10/6/08

Avoiding Transparency - Towns Shuttering Websites

Some small towns - like Lyme, Salem, Colbrook, and Harwinton - in Connecticut are shuttering their websites because of new transparency laws:
Bart Russell is the Executive Director of Connecticut's Council of Small Towns.

His group wants the state's FOI Commission to issue an advisory opinion on the law that went into effect Wednesday that requires municipalities to post information from public meetings on the Internet.

Under the new law, meeting agendas must be up twenty-four hours in advance and minutes posted within seven days after a meeting. Russell says the towns want to be transparent but the time constraints aren't reasonable.

I am trying to figure out what would make it so hard to comply here since all it takes is for the webmasters of these sites to add an easy "upload button" somewhere for the town workers to click on and upload files? I can understand some short delays as the code monkeys write up something and add a searchable section of the site to upload them to. If they are too cheap to pay for the sites they could easily do it on Blogger by cut and pasting the agendas and minutes into a Blog. It isn't that hard to do.

Look... It took me all of 20 minutes to set up that Sample Blog for New Milford and another minute to write a title for the post and to cut and paste the information out of an Open Office Document file and into the post.

If you or your town has internet access there is no excuse to skirt posting the information in a timely manner.

Just a video in honor of the many code monkeys that do volunteer to do this kind of community organizing for many towns across the USA for free.

1 comment:

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