The Town of Needham has an elaborate email alert system that allows citizens to get meeting agendas and all sorts of other information. It would be great if Newton did this too.
Here’s something City Hall should adopt….
by Greg Reibman | Nov 26, 2012 | Newton | 7 comments
meanwhile, you can visit lwvnewton.org and see the “Docket Digest” for this week and last–to use as a guide to what’s happening, and what just happened, in Newton politics
Rather than send one of our current Village 14 bloggers a link every week, it would be great if we made the person who complies this for the league a blogger and each week they posted something like this…
@Ad: That’s really useful.
I had no idea that existed and I imagine that I’m not the only one who never knew about it or who would think to look there.
I wonder if the LWV would be interested in cross-posting this each week on Village 14?
Sure. Send you the link every week?
Both having City Hall do email alerts and having the LWV post on Village 14 are great ideas.
Or you could go to the Electronic Posting Board on the city website, which is maintained by the Clerk of the Board of Aldermen.
Publishing and archiving documents online is fine (semantic urls, please) but it would be wonderful to see the city use technology in a way that is more active. Alerts could be very helpful, as would posting information in structures which enable other tools to analyze and notify people (e.g. RSS/Atom feeds, iCal, etc.)
And not just for city meetings. Wouldn’t it be great to have a service to post “snow emergencies” in such a way (perhaps even by Twitter) that some external service could choose to relay via SMS or method of your choice, without the city investing a dime in infrastructure? How about an autopay service for bills instead of wasting time logging in every few months to pay bills? What’s my password again?
For another example, take the Nixle experiment. What would it be like if everyone had a personalized 21st century police scanner? Daily reports have been replaced with individual events (good) but the service doesn’t seem to be used consistently enough to make it useful. What if geo-coding were used more? I’d love to be notified when certain emergencies occur, but only if I could filter them when they hit close to home.