How will you use technology to run city government more efficiently, increase transparency, etc?
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We welcome your comments on the questions. The questions appearing in this blog have been submitted by Ypsilanti city residents and interested parties. The YMDC will not inform the candidates of the actual questions to be used in the debate.
Each candidate will be asked to answer all questions asked during the debate and will be given a maximum of three minutes to respond to each question. The moderator is given the authority to keep time and to gently inform candidates when their answer-time has expired.
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While YMDC hopes for questions that can be posed to all three candidates, and while these will be the kinds of questions asked at the debate, we realize that there are significant questions that need to be asked of each candidate. YMDC does not plan to remove those questions from the list of questions we receive. Where we draw the line, however, is with clearly confrontational, accusatory statements. The committee reserves the right not to post such items.Submit a Debate Question
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Don't forget to mark your calendars for Thursday, July 27 at 7 p.m. You can observe the three candidates running for mayor at EMU’s McKenny Union, and you can submit a written question for the candidates at that time.About YMDC
The 2006 Ypsilanti Mayoral Debate Committee is a grassroots, nonpartisan, wholly volunteer organization made up of Ypsilanti city residents. The committee’s purposes are several:
First, the committee seeks to inform the public about mayoral candidate views and policy positions through a public debate.
Second, the committee hopes these efforts foster a sense of community and connectedness among city residents as they participate in the electoral process.
Last, the committee desires that this event will inspire future public forums where community members and voters will take an active role in defining public policy.
Members of the 2006 Ypsilanti Mayoral Debate Committee
Mark Maynard
Rachel Cheng
Amanda Edmonds
Linda French
Barry Hall
Mark Higbee
Eric Lagergren
Richard Murphy
Nancy Shore
Kathryn Taylor
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July 21, 2006 at 10:36 pm
More citizens need to get wired. There’s already a lot of Federal, State, County and Local activity on-line and available to all. In addition, several committees, such as the HDC, are working to streamline public communication, applications and approval processes. Drop in to an HDC meeting and you’ll see notes being taken on computer, digital photos being reviewed and other improvements.
July 22, 2006 at 11:33 am
You may want to see Mayor Farmers speech to the legislature regarding revenue sharing (on the Cities website) prior to answering this question. According to the Mayor “Technology cannot arrest criminals” (why did she support the radio millage). “Technology cannot fight fires” (so much for advances in fire safety, fire suppression and fire trucks). ” Technology cannot remove snow” ( What is doppler radar?) and what are we doing with a City website on the internent?
July 22, 2006 at 11:44 am
The HDC might take notes on a computer, but that doesn’t change the fact that the city website still is horribly designed, minutes and announcements take forever to be posted (and are generally in .pdf format when they are), and it’s very difficult to navigate. A 12-year-old kid with a copy of Dreamweaver could probably do a better job.
Also, I think it’s a fairly safe assumption to make, that at this stage of the game, nearly everyone with the ability and desire to be ‘wired’ already is, to some extent. On the flip side of the equation, though, are a those that simply can’t afford the technology, and I think there’s quite a few in that situation here in Ypsilanti.
Everytime I go to the library, nearly every internet-enabled computer is being used, so clearly many people who may not have home computers are taking advantage of that option.
I might add, as a corollary of this thread’s main question, “What steps could be taken to increase access to computers among the citizenry of Ypsilanti?” And by that, I’m not referring to free wi-fi, which is useless if you don’t have a machine to log into it with.
July 22, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Does EMU have any programs working on access to information issues? I know that, at UM, both the School of Information and the B-School have such programs, though, much to my frustration, my experience in the B-School suggests that they’re interested only in using access to technology as a money-making scheme in India and sub-saharan Africa, and are completely disinclined to consider needs right here.
Schutzman – do you want minutes in…html? doc? plaintext? I agree with you on the design / organization complaints, which I also apply to every other government website I’ve ever dealt with. The HDC and Planning sections as of late being my turf, someday I might get around to improving things. Maybe when the website makes it above the 10th most urgent thing on my todo list. Sigh.
July 25, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Murph, I personally prefer nearly everything online to be in html format, or plain text, second. PDF is fine if you’re only using the file to print from, but gets very irritating if you’re looking for information, which I’d say is the most common case of visitors to the city website. And, both pdf and the various word formats are proprietary, and change versions with some frequency, thus can be irrirating to deal with.
I think much of the problem comes from people in offices, where oftentimes everything’s running off the same server or else they all have the same system/software. When, however, they’re doing something for public consumption, they just automatically assume that’s the same way everyone else looks at data, which isn’t the case.