Open Public Meetings

Call to Participate:

The eCitizen Foundation, in partnership with e-Democracy.org, has launched a research project to establish best practices for public meetings notices and agendas online.

To participate in our next meeting, please enroll at:

Relevant Links:

For more information on our approach, please see: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Public_Meeting_Notices_and_Agendas

To participate in a feedback session on our draft approach, please register at: http://publicmeetingsnov2010.eventbrite.com/

More information about this project is available at: http://publicmeetings.info, a project of http://www.e-democracy.org

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Overview Message by Steven Clift, e-democracy.org

 

 

Highlights

As of October 29, highlights of the draft approach include the following:

A. Guidelines

Public Meeting Notices and Agendas is intended to help local and larger jurisdictions and other interested parties the understanding and best practices for creating a healthy ecology of public notices within a larger civic ecology. Towards this we have a few guidelines:

  • Jurisdictions should not have to cede identity, jurisdiction or oversight over their public notice systems as part of any contract or terms of service.
    • However, jurisdictions may be held responsible for other sorts of provisions including paying for services and materials necessary to publish and syndicate the notice information.
  • Jurisdictions should not limit access to the information that is published for any reason including jurisdiction, constituency, payment, and authentication for any purpose. However, based on sound and reasonable methods, jurisdiction should be encouraged to limit participation to any criteria that is understood, explicit and based on previously instituted rules, laws and regulations.
  • Regardless of any additional methods of conveying the information contained in a public meeting notice, there must be a main method which is both human readable and machine processable.
  • Aggregators, re-publishers and value add systems must always link and/or cite to the original and authoritative published version without any additional cost or proscriptions regarding the original content.

B. How to Publish an Online and Printable Public Meeting Notice with Agendas

  1. Principles:

    • Everything should be at a URL (time/date, location, jurisdiction, agenda items, people)
    • Every section of the page itself should be individually at a URL fragment and authoritatively citable and use embedded self-cite recommendation) so that each can have "Share-Like" functions.
    • Everything should cite to authoritative source and be citable (self-cites)
    • Standards for "Semantic" or "XHTML" for each component (e.g. RDFA for cal/time, microformats for events)
    • Include links to alternative standards (e.g. iCal, RSS, etc)
    • There should be a QR barcode for online, printed and mobile versions and other versions optionally.
    • Every page should use "pop-ups" recommendation ("Preview Online Page Universal Page Standard")
    • Point to the Rules under which the meetings will be held

  2. Processes:

    • Applicable Procedures (quorum requirements, other rules for each part of meeting)
    • Commenting on Items, etc in advance of meeting.

  3. Policies

    • Public vs. Private
    • Authenticated vs Psydonym vs Anonymous Participation and Personalization
    • Comment and Participation and Collaboration (including policy and process for entertaining contributions that are not directly germane - e.g. "out of order" or "out of scope" and how those determinations are made for comments and online participation rather than in-meeting live rulings on points of order)
    • Proprietariness and Propriety - gift-ban rules on free services? Need for RFP or Public Notice to use Vendor?

  4. Business and Functional:

    • Workflow for Public Employees and Officials (or authorized agents acting on their behalf) to auto-generate or manually create, amend or replace public meeting notices and agendas.
    • Required and Recommended Tasks: Publicize Broadly and Inform Relevant Constituencies, etc (check-list)
    • Role of "For Profit" "Non Profit" and other External Entities in Providing Services and in the Ecology of this information, communication and collaboration.

  5. Examples of Meeting Notices and Agenda

    • Notice
    • Agenda
    • Pre-Meeting Phase
    • Meeting Phase
    • Post-Meeting Phase
    • Archive and Access