As an actual municipal IT Critter from Massachusetts, I can dump emails in a matter of minutes.
However, for a standard public records request, you need to audit by hand each and every email to make sure it doesn't have private information such as personnel records or open contract negotiations in it. That's probably where the cost is. That might be different if it was a subpeona as a judge can just say give us everything, but for standard public records requests, we have to comply with privacy laws.
If that's $5k/person, then that doesn't seem reasonable because most users will have little email and nothing with any privacy implications. But for all employees? Or for some big shots like the mayor with thousands of emails? It could be reasonable.
I'm an actual municipal IT critter in Mass, though from a teeny tiny town that barely warrants the one full time IT position I fill. It would be great if the Sec of State could cite this two year rule somewhere in the Mass General Laws or his office's edicts on email retention because all previous guidance from the state has been that email follows the same retention requirements as other documents, which generally means that only official materials like a meeting agenda need to be retained. (The state's guidance also clearly indicated that any retained emails need to be printed out and not retained as email.) The last guidance I saw was also that email was a format, not a document type. You based retention on what was in the contents of the email, not on the basis of it being an email.
The other side of that is that almost any sort of actual policy communication in email is not allowed at all because if a majority of committee members communicate in email or any other online format, it constitutes a meeting subject to open meeting laws which means it needs to be formally posted ahead of time. That formal posting, signed by a committee secretary and stamped by the town clerk would be an example of an official document that would have to be retained. But requiring a physical signature guarantees that it isn't applicable to email.
I'm the IT critter for a town in Mass and I manage the online stuff, including mapping. It's possible that the sales of copies are built into the decision about whether or not to update maps, do additional flyovers, and that sort of thing. I don't know about taxes in WV, but here in Mass local government is very very lean, and I can easily see someone in a similar fiscal dilemma deciding that the best way to pay for more frequent updating of mapping (which with flyovers and such is fairly pricey for a small town or county) is by generating revenue from the maps. Particularly as most of the users of mapping are businesses--this doesn't apply quite as much to tax maps, but our GIS layers are pretty expensive to produce and when 90% of your requests for GIS maps are from business who would otherwise need to do the survey work themselves, it's a fine line between public access and corporate welfare.
Also, having possibly out of date maps available in a central archive does kind of worry me. I'd rather have people getting them from us directly. Citizens have a habit of getting the wrong end of a stick on something and storming into town hall irate out of their minds over problems that don't really exist. I've had irate people in my office banging on the counter and screaming waving printouts of some web site somewhere they found that they thought was our official one. Part of managing a municipal website is trying to figure out ways in which information can be presented where citizens will not be confused and assume the worst and where it will be kept accurate and fresh.
Having said that, I agree with most of the people here. These are public records. All our GIS layers are on our website in addition to the ones that are on MassGIS, which includes a viewer. We're adding PDF'd tax maps as of our next update. Our property record cards are available online. I think and our town thinks these are records that should made as widely available as possible. But IMHO that's not the only legitimate way to look at things.
There are no monopoly licenses given out by municipalities, federal law prevents that and has for some time. Most areas have defacto monopolies, but that is due to the free market forces that make it overly expensive to "overbuild" except in highly dense "early adopter" wealthy suburbs.
Good luck at getting rid of that analog. I'd love to see it gone, but I was stuck on the cable tv committee (I work for a town) and our single biggest complaint from the gloriously ignorant public was that they needed a set-top box for anything. Followed by why they couldn't get local radio on an "FM Service" like they had 10 years earlier.
One of the underlying issues in the article is that home and office are merging. If an employee ends up spending 3 or 4 hours on the weekend working at home and has to check their email before going to bed, then it's no surprise they get used to the toys and tools they have at home.
If you want people to stop checking their gmail at work, start by having them stop checking their work mail at home.
I don't think you can run any games on that. Maybe Puzzle Pirates or something. But even something with modest graphic requirements like WOW? I don't think so.
I work for a government office where 2/3rds of my end users are over 60. Most meander their way through work, but I have a few who simply aren't computer literate in any way shape or form. They engage in what I call magical thinking: a computer is just a form of magic wand, you do prescribed things, and something happens. But no understanding of the causality.
First, AMEN on the file system.
I have at least three users where I work who simply can't (and won't) comprehend what a file is. Files are saved "in word" or "in acrobat" or even better "in the program" (they don't even know what program is running, "the program" is the file they opened) and no amount of explaining will get past that.
File systems -- locations, local and network locations, the difference between a program, a file format, and a location How to organize files.
Data manipulation basics -- how to find things in menus, how to cut, paste, and copy.
Basic Office Applications -- Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Database, Email. Just the basics. Set a margin in a word processor, format text. Add up a column in a spreadsheet.
Internet -- Basic defensive browsing aka how not to click on every popup, how to find things with a search engine, how to recognize a website url and differentiate it from an email address.
I tried Ubuntu a bit ago and the network was fine, but I never could get the sound working. A friend worked on it and finally got it running, but it wouldn't play anything from streaming audio. I can't remember if video went above 1024 or not as I'm happy at 1024.
Not to mention that if we put it in an open format, citizens will not be able to open it and will call up complaining and we'll have to talk them through it.
You haven't lived until you've tried to explain to a cranky 80 year old what acrobat reader is, nevermind open office.
The real problem is that the open standards aren't useful for people and the standards that are used aren't open.
I once had an idiot professor who insisted we write our final exam essays in cursive rather than print them. This was supposed to do something to stimulate us intellectually. All it did was give me a cramped hand and assure that I never took another class with her.
Perhaps wet ink is in order too. None of these silly ballpoints.
I don't really feel like I have an option to consider alternatives for the desktop other than windows and office. At home yes, but professionally? No. It's just not viable. Until we reach a point where it is, then yes, they have a monopoly.
One of the keys is that channels like Discovery became popular because bundling put them in people's homes allowing them to be seen. There's no way I would have subscribed to discovery or food, yet these are two of the channels I watch the most.
Actually as IT Director for a town in Mass that's not what I see happening.
Everything will just get posted in PDF and it will probably be generated by MS Office's next generation version. And instead of nursing along existing copies of Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003, we'll upgrade everything to the next version that writes PDF. In other words, Microsoft is going to make a lot of money off of this.
And there's going to be a load of behind the scenes sharing of MS Office format documents.
I don't work for techies, I work for the public. The public can't stop itself from clicking on bonsi buddy popups, they certainly aren't going to understand how to translate document formats. We have to give them something they can understand. PDF will be bad enough (I had someone in my office for 20 minutes complaining that his ten year old Macintosh didn't open PDFs from our web site), opendoc would be a disaster.
FYI I use openoffice at home. It's a great program. But I just don't see this working. It was a nice attempt to use brinkmanship to force MS to open their document formats, but they called our bluff. It's a great idea for the feds to try though. They're probably big enough to force MS to comply.
I'm a municipal IT director, this just comes off as a waste to me. I loathe Microsoft, but it's what we use, it's what our employees are familiar with, and it's what our citizens use and are familiar with. Posting formats our citizens don't understand is just going to generate more work which involves more expense and more taxes to fund it. And we're still going to need to post MS compatible files because otherwise, people will just email us asking for them.
I would love to see an open format that is truly universal, but this isn't going to do that. It's just going to create more work. Maybe the state is rolling in money for faith based initiatives like this, but our town still has Pentium II/Windows 95 machines kicking around and I'm the only IT employee.
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As an actual municipal IT Critter from Massachusetts, I can dump emails in a matter of minutes. However, for a standard public records request, you need to audit by hand each and every email to make sure it doesn't have private information such as personnel records or open contract negotiations in it. That's probably where the cost is. That might be different if it was a subpeona as a judge can just say give us everything, but for standard public records requests, we have to comply with privacy laws. If that's $5k/person, then that doesn't seem reasonable because most users will have little email and nothing with any privacy implications. But for all employees? Or for some big shots like the mayor with thousands of emails? It could be reasonable.
I'm an actual municipal IT critter in Mass, though from a teeny tiny town that barely warrants the one full time IT position I fill. It would be great if the Sec of State could cite this two year rule somewhere in the Mass General Laws or his office's edicts on email retention because all previous guidance from the state has been that email follows the same retention requirements as other documents, which generally means that only official materials like a meeting agenda need to be retained. (The state's guidance also clearly indicated that any retained emails need to be printed out and not retained as email.) The last guidance I saw was also that email was a format, not a document type. You based retention on what was in the contents of the email, not on the basis of it being an email. The other side of that is that almost any sort of actual policy communication in email is not allowed at all because if a majority of committee members communicate in email or any other online format, it constitutes a meeting subject to open meeting laws which means it needs to be formally posted ahead of time. That formal posting, signed by a committee secretary and stamped by the town clerk would be an example of an official document that would have to be retained. But requiring a physical signature guarantees that it isn't applicable to email.
I'm the IT critter for a town in Mass and I manage the online stuff, including mapping. It's possible that the sales of copies are built into the decision about whether or not to update maps, do additional flyovers, and that sort of thing. I don't know about taxes in WV, but here in Mass local government is very very lean, and I can easily see someone in a similar fiscal dilemma deciding that the best way to pay for more frequent updating of mapping (which with flyovers and such is fairly pricey for a small town or county) is by generating revenue from the maps. Particularly as most of the users of mapping are businesses--this doesn't apply quite as much to tax maps, but our GIS layers are pretty expensive to produce and when 90% of your requests for GIS maps are from business who would otherwise need to do the survey work themselves, it's a fine line between public access and corporate welfare.
Also, having possibly out of date maps available in a central archive does kind of worry me. I'd rather have people getting them from us directly. Citizens have a habit of getting the wrong end of a stick on something and storming into town hall irate out of their minds over problems that don't really exist. I've had irate people in my office banging on the counter and screaming waving printouts of some web site somewhere they found that they thought was our official one. Part of managing a municipal website is trying to figure out ways in which information can be presented where citizens will not be confused and assume the worst and where it will be kept accurate and fresh.
Having said that, I agree with most of the people here. These are public records. All our GIS layers are on our website in addition to the ones that are on MassGIS, which includes a viewer. We're adding PDF'd tax maps as of our next update. Our property record cards are available online. I think and our town thinks these are records that should made as widely available as possible. But IMHO that's not the only legitimate way to look at things.
There are no monopoly licenses given out by municipalities, federal law prevents that and has for some time. Most areas have defacto monopolies, but that is due to the free market forces that make it overly expensive to "overbuild" except in highly dense "early adopter" wealthy suburbs.
Good luck at getting rid of that analog. I'd love to see it gone, but I was stuck on the cable tv committee (I work for a town) and our single biggest complaint from the gloriously ignorant public was that they needed a set-top box for anything. Followed by why they couldn't get local radio on an "FM Service" like they had 10 years earlier.
Maybe if someone created a "white" anything that wasn't focused entirely on hate mongering towards non-whites, people would be more accepting.
One of the underlying issues in the article is that home and office are merging. If an employee ends up spending 3 or 4 hours on the weekend working at home and has to check their email before going to bed, then it's no surprise they get used to the toys and tools they have at home. If you want people to stop checking their gmail at work, start by having them stop checking their work mail at home.
The more they regulate and threaten the broadcast networks, the more of us tune out and just watch cable.
Oh God on a stick, webshots. I hate that program.
"I can see taxing profits from a game (i.e. if you make more than you spend in monthly fees or whatever)"
I believe that's what we're talking about.
I don't think you can run any games on that. Maybe Puzzle Pirates or something. But even something with modest graphic requirements like WOW? I don't think so.
I work for a government office where 2/3rds of my end users are over 60. Most meander their way through work, but I have a few who simply aren't computer literate in any way shape or form. They engage in what I call magical thinking: a computer is just a form of magic wand, you do prescribed things, and something happens. But no understanding of the causality. First, AMEN on the file system. I have at least three users where I work who simply can't (and won't) comprehend what a file is. Files are saved "in word" or "in acrobat" or even better "in the program" (they don't even know what program is running, "the program" is the file they opened) and no amount of explaining will get past that. File systems -- locations, local and network locations, the difference between a program, a file format, and a location How to organize files. Data manipulation basics -- how to find things in menus, how to cut, paste, and copy. Basic Office Applications -- Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Database, Email. Just the basics. Set a margin in a word processor, format text. Add up a column in a spreadsheet. Internet -- Basic defensive browsing aka how not to click on every popup, how to find things with a search engine, how to recognize a website url and differentiate it from an email address.
I tried Ubuntu a bit ago and the network was fine, but I never could get the sound working. A friend worked on it and finally got it running, but it wouldn't play anything from streaming audio. I can't remember if video went above 1024 or not as I'm happy at 1024.
In all seriousness, having worked on a phone job once as an undergrad, they are probably fired if they deviate from the script.
Leave for another ISP? Um. Not possible here. It's comcast or nothing. No DSL, no fiber.
Not to mention that if we put it in an open format, citizens will not be able to open it and will call up complaining and we'll have to talk them through it.
You haven't lived until you've tried to explain to a cranky 80 year old what acrobat reader is, nevermind open office.
The real problem is that the open standards aren't useful for people and the standards that are used aren't open.
I once had an idiot professor who insisted we write our final exam essays in cursive rather than print them. This was supposed to do something to stimulate us intellectually. All it did was give me a cramped hand and assure that I never took another class with her. Perhaps wet ink is in order too. None of these silly ballpoints.
I don't really feel like I have an option to consider alternatives for the desktop other than windows and office. At home yes, but professionally? No. It's just not viable. Until we reach a point where it is, then yes, they have a monopoly.
One of the keys is that channels like Discovery became popular because bundling put them in people's homes allowing them to be seen. There's no way I would have subscribed to discovery or food, yet these are two of the channels I watch the most.
Actually as IT Director for a town in Mass that's not what I see happening. Everything will just get posted in PDF and it will probably be generated by MS Office's next generation version. And instead of nursing along existing copies of Office 97, 2000, XP and 2003, we'll upgrade everything to the next version that writes PDF. In other words, Microsoft is going to make a lot of money off of this. And there's going to be a load of behind the scenes sharing of MS Office format documents. I don't work for techies, I work for the public. The public can't stop itself from clicking on bonsi buddy popups, they certainly aren't going to understand how to translate document formats. We have to give them something they can understand. PDF will be bad enough (I had someone in my office for 20 minutes complaining that his ten year old Macintosh didn't open PDFs from our web site), opendoc would be a disaster. FYI I use openoffice at home. It's a great program. But I just don't see this working. It was a nice attempt to use brinkmanship to force MS to open their document formats, but they called our bluff. It's a great idea for the feds to try though. They're probably big enough to force MS to comply.
Well the Windows based version 2 beta boots with a Sun logo and has a Sun copyright notice.
I'm a municipal IT director, this just comes off as a waste to me. I loathe Microsoft, but it's what we use, it's what our employees are familiar with, and it's what our citizens use and are familiar with. Posting formats our citizens don't understand is just going to generate more work which involves more expense and more taxes to fund it. And we're still going to need to post MS compatible files because otherwise, people will just email us asking for them. I would love to see an open format that is truly universal, but this isn't going to do that. It's just going to create more work. Maybe the state is rolling in money for faith based initiatives like this, but our town still has Pentium II/Windows 95 machines kicking around and I'm the only IT employee.