Forward Lookout, beyond the blog

The reason I blog at Forward Lookout, beyond being on the same site as Brenda and Lucas and getting ten times the pageviews I used to get, is that this site is one of the most interesting experiments in the country towards increasing civic engagement. The blogging is almost secondary.

As an information source, Brenda is hands-down the best source for what’s happening in local government. If she blogs about a meeting, her notes are probably better than the official minutes of what happened at the meeting – in fact, I bet that policy makers, journalists, and interested citizens refer to her blog posts on a meeting and treat it as the canonical version instead of the meeting minutes, regardless if they agree with her politically. I doubt that there’s anyone in the state that does what she does, and I’d venture that’s true in the nation, too. As a community, we’re very blessed to have her.

That said, there are two significant shortcomings to Brenda:

1. Brenda does not hide her editorial biases. Occasionally, people may be interested in hearing what Tim Bruer had to say, and Brenda is known to summarize him as “blah blah blah.”

2. Brenda doesn’t scale. If she doesn’t attend a meeting, or TiVo it, that’s it.  Last night there was an EDC meeting, a Board of Public Works meeting, an ALRC meeting, and a UDC meeting. I think we lucked out in that Kristin Czubkowski of the Cap Times decided to do ALRC, and Brenda is going to UDC. If your issue was BPW, I think you’re mostly SOL.

To a computer scientist, we’d look at the second problem and note the load is increasing linearly, and say “Just add a second Brenda.”

I know that terrifies some of you, and fear not, it’s not actually possible. And in fact, that’s not what we really want: we just want more people who can do what Brenda can do. If we can’t create more Brendas, perhaps we can train more.

What do we want them to do? I think a starting point is making sure that primary sources are available and online. For public meetings, I claim that the best “primary source” is an accurate transcript of what happened at the meeting, along with handouts from the meeting.

By that metric, the best version is the City Channel’s recordings. They’re high-quality: multiple cameras, good use of microphones, often capture the visual material of a presentation, and even have some on-screen titles to identify the participants. If you want to know what happened, with the recordings you can usually get most of important parts of the meeting.

Second best are “liveblogs” like Brenda’s or Kristin’s. (More accurately, “blow by blow” blogs, since they may not be live) In some ways, these are better – I can read a transcript of a meeting much, much faster than watching the video, and I can cut and paste a quote into a blog post, and they’re search-engine friendly.

Without that transcript, or at least very accurate meeting minutes (ie, more than we usually get), much of value of that meeting dissipates into the ether when the committee adjourns. The recording or transcript captures that value and allows for it to be used and reused, or leveraged in higher-value works, like a summary news piece, or an informed opinion piece. (In many ways, it reminds of de Soto’s thesis from “The Mystery of Capital.”)

Now, most people want the action of the meeting distilled down into something more manageable.  This is a challenge, but journalists are pretty good at it. If the journalist was present, or has access to the transcript, they can write the story directly from their own notes. For most readers, that’s a welcome and sufficient version – but if you want to go deeper into a particular issue, or are trying to relate the true history of one event to another, having access to the full, original source material is invaluable. We can always construct the summary from the full source material, but we cannot construct the source material from the summary.

So, here’s the vision: in the 21st century, the full proceedings of government should be completely available, online and accessible on-demand. This is one component of modern participatory citizenry. As much as possible, the information should be integrated together and not in separate silos: I should be easily find the video from the City Channel, documents from Legistar, raw data out of ELAM or Madison Measures, news and blog coverage of the issue – all of it should be available in one setting.

We are a long way from the vision, and I’m not going to give a roadmap in one post. For starters, I’m not exactly sure how we get there, and so I’m going to take a “release early, release often” approach and develop ideas over time.  Making this work is an active area of Computer Science research, and a lot of it isn’t possible today. We’re going to do experiments and see what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s my first experiment: I was sitting through the EDC meeting. I knew Brenda was taking excellent notes, but the City Channel was not. It occurred to me that I ought to record the audio of the meeting, so here are the results. I used my iPhone and the SpeakEasy app, with my phone sitting on the bench about 10 feet away from the table.  The first version is what my phone recorded and I just copied to the web. If you crank the volume up, it’s not too bad. I also did minimal post-processing and created a second version with Levelator, which makes it listenable at a more reasonable volume level but has a lot more noise.

It’s not perfect: it sounds terrible, and you have to know people by voice to really know what’s going on. It’s not integrated with anything, just buried in a blog post. It didn’t start right at the beginning because I didn’t think of it until about 20 minutes into the meeting. But, if you want to hear exactly what Tim Cooley had to say about a big vision for the Monona shoreline, jump to 12:45 in the audio and listen for three minutes. (Brenda’s notes are mostly spot-on, though she gave Cooley a pass when he called the Beltline the Beltway.) Or, if you want to hear him reiterate that this is “not an attempt at all, to minimize, or to eliminate the voice of the neighborhoods,” jump to the 18:46 mark.

Most importantly, it’s out and on the Internet now, and it took virtually no effort on my part. No automated transcription software currently available could do anything with it right now, but that might change in five years, and if it does, at least we have a recording. The next meeting you’re at where there’s no City Channel presence, you should record it, too. If there are easy ways to improve the quality of the audio, I’ll start using them and tell you what I did.

Tim O’Reilly likes to talk about the “Vending Machine” view of government: put in your taxes, out pop services, and only interact with it when something goes wrong, usually by kicking and yelling at the machine. He and many others, myself included, think that there’s a better model for civic participation. Forward Lookout can be a way for We The People to build something of value. Some of it will be with whiz-bang technology, and some of it will be with dedicated citizens. I’m excited to see where we can take it.