[RP TownTalk] Talking to the Town

[Rob Oppenheim]

I agree that getting the minutes online is a good idea and easy to do and a good place to start when compared to video.

I like the idea of having draft versions of the meetings go online immediately, but I know that some people are worried by this. Communications are best when they are timely - so people can respond and participate. If the minutes were clearly labeled DRAFT, I see little problem with errors. They will happen. (They will happen in the final version too). Some grumpy people will point out the errors and complain loudly about them. So it requires courage and resolve to place them online. By labeling them DRAFT gives an easy reply to complaints. You know, "Thank you for pointing out the error. That is a draft version. We will look at correcting it in the final version".

Another possibility is having all the public outgoing correspondence posted online. That is, all the public documents that we have on local computers now. Ideally, incoming correspondence would be scanned in and posted too, but that is a lot more work. 

There are Internet based file servers. You simply save your Word file to it the same as saving it to a disk. They make great off site backup, and have both private and public areas, and claim to have great security. Any document that we would like to be public can be copied to the public area or simply saved to it from within Word. These services are surprisingly cheap - some are less than $5/month.

- Rob
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