Describe City of Raleigh Partnership here:
Here's a clip from a City Council meeting where Councilmember Gaylord asks city staff to come up with a report on how to collaborate with the project. As a wiki community, we can brainstorm together on how we can develop a partnership with the City of Raleigh. In June 2012, Reid Serozi met with Beth Stagner, City of Raleigh Web Manager, to begin talking about the two sites.
As a phased one approach here is a list of proposals:
Endorse Open Raleigh Projects by Citizens
What is stopping any start-up idea (commercial venture for example) wanting the same treatment at Triangle Wiki? Many of the proposed ideas below will need council blessing.
Goal: Develop criteria to approve or disapprove a citizen-led, open Raleigh project before the city of Raleigh officially endorses.
Feedback:
- This may be a tricky one due to interplay of many factors; political, technical, commmercial. And many stakeholders with varying interests. [sandrogisler]
- I'm not sure I understand this one [laurahamlyn]
Bridge between City and Citizen Content
Provide linkage between City of Raleigh content and citizen supplied content posted on the wiki. How do we display links on a particular city of Raleigh web page to a related triangle wiki page? At the same time, add links on wiki pages to related city of Raleigh web pages.
Goal: Add an Open Raleigh section to city web pages that list applicable endorsed open Raleigh projects and services. For example, the "Pullen Park" city of Raleigh web page would have a "Pullen Park" Triangle Wiki link.
Feedback:
- Excellent idea. Right now, the City website is quite good, but still a one-way street; this would provide a place for public discussion while maintaining a clear boudary city website <-> Triangle Wiki. [sandrogisler]
Valuable Public Affairs Content
https://trianglewiki.org/Raleigh_City_Counci
Immediately following a city council meeting, the Public Affairs office will develop an array of public news releases on many different civic topics. The public affairs office will email the public using the MyRaleigh subscription service. Many of those press releases contain valuable, well written information about our city. Who's archiving this content?
Goal: Directly add content from emails to the wiki with little modification to reflect dates.
Feedback:
- I disagree with this one; News releases are "static" issues from the City; they are not meant to be edited and changed over time like a Wiki page. A more appropriate form would be similar to a newsletter site (like the N&O), where a post is published by an article, and then everyone can comment on it; original post is clearly separate from the public comments. The Wiki is not a suitable forum for this. [sandrogisler]
- Let me try to change your mind. I think the description above is misleading. I don't mean literally archive the newsletter for verbatim, but pull pieces of content out from the public news releases to paste into the wiki. For example, check out this wiki page about city council and former Chief Dolan. 95 percent of that content came from a city of Raleigh public release. I think the content is golden. -- Reid Serozi
- Would it be possible to add some language to the bottom of each new release that says "Be the first to update the local wiki about [ Title w/ link]" -- Reid Serozi
GIS Import
Hand drawing council boundaries, CAC districts through the wiki software doesn't make sense when precise maps already exist.
Goal: Import city of Raleigh maintained GIS maps to the Triangle Wiki. Each map would be associated with a wiki page.
Feedback:
- I don't have insight into the technology, but as far as I understand all the GIS data is public and available; would be up to us to write an API or something that pulls in these boundaries and other items. [sandrogisler]
- Could this be broaded to "open data host" or something like that? It seems like the wiki could host more than GIS data to help populate APIs. [laurahamlyn]
Hosting
trianglewiki.org is currently hosted, supported and paid by the LocalWiki project. At some point, it will make sense to transfer hosting from LocalWiki to local supported environment.
Goal: Host trianglewiki.org from City of Raleigh datacenter.
Feedback:
- Agree, but similar to your first point above, "why trianglewiki.org and not others"? Any web project could come and say they want to be hosted by the city. Plus, from an market-economics perspective, the City is not in the business of being a webhost, so if anything, getting funds from the city to pay a commercial (local) host might be would be more economical for all three parties. [sandrogisler]
Advisory Board Homegrown Pages
How can a citizen lead Advisory boards maintain a wiki page that compliments the city of raleigh's board's page? What features of the wiki would be considered helpful for an Advisory board? For example, tagging related assets that follow the advisory board's responsibility. Giving board members the ability to create profile pages about themselves.
Goal: Standard City of Raleigh Advisory template and best practices for content.
Feedback:
- This is a good idea, and worth investigating. What are boards and commissions doing now when collaborating on a document? Google Docs? Advantage of that is that access can be controlled easily; Triangle Wik would just be "open and visible to all". [sandrogisler]
- I like this idea. I'm working on the Town of Cary Technology Task Force and we used Basecamp for a while to store and share documents and notes. But we can't make decisions there because that is a violation of open meeting laws. We are looking at using a Wordpress site as our new tool, making our work more public (being careful not to form a quorum or making decisions until we have a meeting.) The content would need to be searchable via tags, which you mentioned earlier. [laurahamlyn]
