The Starkville Board of Aldermen received a good report on the status of the new city hall at a recent board meeting. It is progressing on time and the city should be ensconced in its new home by the end of the year. It’s an exciting time as our downtown trades an old and careworn face for a modern and energetic look.
That new facility can be seen as an opportunity to evaluate where we are, where we are going and how we are getting there.
I am a lover of technology in all its forms but I am especially fond of the use of Twitter. It has gotten to the point that I get most of my news from the Twitter feeds of national and international news agencies. Though I still try to make it home for the 5:30 broadcast news, it is just a token habit that identifies the end of the workday. By the time the 5:30 news rolls around most of what is presented has been hashed out on social media.
Starkville has been slowly working its way out of the Paper Age and into the 21st century. In the previous term we created a technology department, worked to have wi-fi available throughout downtown and transitioned to electronic packets for all the Board members. Of the seven members all but two opted for the electronic version. That saved us money and time in producing those packets twice a month.
It costs a lot more to create, plan for and store paper records than it does to have them available and backed up electronically. Using technology instead of paper, those records can be kept forever without the problems of having staff to file them and the space required to store them.
My understanding is there has been a bit of a backsliding since then as there are now four board members who have gone back to paper. Too bad, but that too will change as time marches on and a younger generation comprehends all that technology can do to make us more efficient, effective and responsive.
Starkville has been streaming board meetings over the past year or better and has created access that allows anyone with an Internet connection to see what goes on. Opportunities abound for citizens to be knowledgeable about their community without ever having to leave their home or set foot in city hall.
This new city hall and the plans for a rehabilitated police station should provide a technologically advanced platform that readies us for whatever the future may bring.
We’ve come a long way, but we need to keep reaching for the next exciting opportunity. I believe that Twitter can bring much more to the table. Aside from live tweeting the board meeting festivities, which several of us do for fun and reporters do professionally, there are more creative uses that might just be wonderful experiments.
For example, there is a city in Spain, that uses Twitter as an operational tool. When a citizen sees something that needs to be done or has a question, they simply tweet it to the city, and the city tweets it to the appropriate party. It is as purely transparent as communication with government might ever be.
If you follow the city’s Twitter account then you can see any communication between the city and a citizen. The communication acts like an open phone call to the citizen and the person responsible for the repair. The city tweets the request to the responsible party who sees it and then takes care of it and tweets back a picture and the status that the work is completed. That scenario recently happened with a broken park bench. It was removed and a picture was tweeted out.
You just can’t get more transparent than that. The down side may be that expectations are set, but the up side is that if the work gets done, the city has satisfied citizens who are engaged in the process with feedback and an opportunity to build trust.
Let’s see if Starkville can be one of the first to get behind and build on the concept of E-democracy. Our new city hall’s capability can be the catalyst that sparks the innovation and makes a statement about how visionary we want to be.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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