The Open Government Task Force met for the first time this evening. Many City, County and Township officials were in attendance as well as an equal number of bloggers/citizens. Karen Goldner, 2nd District Councilwoman, acted as moderator. Â
As Karen stated at the beginning of the meeting, there is no task force membership – anyone in the community who has an interest in open government is welcomed to attend the meetings.
The first round of discussions centered on putting together a list of items the group felt needed to be worked on to make government more open. Once this list was completed, it was divided into three categories:
Non-electric Items
Educational/Electronic Items
Cable TV Government Access
Several City and County officials spoke up to take responsibility for some of the items. One of the concerns that everyone on both sides of the table had was that the ideas garnered tonight be acted upon immediately. It was pledged that frequent updates will be given to the public and that action will be taken as quickly as possible. While some of the suggestions will involve some technical challenges, there were also a few that were as simple as providing a suggestion box to the public inside the City-County Building as suggested by Councilman Tom Smith and supported by Allen County Commissioner Bill Brown.
This is a pretty simple digest version of the meeting. If you would like, an mp3 file of the meeting is linked below. Feel free to download. The sound quality is not bad. If you have comments, please feel free to submit them to this blog. I apologize in advance for making you register, however, this is the best way around the spam. Stay tuned for updates on this project. As soon as I have the typed notes, I will post them here and also any future dates as well.
 mp3 file of the meeting (10.9 MB)
The Journal Gazette’s Opening Up City Council article by Ben Lanka – 3/10/2008
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