Re: Public meeting agendas, minutes and XML

+1 David!

-g

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Novak, Kevin <KevinNovak@aia.org> wrote:

> David,
>
> Great stuff, thanks for forwarding on.
>
> Kevin
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-egov-ig-request@w3.org
>  [mailto:public-egov-ig-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of David Pullinger
> Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 7:51 AM
> To: daniel@citizencontact.com; Owen Ambur
> Cc: 'Betsy Fanning'; Arthur Colman; 'Steven Clift';
> johnpaul.deley@eia.doe.gov; Adam J.' 'Schwartz; 'Metagovernment Startup
> Committee'; 'Jane Harnad'; Sylvia Webb; 'eGovIG IG'
> Subject: RE: Public meeting agendas, minutes and XML
>
> I agree with Daniel's response.
>
> Here in UK we have developed some RDFa for public sector consultation
> descriptions for the same reason which is to enable human-readable
> content to be machine processable.  This will not only allow many to
> re-use the information appropriately for the services they want to
> offer, but also gives the government a means of aggregating a list of
> all the consultations into one place to find out how citizens and
> stakeholders can contribute to consultations.  You can find the draft
> standard we are using at:
> http://code.google.com/p/argot-hub/wiki/ArgotConsultation
>
> A lot of work that has been done in developing the XML can be re-used
> for RDFa - for example all the business analysis of what information is
> worth identifying as separate elements and what end-users and developers
> want to be able to do with it at the end is some of the most
> time-consuming parts of the overall work, preceding the development of
> the appropriate ontology.
>
> For interest, although irrelevant to this strand, we have also developed
> a Job Vacancy Description RDFa which is in use across various parts of
> the UK public sector.  This allows and encourages re-use by third
> parties, which increases accountability and reduces cost to the taxpayer
> in filling posts.  You can find it at:
> http://code.google.com/p/argot-hub/wiki/ArgotJob
>
> Kind regards,
>
> David
>
>
>
> David Pullinger
> david.pullinger@coi.gsi.gov.uk
> Head of Digital Policy
> Central Office of Information
> Hercules House
> 7 Hercules Road
> London SE1 7DU
> 020 7261 8513
> 07788 872321
>
> Twitter #digigov and blogs:  www.coi.gov.uk/blogs/digigov
>
>
>
> >>> <daniel@citizencontact.com> 07/10/2009 12:17 >>>
> I think that any meeting information should be in XHTML since that is
> the human readable form that people actually read and will use. It is
> easy then to make the same web page be machine processable. There are
> already widely accepted standards for much of the event, GIS, textual,
> video and other components of a meeting.
>
> For example, the web page can include RDFa and/or Microformats for all
> of the information as well as link to iCal/vcard and other non-human
> readable formats for backwards compatibility.  The page URL for that web
> page can also be used as a metadata nugget for tagging/citing things
> that happen at the event. And you can use id attributes to allow parts
> of the meeting to be found (e.g..
> http://example.gov/20100217/meeting.htm#agenda-1 )/or even to have
> multiple events in the same page. And then those portions of the meeting
> can be separately tagged/cited (note that pure XML non-HTML document is
> harder to cite from within an HTML doc-see XLINK).
>
> If for some reason it feels necessary to create new standards in XML for
> this data, I would recommend ALWAYS using a standard XSLT into XHTML and
> then including all the Microformat and/or RDFa standards in the
> resultant/generated XHTML. The XHTML would could exactly as described as
> above. This way there would not need to be the segregation of data from
> humans.
>
> Also some interesting work has been done on creating transcripts of
> videotaped meetings in a crowd sourced manner and for public posting of
> meetings by metavid and openmeetings.
>
> Daniel Bennett
>
> eCitizen Foundation
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Owen Ambur" <Owen.Ambur@verizon.net>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 6, 2009 8:55pm
> To: "'Steven Clift'" <clift@e-democracy.org>, "'eGovIG IG'"
> <public-egov-ig@w3.org>
> Cc: JohnPaul.Deley@eia.doe.gov, "'Schwartz, Adam J.'"
> <aschwartz@gpo.gov>, "'Betsy Fanning'" <bfanning@aiim.org>, "'Jane
> Harnad'" <jane.harnad@oasis-open.org>, "Arthur Colman"
> <colman@drybridge.com>, "Sylvia Webb"
> <sylvia.webb@vision4standards.com>, "'Metagovernment Startup Committee'"
> <start@metagovernment.org>
> Subject: RE: Public meeting agendas, minutes and XML
>
> Steven, I don't know how much time I might be able to devote to it, but
> since I have long believed there should be a standard XML schema (XSD)
> for posting meeting notices on the Web, I'd have a hard time not
> participating in any reasonable effort to specify such a standard.
>
> While the initial iteration of the standard should be as simple and easy
> to implement as possible, it would be good to consider enabling
> referencing of the <Identifiers> for goals and objectives documented on
> the Web in conformance with AIIM's emerging Strategy Markup Language
> (StratML) standard.  See http://xml.gov/stratml/index.htm &
> http://xml.gov/stratml/draft/StratMLGlossary.xml#Identifier
>
> Since meetings are (or at least should be) conducted to support
> accomplishment of explicitly identified goals and objectives, it would
> be good if meeting notices and agendas could reference those goals and
> objectives -- which should themselves be documented in standard, readily
> referenceable XML format on the Web (e.g., StratML).
>
> Needless to say, that is an objective to which I will be more than happy
> to contribute to the best of my ability.
>
> BTW, as you may recall, E-Democracy.org's plan is in the StratML
> collection at http://xml.gov/stratml/drybridge/index.htm#Other or, more
> specifically, http://xml.gov/stratml/drybridge/eDo.xml
>
>
> Owen Ambur
> Co-Chair Emeritus, xmlCoP
> Co-Chair, AIIM StratML Committee
> Member, AIIM iECM Committee
> Invited Expert, W3C eGov IG
> Communications/Membership Director, FIRM Board Former Project Manager,
> ET.gov
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-egov-ig-request@w3.org
> [mailto:public-egov-ig-request@w3.org]
> On Behalf Of Steven Clift
> Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2009 4:38 PM
> To: eGovIG IG
> Subject: 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 <http://e-democracy.org/>Donate today:
> http://e-democracy.org/donate
>
>
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-- 
OSS ( WOA, SOA, MDA, BPM, SNS, LOD )