I wanted to write a little bit about an ongoing experiment that I've been conducting. In the age of all things electronica and, since I'm an IT guy, I wanted to see how it went trying to conduct City business electronically. It's always bothered me at least a little bit that the shelf life of the mountain of paper I get from the City each week is about 4 days. The 200+ page Council agendas go straight into the recycle bin as we finish with each item during the Council meeting. Committee agends are all gone by Wednesday. It's always seemed like a waste.
First a little background:
When I was first elected, the city distributed laptops to all newly elected members of Council. That was interesting and I suppose a little bit useful but since Outlook wasn't configured to work over the internet, I still had to use webmail. I guess that the main idea behind giving Council members laptops was to help them segregate their life in order to avoid FOIA problems, which can be major (I've blacklisted the city's domain on my business email so that city email doesn't come there). However, laptops just weren't very useful – we never even made a stab at trying to do business electronically. That was all about 6 years ago.
So, I've been trying to do the agendas only on my iPad and so far so good. I have found two recurring problems tho: the first seems to be an artifact of how the agenda is scanned. Maybe the resolution is too high (guess) as sometimes the ipad will have a hard time rendering the pages and it isn't solely to do with the size of the agenda. The other is that it I can well imagine non-techies having problems getting the agendas and other media to save correctly. There are fixes for that which are done on the IT side but it is an issue. Overall, I think it's probably simple enough that Council members could opt for an iPad instead of a laptop.
The iPhone is a bit of a different story. I tried to do the agenda thing on it once and that was a failure. It is just too damn small. However, at thte last town hall meeting I figured I would try to take notes on it. This was an abject failure. It took waaaay too long to get things down and my suspicion was that people in the audience thought I was screwing around on the internet. That's not useful either: in solving one problem I'm causing a more serious one!
So, the iPhone is probably out of the running but the iPad experiment is still alive. I'll report back with a conclusion at some point.
May 31, 2012 at 9:38 am
What about the other experiment with Andrea having the ability to type the minutes while Council in session on her pad? Haven't talked to her about it, but presume she is finding a useful tool? By the way, I think it was Lynchburg that went to all Ipad for their Council….and I think Charlottesville is also trying the experiment.
In terms of pulling up the agenda (no attachments) and agenda with attachments on my Android phone using Quickoffice, the straight agenda loads pretty well. When it comes to the larger PDF with all the attachments, once it is downloaded which seems to take forever, overall I have good results. Occasionally, like you, I find a few burps in how the docs are rendered – for that matter, even pulling it up on my Windows PC sometimes has those burps.
By default, the Android will save the document first, then Quickoffice opens, so I have not encountered the saving issue you found with the Ipad. Taking notes is also not a problem, although as you have noted, when I am sitting in Counci chambers, I have my paper and pencil 🙂 Sometimes faster method for notes is the historical standard vs. trying to type on a small keyboard.
Think you hit the nail on the head about the rendering when flipping it all into a PDF. Of course, when Toni or Andrea are preparing it for loading on line, they have to do it fast sometimes. Simple fix to possibly just keep it to 300dpi to 600dpi given sometimes – especially with Public Works stuff – you need a good resolution to see details. Although, for public viewing, that is a maybe, maybe not – the key point in getting the Agenda et. al up online is so the public at least sees what the sessions would be about. Not sure which side of the coin to vote on – higher resolution or just the intent of having the documents available.
May 31, 2012 at 10:16 am
Instead of using a small keyboard to type notes on the iPad, have you tried using any of the handwriting/note-taking apps available? I use Ghostwriter and either my finger or digital pen (if I remember it!) and I write on the ipad just as I would on paper. Very convenient!
June 2, 2012 at 8:55 am
I'm definately sticking with the ipad for the agendas. There has been some discussion of issuing ipads to Council members instead of laptops. That, in combination, with the reduction in staff time and materials would be a money-saver. However, its not likely to happen as it would be precieved to be too fancy or some such. I think it would save about 100 reams of paper per year. I used the city laptop for awhile but it got old and slow and no replacement has been forthcoming. I'd love to have a "city ipad" that had my city email and all my documents in one place. It would really help me a lot and, although I know the ipad is my idea, I am frankly getting tired of using my stuff to do city business – cell phone, computer, etc.
@repraha: I installed that app and will give it a whirl.