Is Virtual a Reality?

I will assume that if you are reading this, you are familiar with the internet and its many capabilities. We are a society that expects to Google a word and have 5 million resources at our fingertips in about 3 seconds flat. Notice how the word Google has replaced “search”. And notice how spell check likes Google, but not google. It will be in Merriam Webster before this decade is done. It used to be that people gathered in the town square and waited for the Pony Express to deliver weeks old, sometimes month’s old news. Now we can watch congress with a ten second delay.

Many cities and townships broadcast their council and school board meetings through the cable systems local access channels. But that leaves out satellite users. And the five people that still use antennas.

The internet solved these problem years ago, but government bureaucrats have been slow to embrace this “new” way of community outreach. It’s simple and cheap to broadcast meetings via the web. If you want it to be.

But what about the things that are behind the broadcast? The contracts, the resolutions, the financial transactions? There is more paperwork involved in school business than you can imagine. I’m sure an entire forest in southern Ohio has been cut down and turned into documents I have received over the last two years. On top of that, the tax payers never see 99% of these public documents. Oh, they could. They could go down to the board offices, request and pay for copies. Or they could set up an appointment and inspect records all day with a district employee.

Or we could start using BoardDocs.com. Please check out their web site. To attempt to sum it up, any and all information could be available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 day a year, plus leap day. Meetings are recorded electronically and vote counts can be posted instantaneously. Paperwork can be, but doesn’t have to be, non existent. But the best part I think is the public access. I have always been a proponent of open government and easy access.

We want involvement but at what price? People cannot structure their lives around government meetings. But they can and do look for info on the internet at their leisure. Does not going to meetings mean you do not care about the state of affairs? Or does it mean you have a busy life? I fully support implementing this program. It embraces everything I feel open government, transparency, public access, and open records should be. When you want it. At a cost of $10,000 a year. A drop in the bucket is a phrase I commonly hear about amounts such as this.

A powerful tool for the public, as well as the board and administrators. I’ll put it in levy terms. That’s 50 cents per household per year. Or about 20 cents per person. It’s an expenditure I fully support.