opengov
With all the talk about restructuring Chapel Hill's advisory boards, I thought it might be good time to publicly share my idea for a new board to help foster better civic engagement and more open government, while also addressing the gap left by firing the technology advisory board 7 years ago. I shared this proposal with the Mayor's Committee on Communications
in late 2010, but there didn't seem to be much interest at the time.
Maybe now there is an opportunity to do something to make Chapel
Hill more participatory and democratic.
Not
enough Chapel Hill residents participate in public meetings and
advisory boards. This lack of engagement leaves the Town at a
disadvantage without the valuable input of a broad range of Chapel
Hillians, and also leaves many people feeling frustrated and cut off
from decisions that impact their lives and issues that concern them.
So far this week, my e-mail to the school board was trapped in their spam filter (and not discovered until after they voted on the subject of the e-mail), and then I went to a public hearing at which the county commissioners did not in fact accept public comment. Not a great week for civic engagement.
I've been encouraged to hear municipal staff and elected leaders in Chapel Hill talk about how broad, inclusive, and engaging they want the process of revising the Town's Comprehensive Plan to be. I've also seen some positive steps in this direction, but have also been frustrated about my inability to get information about what is going on with the process so far. Hopefully, this frustration will end when the public part of the process kicks off on September 27th (OP's birthday, coincidentally).
The town's "2020" web site lists ways that people can get involved including: Become a Stakeholder, Join a Working Group, Subscribe to our email list, Take a survey, Attend a Meeting, Tell someone about Chapel Hill 2020, and Tell us who's missing. This is a great start. I think this process is an opportunity to think more broadly about how to get residents more involved more effectively and creatively in our local government, and I bet we can think of some different formats and different venues for this to happen.
Sorry, Ruby. I know you wanted to write about this topic in the upcoming year, but looks like the town and UNC are a little ahead. :)
UNC School of Information and Library Science to partner with Town of Chapel Hill
Posted Date: 6/27/2011
The Town of Chapel Hill is poised to benefit from a grant received by UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science to increase the digital curation workforce, focusing on the public information and the integration of public policy with information technology.
As we've mentioned before here on OP, the Town of Chapel Hill is preparing to revise its decade-old Comprehensive Plan (CP). In addition to documenting something of a shared vision of the community, it is also used as the basis of the Town's LUMO (Land Use Management Ordinance) which contains the actual policies and regulations with which all developers must comply. In an attempt to ramp up the process of creating this community document, the Town Council is trying a new approach: they decided to empanel an "Initiating Committee" (IC) that will lay out the process through which the actual CP wil be created.
Last week The Carrboro Citizen reported on Orange County leaders congratulating themselves on making major technology improvements over the past two years. "“Today’s servers are tomorrow’s mainframes, and we do have to have that kind of continuous upgrade of systems,” board Vice Chair Steve Yuhasz said." He's right of course, but it sounds like many of the changes were to internal infrastructure, so it's hard for us average residents to tell the difference. I'm wondering what technology OP readers would like to see the County improve?
One improvement that I did notice was the update to the web-based GIS system. Mostly it caught my attention because the County's site was down and/or malfunctioning for a while following the upgrade. It is now easier to use than before, which I would characterize as a step up from requiring a graduate degree to use, to merely requiring a lot of patience and guesswork.
When I first learned about the proposed framework for downtown, I was amazed to see such big, new ideas being proposed by the consultant hired by the Town of Chapel Hill and the Downtown Partnership. This proposal presents an opportunity for Chapel Hill to do something visionary and to once again have a thriving urban center that is the envy of other communities. But.
The only way that this Big Idea will evolve into a Good Idea is if Chapel Hill can make this vision our own. Not only that, but I also think this plan might have trouble being approved in Chapel Hill without generating significant community investment in its approach. Or, as I said in June:
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