What I think the City of Fort Saskatchewan should do next. [AFLB to May 25th, 2009]

 

I've been thinking lately about our great little City of Fort Saskatchewan., and how we can improve our image, encourage more people to move here and how to foster better relations between the citizens (read as “employers) and City Staff and City Council (Read as (employees).

Every time either the City Council or City Staff comes up with an idea, they spend tens of thousands of dollars to present their case to the citizens of the City. How much of the public bothers to actually attend City Council meetings? How many attend any of the “Open Houses” that are staged to “enlighten” Joey and Jenelle Public about the proposals and requirements, effects and affects of such proposals - if come to fruition – will have on the average citizen.

We need to look at several things. What is my (and our) goal? To save the City of Fort Saskatchewan a lot of money, right? What's my next goal? To enable better communications to and between the public, the City Council and Staff and the citizens of this City. This will get a lot more done in a lot less time and at a lot less expense.

How can we all – City staff, Council and Public – meet together at any given time to all view any proposals, the status of such proposals, remarks about these proposals, any other relative information (costs, contractor's bids and costs, then City staff discussions and/or justifications with going with certain contractors) and so on. Can any proposal increase the potential to create a new environment of “transparency” to the public? Will this also tend to hold City staff and Council to a more responsible and responsive standard. The answer, dear Joe and Jane Public to all the above is... Yes, actually, it is ALL quite easily done!

OK, So how to we do all this? Well honestly, it actually IS quite easy and inexpensive, but the real cost is the “willingness” to make it happen. Most likely, this will save the City tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of OUR dollars – and encourage much, much more participation by Joe and Jane Public in City Activities and the Decision Making Processes the Council is always requesting...

Here is THE plan:

1.The City of Fort Saskatchewan convert all current and future documents, “Office Suites” and perhaps many other applications to the International “Open Standards” and “Open Source” packages now either being considered or used by many countries simply for cost savings and ease of access by literally everyone;

2.Identify opportunities to distribute more information to the public by enlarging the City's Corporate Website;

3.Index and Publish ALL it's data to the Internet using the above mentioned open standards, interfaces and formats;

4.Develop a plan to digitize and distribute all archival data, including all documents and images, to the public – This can be done in conjunction with the local Museum;

5.Ensure the data being supplied to the City by Third-parties such as contractors, developers and consultants are unlicensed in one of the open standards formats and not copyrighted unless other legal considerations make this not possible, and;

6.License any Software developed by the City of Fort Saskatchewan so that they can be used by other municipalities, businesses and the public without restriction.

Other cities such as Washington D.C., San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver are also going in this direction simply as it makes business sense, saves a lot of money, and gives businesses more data to better provide services to the general population, and the local public can then make more aware decisions.

What I would like to see.

The whole idea is to make the City more accessible to the public. This WILL save lots of money! For example, City Council meetings can be captured by a web-enabled camera and posted and indexed to the City's Website for all to access, so the public can actually see which decisions were made and how such decisions were presented to be made. People then become more enfranchised to become a part of the decision-making process and then make it a point to attend meetings to perhaps become part of this process. 

This is light-years ahead of a “digest” format by some newspaper reporter. If the public is indeed talking about some decision or policy, it will be easy to access and view the original reason and rationale for any decisions and/or policy changes by the Council, or by City Staff. The Public soon learns that if they want any changes, they can interact with the City Council at these meetings, affect decisions, and perhaps offer other potentials, making the whole system work better, and at a lower cost simply by being transparent to the Public!

Other documents that do not need to respect security and privacy issues can be made public in this forum as well. The City works for it's citizens, and there is little requirement to keep any or all discussions hidden/secret; The City must provide the public with access to such data, and in a format that the average citizen can access at home, in a timely and transparent manner at no cost to them.

So, what have we done? Saved tens of thousands annually in Licensing costs for Microsoft Office or other licensed software, and instead, downloaded and installed a free and comparable Office Suite such as “Open Office”, an Internationally known and respected Free Office Suite that does the same as Microsoft's Office software. The US Government is considering swapping over to Open Office as it would save umpteen million$ in licensing fee's alone!

Open Office is a free, open-source multinational, multi-language suite that can open any MS Office documents, and then save them with minimal format changes into an Open Standard document, or even save them an Adobe PDF file as well.

We will have improved transparency within City Government, cut costs and enabled people to use the data to create new useful products, including commercial ones.

The City Council has to remember that it is our taxes that has paid for this data to be collected in the first place! Why can we not view it when we want?

Another little thing that can (and should) be made available for the public is to view what is being collected by any of the City's many Traffic Camera's simply by splitting the feed to the City's Website and a simple page with an “Open-Source” video viewer, so anyone can log on using any browser, and see what any camera is currently viewing, including the camera in Council Chambers. Most Cities, like Edmonton, have such a page, and I encourage the Fort to do the same.

If Fort Saskatchewan wants to attract more businesses and residents, it needs to take up the mantle of a responsible, transparent and modern City that knows how to adapt with the times, respect our security and privacy while still being able to provide the best information access and government transparency only available (or being considered) in the “Huge City” market. 

I think we should be doing such changes NOW while any start-up costs to implement such a policy is negligible and easily recoverable, instead of waiting until the City is much larger, before any such change-over is much more expensive, more difficult to implement and actually a much larger project to make backwards compatible as well. 

Now is also the time to bring forward and implement such a proposal, as costs in this “recession” have come tumbling down, and implementation of such a proposal will cost much less than it will in a vibrant booming economy such as we had only 1 year ago.

Now is the time to do this!

The City of Vancouver just recently endorsed the same principle of making its data open and accessible to everyone where possible, adopting open standards for that data and considering open source software when replacing existing applications and software, possibly saving millions of dollars each year.

We should be next! We have the potential to set the National Standard for all Cities of Small and Medium sizes! Let the Big Cities do it their way. We can implement it faster, go further, for less money all the while getting more return out of our tax dollars.

I believe Fort Saskatchewan residents are more "connected" to the world via the Internet than any other "average large town or small city", and we should take advantage of this while we can!

I must acknowledge the help of CBC News to research this subject.

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UPDATE 26 May, 2009

I am reading the Washington Post today (yes, I do read newspapers from around the world - online!), and there is a nice article with the following headline: Open-Government Tools Unveiled by White House.

What they have done as of today, is started implementing the Policy President Obama committed his government towards developing "Transparency Policies". So, today, Phase One of a Three Phase process included the tools towards developing these policies.

These tools allow citizens, government employees, officials, and pretty much anyone with an interest in developing transparency policies, to brainstorm, discuss and then help draft the guidelines. So if President Obama can do it, why can't Fort Saskatchewan do it???

That's just the way I see it...

AFLB 7 Jun3, 2022,

Interesting read.  I should follow up with the City to see what they are currently utilizing for software.  I suspect MS Office.  Hmm.

Also interesting, looking back to 2009, that I almost, almost came out and said "hold meetings online with online participation".

That would have been a heck of a pre-cognition, eh?  But I am not sure if the online meetings are open to Citizens to interact with the Council during a meeting, excepting invited guests.  Perhaps there is a panel to ask questions, or there should be.  Only registered citizens need apply, but anyone else can watch/listen.\

Truthfully, the City has come a long way since 2009 - and the Pandemic only opened up our eyes to online meetings - applications such as Zoom, FaceBook Messenger (with Viedo), WhatsApp (Strong encryption!) Apple "whatever" - they all have video-calling features that in 2009, were only on the drawing boards.

Well, that's just the way I see it in 2022.

Peace!