the federal gov’t rank for the top choice of employers among new information technology graduates?

• “Philadelphia Must Catch Up on Open Government, Councilman Says” (GovTech.com)
  • “Philadelphia Councilman Bill Green wants the City of Brotherly Love to take a liking to open government.”

• “comScore Releases April 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings”
  • “comScore, Inc. released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 172 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in April”
  • “81.9 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.”
  • More data in the Press Release…

• “A Bucketful of Transparency Papers”
  • This has also been added to our Open Government Resources page.

• “Newspapers + Government: 2.0”

• “High-speed internet prices drop by 50% around the globe”




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Open Gov Links of the Week

broadband, engagement, gov 2.0, government transparency, online video stats, open government, social media, stats, transparency, video, video stats

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Let’s think about public meetings for a bit. Several groups of people have an even harder time than the rest of us at attending public meetings.

Most of us just have excuses of a busy life, apathy, etc.

But some people don’t. Consider the following:

Other Languages

I blogged about the influx of Hispanics and Latinos into the U.S. last week (see: How Can Social Media Help Governments Serve the Booming Hispanic Population?).

So, how can Spanish-only-speaking Americans understand what is happening at a local government meeting? They only have a few options:

• The local government can provide a translator.
• The citizen can bring someone along to the meeting to translate for them.
• If the meeting is recorded on video, closed captioning can be added and they can watch the meeting later.
• Or they can watch it immediately if the translation is done live on the TV.

Disabled citizens

Let’s say that you’re hearing-impaired. You want to be informed about your local government, but you don’t have time to make meetings. The meetings aren’t on video and aren’t closed-captioned.

Or, let’s say that you’re unable to attend public meetings due to a disability that doesn’t allow for you to travel easily. At the same time, there are issues that your local government is dealing with that affect you and you want to be actively involved.

Some ideas

What if public meetings were on video and online? But wait. What if they also had closed captioning in English? What if there was also a transcript that was easily made available by a vendor for the local government? Government officials (and citizens) could easily research past meetings to see what happened. And for areas that have a high population of non-English speaking citizens, what if the closed captioning was also available in Spanish so that someone could watch a translation of the meeting online?

What if local Clerks didn’t have to deal with most of this because much of it would be done by someone else – saving Clerks time?

What do you think?

Would more local governments be interested in posting video of their public meetings online if:

• they could be done in closed captioning by a vendor?
• the closed captioning was also done in another language?
• there was a transcription made available by the vendor so that government officials (and citizens) could easily search a word-for-word record of what happened in past meetings?

I’m not saying that our company does all of this.

But — what if we did? Would it serve your community well?

Let us know in the comments below… I look forward to your thoughts!

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Miscellaneous, Open Government

accessibility, citizen participation, county commissioners, county government, engagement, Hispanics, local government, Minorities, online video stats, open government, open meetings, video