Duly noted. ensuring a better web site is a high priority of mine, and a lot of your suggestions coincide with my own ideas for improvement. But, as you would appreciate, spare staff time to manage this is at an extreme premium. I’m trying to rectify this with the addition of an outreach position, something I’ve included in my last 3 years budget requests. I consider an effective citizen communications program an essential for any planning department and hopefully, I can make that happen soon. I apologize for the deficiencies in the interim. Thanks for everyone’s input

I consider Russell a good friend.  I had the pleasure of interning under him in the Planning Department’s Urban Redevelopment Division and think the city did well to promote him to Director.  I believe him when he says that these things are a priority and look forward to seeing public participation improve during his tenure.  With the challenges of implementing new systems and hiring new people at a time when the economy is hurting and municipalities are having to shrink budgets, we may have to wait a while to see all of this come about.

In the meantime, I will again offer to map the agenda items for free (as I did in the comments on 1/15):

I will definitely pledge to make a Google map of every agenda from this point forward in 2009 if the city will give me the information in a spreadsheet format I can use…

I think this single change could make for a significant improvement and lead to a number of new participants in the public process.  Though admittedly, depending on how the information is currently formatted, preparing the information in the spreadsheet may require city staff time that is just not available.

Either way, when city leaders enter into a dialagoue with consituents – be it in person or online – public participation can only be improved.  So thank you Mr. Claus!

Following yesterday’s post, I thought it would be best to give some examples of places that citizens get tied in and expand a bit on what the city can do to help. First place I went to get information was the OKC Planning Department’s website.  I had the privilege of working as an intern at the planning department prior to starting my graduate program and hold the people there in very high regard.  Checking out their website, I noticed that they do a good job of making the agendas for upcoming meeting readily available on the right side of the page, which I have made available for you below:

• Board of Adjustment
• Bricktown Urban Design Committee
• Downtown Design Review Committee
• Historic Preservation and Landmark Commission
• Planning Commission
• Stockyards Urban Design Committee
• Urban Design Commission

Having the agendas easy to find is great, but there are still some things that need to be addressed.  Here are some of my suggestions, and I encourage you to go through the motions and see if you have any suggestions of your own.  With a few small improvements we can make it much easier for the average citizen to get and stay meaningfully involved.


FIX THE LINKS

Not all of the agenda links are working correctly.  The links for the Board of Adjustements and Planning Commission take you to a page with meeting times, but no agenda.  And the Stockyard Urban Design Committee link hasn’t been updated since October.  This is basic and should be fixed quickly!


RELEASE AGENDA ITEMS EARLIER

State law requires that the agenda be made available at least 24 hours prior to the meeting, not including weekends or holidays.  But most of the time the agenda are already complete before this, with copies available to board members, and the individual items that are likely to appear on the agenda are known well in advance of the meeting as they often require that neighbors on adjacent properties be contacted.  The problem is, if you are simply an active citizen that cares about what is happening in an area in which you don’t own property and do not legally have to be contacted, you will usually only have around 24 hours to download the agenda, read the entire thing (goodluck – the most recent planning commission agenda was over 500 pages) and decide which items if any deserve your attention.  You probably don’t have enough time to contact anyone and certainly not enough time to fire off a formal letter, so you have to decide if you want to go to the meeting.  But even then, the item descriptions provided in the agenda are usually only detailed enough to arouse your interest or anger, but do not give you all of the information needed to keep you from looking like a completely uninformed idiot in front of the committee.  Making the agenda items available at least one week prior to the meeting would allow time to ask questions, hold discussions, organize, compromise, etc.


ADD THE DATE AND TIME TO FRONTPAGE

People should not have to download a .pdf agenda or scour google to find out the date and time of the next meeting; this information should be easy to find.  Along these lines, though requiring more effort, if we really want people to become involved then we shouldn’t require them to sit through an entire half-day long meeting only to speak to one item.  Either the agenda should be broken up to give shorter time slots in which people could attend and speak to the item of interest, or some other solution – such as allowing comments to be submitted via email and read at the meeting – should be sought out.


GOOGLE MAP THE AGENDA ITEMS

It is incredibly difficult to look through multiple agendas in search of things that may be of interest to you.  As mentioned, this weeks Planning Commission agenda is over 500 pages long, and over 100mb in download size.  As you scan through the agendas, you have to look for the address on each item and then figure out exactly where this is located relative to the areas with which you are concerned.  This is overly cumbersome and I doubt anyone does this on a regular basis.

Agenda items mapped by location allow users to quickly find the information that is most important to them.

It is not too much to ask to have the agendas for all meeting provided in the form of a google map.  It is very simple to input a spreadsheet of addresses and be left with a map that could include the agenda item name, type, and a link to the rest of the relevant information (like in the example shown above).  That is the basics and is very simple to do. In fact, with a little tweaking it could be dynamically setup to update automatically as the individual agenda items are cleared for the agenda.

Allowing users to define their areas of interests would allow people to stay connected with what is going on in the areas they care about.

Eventually, if we are really going to strive for excellence and not just for what is required.  Then the system should allow citizens to create boundaries of interest.  So say for instance that that I am interested in all of the planning and development taking place in and around Bricktown and also up on Western Avenue between 36th and 50th.  The system would allow you indicate this through a map interface and then send you a feed straight to your email inbox or feed service of your choice with the agenda items that fall within your specified boundaries.  You wouldn’t even have to navigate to a webpage to view the map, it would happen instantly, as soon as the agenda items are uploaded into the system.  AND, you wouldn’t have to scour multiple agenda from different branches of the planning department – or of the city for that matter – but would be notified of ALL agenda items from EVERY department that fall within the parameters you set forth.  Of course, even without the feed and with just the map, the information becomes much simpler to navigate:

With the Agenda Map, you just click on the item of interest and it gives a brief description with links to more information.

This can all be done today by every city department for relatively little in cost and just a small amount of know-how.  With such a system, I really think we would see tremendous breakthroughs in the level of civic participation and contribution by the citizens of the city.

What do you think?  Do you already attend these meetings on a regular basis?  Would you be more likely to if these changes were implemented?  Has anyone ever read an entire planning commission agenda…?