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.