| | | |
Home /
Frustrating citizen participation  Uploading ....
The devil is often in the technical details. The "transparency that appears to be coming to Kauai" is an illusion and actually designed to frustrate citizen participation in governance ("Council minutes posted online", Michael Levine, A1, July 3, 2009).
Council members Bynum and Kawahara's Goal #2 "make key
public documents readily available to the public on the County web site"
is laudable but not sufficient. These documents should also not only be
accessible (readily available) but useful as well. By useful I mean the
ability to do text searches of the document and easily copy and paste portions of the minutes from the
website into another document.
Let's say a citizen wants to submit
testimony on an upcoming issue. In the preparation of such testimony it
would be nice to copy and paste quotes from the county document into
the citizen's testimony (as opposed to having to retype the quote).
Retyping takes time and mistakes can and are made. Wouldn't it be more
efficient to just cut and paste such quotes into your testimony? Of
course it would. It would be much faster and have less tyopographical errors.
What if (heaven forbid) there were people in
government who wanted to limit citizen participation, and yet wanted to technically comply with Goal # 2. Here' is a road map to create a dilatory
process to limit citizen participation:
- print out a hardcopy of the document, and
- scan it into the computer as an image file, then
- convert that image file to a PDF file, and
- upload it to the internet.
Surprisingly this is exactly what the county did before publishing the minutes online. The
result of this process is a PDF file containing a non-text
searchable, non-text copyable and non-pastable PDF document. Citizens could access (look at), the document but find it very difficult to use in the creation of testimony. This is also a lot more work for county employees, but apparently hindering citizen participation is worth the extra effort. The efficient thing to do would be to convert the word processing document into a text searchable, copyable pasteable PDF file. This can be accomplished in a few keystrokes.
I hope Councilmembers Bynum and Kawahara will
flesh-out Goal #2 to prevent such dilatory tactics already being deployed to circumvent the intent of their laudable
struggle for citizen transparency and access.
|
|
|
| | | |
|