Government 101: Sharing Is Caring

Beverly Hills is at heart a small town of tree-lined streets, tidy lawns and mom-and-pop shops. Almost in spite of our global reputation and out-of-town visitors, we are likely to know our neighbors or be regulars at a the Farmers' Market. Heck, City Hall is so close by that we call our elected representatives and they call back.

Yet participation in city government is underwhelming. We are 35,000 residents and many more business people, yet few turn up at Council Chambers for public comment...or even call in. Much of city business takes place at commission or committee meetings but few appear with comments.

That leaves City Hall officials wide open for vested interests to speak up for some or other variance, or to oppose a given regulation if it doesn't suit them. And they find City Hall’s ear because our democracy works. Residents, though, are dropping the participation ball.

I myself appear before a variety of committee and commissions and I’ve learned a lot about civics in the process. (Schoolhouse Rock it isn’t.) To make it into law, a proposal requires good ideas, a lot of energy and perseverance throughout the legislative process.

On behalf of Better Bike, I encourage policymakers to move Beverly Hills toward the sustainable city that is envisioned in our plans. I press for plans and programs, bike racks and routes that will make walking and cycling more safe and appealing. While paid representatives appear at city hearings in fine suits, I arrive in a bike helmet. And I'm heard. I've learned that our wheels of democracy need not turn only on the efforts of vested interests.

Our “government of the people, by the people, for the people” (as Lincoln said) requires our constant attention and participation.

Your Attention Makes Government Work Better

Beverly Hills could take several steps to make City Hall more open to residents, however. The doors of City Hall already swing open. We need to make sure that our online gateway is as breezy as that on Rexford Drive.

We could make public information more available. For example, the city long had bolted its online front door against search engines. They simply couldn't crawl the city’s website. By blocking access to BeverlyHills.org, though, the city ensured that Googlers and other searchers like me came up empty-handed. City documents were available only through the city’s own portal and once they were pulled they were gone, gone, gone. (The switch has finally been flipped and now the site is visible to search engines.)

The city should make more accessible the public information already available. The difference between availability and accessibility is usability. Posted agendas, minutes and supporting policy materials must be made more usable by making them accessible for search engines. Today, many posted documents are scanned from paper copies; these are invisible to search engines and end users are hampered too because even we can’t search them.

For example, imagine a 75-page spreadsheet of budget line-items that is generated not from an Excel file directly but instead printed on paper and then scanned. For the resident interested in finding some needle in that haystack, the scanned image document provides zero search access. The city has posted such documents to the web for years and continues to do so today. Let’s make these documents fully machine readable.

The city must also make all public documents simply readable. Huh? They aren't readable? Nope—some of them look like gibberish to a Mac user (see photo). In the Los Angeles area, market research shows, 20 percent of households use a Mac and I’m one of them. Yet I routinely come across public documents formatted as PDFs that come out as gibberish.

Last, I have come across yet another document issue that confounds the IT experts: When the city scans paper documents, it sometimes generates an accompanying text file using optical character recognition (OCR) that is then bundled with the image document. In theory, that should make the file machine-readable. In practice, however, it’s not cross-platform compatible. On a Mac, at least, it's not even searchable without a proprietary browser plugin from Adobe.

The answer is to ensure that all documents are readable across platforms by using up-to-date software and a standardized process. Yet the city continues to generate PDFs using software from 2003 that is known to cause formatting problems. (Ironically, documents generated using circa 2000 software that the city also uses read just fine.) Our city needs to bring its document-writing software into the present day!

Why the Fuss About Public Documents?

For too long City Hall procedures revolved around a "bulletin board" approach to engagement: Meetings noticed via paper pinned to the board at the library. Agendas, minutes, staff reports and supporting materials keep residents informed of city business and should be both available and truly accessible if we are to encourage public participation.

If only we could embrace the online tools we have. Our website is outdated. The In Focus newsletter is relatively insubstantial. It needs a boost to be a useful avenue for communicating with residents. Until recently, our city’s social sharing webpage was "under construction." It had been for a full year-and-a-half after the city trumpeted the initiative in a press release. (After recent feedback it has been completed.)

Still, we’re far behind other cities in eGovernment innovations. It took an embarrassing salary release to prod city officials to communicate directly with residents, beginning with a Patch column to explain . It was a rare instance of direct outreach from which all residents will benefit if it continues. 

We Will Continue Because It Must

The good news is that change is in the wind. I’m confident that our IT folks recognize the virtue of local government transparency and are working to move our twentieth-century city into the 21st century. I enjoyed a tour of the city’s data center (think HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and I feel secure we’re prepared for the era of big data.

Our "Smart City" technology committee is high-capacity like all of our advisory bodies. I believe that our city’s plans for a new website and mobile application will serve residents and visitors well in the future.

I believe that we will do better because we must do better. If we hew to values like transparency and public participation, we can improve our already good quality of life. And then we can truly aspire to Lincoln’s "government of the people, by the people, for the people."