The Albemarle BoS is considering providing less detail in the minutes of their meetings. Because if there’s one thing citizens are demanding, it’s more opaque governance.
7 thoughts on “BoS Proposes Reduced Detail in Minutes”
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The Albemarle BoS is considering providing less detail in the minutes of their meetings. Because if there’s one thing citizens are demanding, it’s more opaque governance.
Comments are closed.
I would have been surprised last year. Well, it may limit the kind of information that can be used in lawsuits.
Detail is fine when it is clear and concise.
Is this just a technological shift? They will have podcast of the whole thing and some would argue that a written report might be less clear than the spoken word. I just not sure how evil it is.
That said the pocast should have indexing like Cville tomorrow does.
The BoS voted to retain the near-verbatim method of keeping minutes.
The great difference IMHO is that audio files aren’t as easily quoted in blogs, nor are they searchable via google, etc.
It’s a shame this wasn’t a unanimous vote.
Jim, searchablity is the first thing I have read that makes sense on why there needs to be both. I can totally see where just having a audio record only could make a citzens search for the truth more difficult. Would proper indexing of podcast reduce that need?
I hate to post a “me too” but, yeah, it’s all about indexing and searchability. We’re years away from having the muddy audio of a multi-person meeting indexed by search engines. And it’s significantly more difficult to manipulate and even use audio than text. There’s a reason why NPR and other radio news networks don’t just post the audio for everything.
As Jim said above, the Board did vote 5-1 this afternoon to retain near-verbatim notes. The 25 minute discussion and write-up is posted at Charlottesville Tomorrow. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to index this one because of the large amount of stories we’re following this week.
I would say, one reason NPR and other radio news networks don’t post full audio of lectures and government meetings is because radio reporters tend to be very efficient in terms of what they record. If you don’t need to record three hours of something, the tried and tested method is to pull one of the people aside before or after the meeting and get their comments off tape.