For meeting purposes only, let’s provide the elected ones with city-owned, network-crippled laptops — no access to wireless or ethernet — which can also come pre-loaded with meeting packets and lots of relevant reference materials now found on city, state and federal web sites. (You might want to call this charitable concept the One Laptop per Councilmember Program.) Thus they could still peck at their keyboards and mouse around during meetings, while using installed applications to look up info and take notes. But as far as networking goes, everyone would party like it’s 1989. Keep all the digitized action on the home drive, only, like we did before discovering these interwebs.

Meanwhile, city clerk staff can still project an electronic version of the meeting packet onto the wall for the viewing pleasure of the live, in-studio Larcom audience. And any sneaky elected official caught accessing a wireless net connection through their smart phone should be whipped on the spot with an unplugged ethernet cord.

You also get access to all email, written records, and personnel files (with some redacting).

I saw this with the parking bruhaha earlier this year. The A2 government with notable exceptions, seems to like keeping their hands on the puppet strings of public information. My belief is that public information should not have strings, should not be caged, and should be public. When government seeks to control public information, they are no longer representing the public. Instead they are controlling the public.

I certainly hope that continued pressure will eventually lead to a political body that realizes it’s much easier to gain public trust by not hiding information from the public. The only thing that comes from a closed meeting is suspicion. If the council has “nothing to hide” they can show this very easily… simply hide nothing.

Well-conceived, well written.

To me, the next step is to press the point that releasing prior e-mails is not about the past. Even though most current council members were elected after 2007, a sitting judge (Judge Easthope) and two members of the Planning Commission (Jean Carlberg and Wendy Woods) were on council before 2007, and are still serving in decision-making roles in government. The public needs to know that these three people – especially Judge Easthope – have not been involved in routine violations of state law. I would think that they would all be eager to have their names cleared. As long as the emails are kept from the public, their personal reputations and professional credibility are in a delicate position. Judicial temperament and fitness for office are serious business.

Cool, so if I send my council rep an email during the meeting that says, “Whassup????” it will get printed in the minutes! I’ll be published!

The contrived “remedy” of disclosing the deliberations to the public in the official minutes — which would most often occur only AFTER any decisions had already been made (!) — is an INSULT and shows that transparency and the public’s interests did not show up on the radar of city council when they were penning this resolution.

Councilmember Briere continues to demonstrate that she’s less guided by ego (and role, both in the sense that Eckhart Tolle uses) than her colleagues.