I’m seeking help from citizens who are concerned about how the City spends money and how we communicate about it. I have previously said that if there were bad people trying to hide information, the City couldn’t be doing a better job of obfuscating information. I don’t really believe there is anyone evil trying to hide information and in fact Dan Rainey the head of IT is interested in looking into better ways of handling information, so there is hope. But, I am still waiting for some interested citizens who would like to participate in helping to make information more available and digestible. To this end I have been pushing the importance of each person trying to learn one thing new and I have picked shareable calendars, in particular Google’s calendar as a simple first step that people could use as a way of getting on the same page.

An example of the problem

Courts Police Building Construction - I received this email from our City Administrator, Roger Fraser:

Quinn-Evans has been diligently pursuing the master planning for the A2 Municipal Center while also working on the early stages of design work for a new Courts and Police Building. To that end, there are several upcoming meetings you should know about:

1) July 24 – 7:00 p.m. – Downtown Library Multi-purpose room (lower level) – This meeting is intended to provide the public with an early opportunity to comment on the building layouts being considered for the west side of the Municipal Center.

2) July 25, 9:00 a.m. DDA – Status report and Q/A.

3) August 7, 9:00 a.m., 7th Floor, City Ctr. – Regular meeting of design team and advisory committee.

4) August 20, 6:00 p.m., Council Chambers – Briefing for City Council, Planning Commission and DDA

When, I searched A2gov.org for “Ann Arbor Municipal Center” there was one result and the only information was from the summary page for the City Council agenda, dated Feb. 5, 2007:

DS-3 Resolution to Approve a Professional Services Contract with Quinn Evans Architects for the Planning and Design of the Ann Arbor Municipal Center ($962,600.00) and Establish a Project Budget for the Police/Courts Building ($1,011,000.00) (Administration - Roger W. Fraser, City Administrator) (8 Votes Required) Postponed until 2/20/07

I know there have been countless meetings for years about this topic, but I would need a staff of people to locate and uncover all the background info. It is interesting that while the City’s web site returns one result, a local blog, Arbor Update, returns 4 results on Google. If anyone out there is interested in working to help me wade through this or other issues and help make them more digestible, I have been actively seeking help. I have commented before that Council members really need a staff person that works for them, if we are to have any hope of being able to oversee the enterprise that is the City of Ann Arbor. When I have asked about who is responsible for oversight, answers I get from other Council members include statements like, “we have excellent staff and we have to trust them.” For me, it is not a matter of trust. I am not doubting the “trust worthiness” of any staff member. The staff I have met seem to be good people with good intentions. That is not the issue for me. My experience in business is that you hire a staff you trust, but that does not prevent you from having an accountant who checks to be sure your books are in order or someone who looks at how organizational behavior issues promote waste or create efficiencies. After eight months on Council I find myself deluged by a Tsunami of information, most of it in PDF attachments to emails that are difficult to review and organize. A council packet can be 850 pages for a single meeting. Despite this, I do believe there is hope for the future, but it will only happen if a few citizens step up and decide to put in a little time to learn some new approaches to handling and communicating information.

Sharable Calendars as a Place to Begin Improving Our Information Flow

The problems with email and coordinating: When I joined Council in November, 2006, I had to keep calling Bob Johnson to find out when we were having meetings. No one on Council was using a shared calendar. At every political meeting I attend, people are always making announcements about this or that event that are usually impossible to capture completely and accurately. Events are announced and then the dates change. I recently showed up for a Democratic Party meeting based on incorrect information in an email I received. Had the person in charge of this been using Google’s sharable calendar, then the text message I received on my phone reminding me of the meeting would have had the corrected information, instead of that information residing in multiple emails with some correct, some incorrect, some opened and some unopened. Because of the nature of what I do for a living (web technologies) I am perhaps at the extreme end of the distribution of why relying on email is a bad way to communicate. But, I suspect that my experience is an early predictor of where this problem is heading for the general public and certainly for anyone in business or government who is trying to do more than a couple of things in one day.

An example of making information more accessible in a shared calendar: I am taking the info from the email I received from Roger Fraser (copied above) and putting it in my Google Calendar, which I can access through a web browser anywhere. Now that I have entered it, the information automatically appears in my Ann Arbor City Calendar Page on this blog. A “subscribe” link appears at the bottom, when you first open the Calendar. Other websites could subscribe to this link and have the calendar events also appear on those web pages without anyone being a bottleneck on information flow. If instead of me doing this by myself, others were participating, incredible benefits would ensue. Think about the telephone. It was not very useful when there were only two phones and Alexander Graham Bell and his colleague talked only to each other. But, the power of a network is an exponential function of the numbers of nodes in the network (Metcalf’s Law).

Benefits of using shared calendars:

• Information for a particular event resides as a single copy in one place, rather than multiple copies that may contain conflicting information.
• Multiple people can share the responsibility of entering and updating information in a single location.
• Other websites can subscribe to calendar information that updates automatically as new information is entered at the source. This helps to present the information to different segments of the population.
• Individuals can subscribe to information that can be consumed in their browser or mobile device.
• When information changes, everyone gets the update in their view of the calendar (from web browsers to mobile devices), instead of having to search through multiple email messages with possibly conflicting information.

I have been accused of being too much of a Geek and some reading this post may come to that conclusion. However, I firmly believe that if we are going to create an economic turnaround in Michigan, we as a people need to step up and be willing to put in a little time to learn something new at least once a year and preferable more often than that. To that end, I decided that shared calendars are perhaps the biggest bang for the buck and that the Google offering is the easiest to use.

Do you want to learn more and help our city?

I am actively seeking people who want to help use shared calendaring via Google to improve information flow throughout the city. I may be on the inside, but I am only one vote. Being in the minority of Council members voting against extravagant expenditures is a loosing battle without participation from citizens, who by their presence at meetings have proven that they can effect the votes of other members that I cannot.

Learning and using shared calendars effectively can increase transparency in our government and draw upon the “Wisdom of the Crowd.” I highly recommend reading The Wisdom of Crowds by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki who “explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future. This seemingly counterintuitive notion has endless and major ramifications for how businesses operate, how knowledge is advanced, how economies are (or should be) organized and how we live our daily lives.”