Public meeting agendas, minutes and XML

I am putting final touches on an invited grant proposal that includes
an effort to make public meeting agendas more accessible as well as
encourage discussion of agenda items across the Web 2.0 world in a
more structured and visible way. Folks should be able to plunk in
their address and be told in one place (actually lots of places from
local media sites to government sites) what meetings are coming up
across ALL the local government organizations that serve them (with
state and Federal options too) and be able to set-up personalized
notification options.

Initially, we'd start with an open specification/convening process
where we'd involve a number of stakeholders and I would like to
appropriately suggest we will consult with this network on standards
to apply or consider.

Any reason I shouldn't do that?

Then, based on the specification we'd attempt to prototype it with
some serious meeting notice/calendar, agenda, minutes, and links to
meeting document scraping across Minneapolis and perhaps St. Paul.
Ideally, a standard would emerge for governments to simply put out
this data in real-time in XML so scraping is only an interim need ...
although with 30,000 local governments in the U.S. and lots of crowd
sourcing, the scraping will be the only way to get many small
governments into the service for many years.

The modest proposal we are developing is a sub-set of the broader
discussion Participation 3.0 draft we have from here:
http://e-democracy.org/P3

If you like this idea and would like to volunteer your expertise or
technology talent, let me know!  It will make it far more likely the
idea will get off the ground sooner than later and not be another
isolated service coming from out of the blue. E-mail me at:
clift@e-democracy.org

I'll let the group know if we succeed with our proposal.

Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org
Donate today: http://e-democracy.org/donate

Received on Tuesday, 6 October 2009 20:38:28 UTC