Posted by Jehf on March 9, 2009 at 11:26pm
The Mission Statement of the Local Government group suggests using Organic Groups for a local government site, citing the ability for people to run their own sections. How would you set OG up for this? Would all posts be Public, and "membership" in a Group (department) only be necessary for maintainers?
I guess you could use Roles to allow non-Admin folks to join a departmental Group just for the OG Notification features.
Has anyone actually set up a public site using OG like this? I'm very curious. The more I think of it the better it sounds.
Comments
What you describe is pretty much it
Really, mentioning OG was just to flatter Moshe into approving the group ;-)
A couple points of clarification: Organic Groups doesn't need roles to separate admin access (manage the group) from pubic access (with the ability to "join" or "subscribe" to the group); individual members of a group can explicitly be made managers. The public status of posts can be determined per-group, and even per post within groups, so this isn't an either-or question. For most departments of a town I see this as staff as admins and people interested in updates and interaction as members.
This is similar to the groups.drupal.org set-up we are writing on right now!
benjamin, Agaric Design Collective
benjamin, agaric
OG in Towns
I've been configuring OG for another community prototype I'm working on that relates to science outreach to highschools and I like the idea of the self administration, particularly for all the Boards and Committees with limited technical skills or access to the Town's website.
There are some issues here in MA to keep in mind:
* Open Meeting laws limit how much can be kept "private". We played with this at the ECC and decided to have it pretty much all public, including draft minutes and internal discussions that we had on a Google Sites Wiki.
* We never did get a clear legal opinion about what we were required to disclose and what we could keep private, although it is clear some issues can be discussed in private. Nor did we get an opinion whether, if a quorum of members where simultaneously participating in a discussion forum, it constituted a meeting and thus required a 48 hour public notice.
In regard to using groups, I wonder if citizens, other than committee members, should be allowed to "join" the group. My guess is that while a committee would happily let people subscribe, they would be less inclined to have them join. Presumably commenting can be kept open and contact forms which provide an archive would be sufficient to allow citizens input without technically being a part of the Group.
If the master "group" were the Town itself, then joining clearly makes sense as it allows ad hoc committees on any number of issues to be created. Lot's to consider, but OG certainly looks like it has a role to play.
Open meeting laws
Gordon-
This is a big issue. The NH legislature has taken a couple of runs at where electronic communications fit into the laws requiring notice and public disclosure of “meetings” and finally passed something last year.
At least for my own board, I’d hard-code the site to make all posts “Public”. And I wouldn’t even enable comments without running it by our legal counsel first and a lot of thought around the administrative overhead it would require. Although it pains me to miss an opportunity for public input, any comments that pertain to an application or issue before the board would need to be treated the same way as written testimony. Comments left on the site would need to be officially entered into the public record (in our case that means printed out and included in the paper files where they are accessible to in-person information requests) and probably at least mentioned at the next public meeting/hearing so that applicants and members of the public attending meetings know that board members are potentially being influenced by them. Anonymous or pseudonymous comments would be particularly tricky.
If board members actually want to participate in a comment thread, things get even trickier. Anything that could be construed as “deliberation” and involves a quorum of members is a “meeting” and must be noticed 24 hours in advance. Assuring that board members never cross that threshold in comments would be difficult. We’re a seven-member board, so four members is a quorum. So before posting any comment, a member would need to read the entire thread, counting how many members have already participated, and only post if there aren’t already three members involved in the conversation. I’m not even sure if that’s kosher, as even a vigorous debate between only two members, which is witnessed by a quorum of members, strikes me as violating at least the spirit of the law.
It’s VERY frustrating to miss out on the incredible opportunities for online public participation, but the law requires that every citizen receive the opportunity to fully participate, and that includes those with no internet access.
I’m thinking a better model would be for official government bodies to expose their official content via RSS or something similar, so that unaffiliated private sites can syndicate that content and host a vigorous debate about it outside of the right-to-know constraints. Of course, the same restrictions would apply to board member participation and I would have to discourage any member from participating in any online discussions which could fall into the category of “ex-parte” communications.
-Jeff
I understand the problem...
We discussed some of this with other committees who raised some of the issues you mention.
FWIW we ended up that "if the site registered and verified citizens with their real names then authenticated their access" that we could emulate personal appearance before the committee, i.e. comments should be treated the same as if they had been submitted in person including being added to the public record.
With the registration we saw the opportunity to start the process of creating an online voter list and suggested that the submission of electronic questions could be run as a trial with some of the less controversial committees to work out what works.
The requirement that printed copies be held at Town Hall for viewing is also very annoying. We also have Code that requires applicants submit everything in print form with copies in person at Town Hall. Here we are going to look into changing Town Code and to see if we can get an initiative at a State level to clear the path for electronic documents. The problems are to some extent self-inflicted: we require copies so the Town doesn't incur the printing cost to distribute it to the various members and boards.... because many of the members don't want to use their computers.
Very frustrating.
In regard to your idea about the internal stuff syndicated out to a "community" site, I think this has to be very much part of the discussion in this group as it would create a conversation around issues that would non doubt find its way back into the Boards and Committees.
Gordon
Retention vs. Public Access
I think that's mostly your town code. In Mass state law afaik, for most committees nothing needs to be retained on paper except for the official filed agenda and minutes of the meeting which can be as minimal as attendance and votes. Almost everything is subject to public access if it is retained, but for most materials you don't have to retain it and format isn't specified. In fact, the Mass retention schedules have some comment that for items that aren't required to be retained on paper, the "information" needs to be preserved, not the actual document which we've interpreted to mean microfilm and electronic storage.
Our town eats the costs of duplication for submissions to boards, but state law allows I think it's 20 cents a page for copies and 50 cents a page for computer printouts. There's no set cost for electronic fulfillment afaik other than to cover our costs based on the least paid person able to fulfill the request.
Mass laws
A couple of things that I actually know about! Everything a committee does is a meeting as long as there are more than a quorum involved--phone calls, email exchanges, online exchanges. This also includes forwards of emails/txts/whatever where more than a quorum is consulted even if done in a round robin way, ie a emails b, who forwards and asks c's opinion. This also applies to forums not sponsored by the government--I don't have the citation, but there was a complaint about an open meeting violation because a majority of selectmen were active on a local newspapers message boards.
This effectively renders the entire internet worse than useless because it cannot be used as a forum for discussion and becomes liability when there's an option to do so that committee members might use inadvertently.
The only things you can keep from the public are meetings held in executive session which are limited to personnel matters and planning negotiations on contracts. These have to occur within the context of an announced open meeting which then goes into executive session. Once those negotiations are concluded the material needs to be made public with very few exceptions--the only one I'm aware of is matters covered by employee privacy laws which are mainly about disciplinary actions.
http://www.mass.gov/Cago/docs/Government/openmtgguide.pdf
Government & Local Government
I do think that it might be worth considering just making this a general discussion about government use of Drupal.
I had actually applied to set up an OG for just Government, but the application was rejected (not entirely sure why).
Some local governments are larger than some states after all. There are aspects of community, collaboration & standardization which common in all good governments.
Also worth looking at this generic government wiki - http://government20bestpractices.pbwiki.com/ - which does have some Drupal examples in it.
We've been doing a lot of work to build themes for a government standard here in Canada - http://clf.openconcept.ca/
Recently added some support for Dublin Core which many governments will likely be trying to add.
Also there's this great Drupal blog about government data & API's - http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/100
Mike
OpenConcept | CLF 2.0
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