Cyborg Planning Commissioners
There's been a move toward use of laptops in chambers among members of the Planning Commission. Despite governmental love of paper, it's my preferred way to work, as it saves me from carrying large binders full of important information. I thought I'd jot down a bit about how I use my laptop during a hearing.
During the days before the hearing, I go over the agenda and the staff reports. Using Tomboy, I create one note which represents the agenda, with each item listed as a link to another note specific to that item.
On each item's subnote, I place a link to the online staff report along with any questions or comments I have. I highlight things I want on the record. Even if these questions are answered in the staff briefing or testimony before I can ask them, as they often are, this helps me organize my thoughts. Sometimes I have no specific questions on an item; when this happens, I think maybe I'm too complacent about it, but that's how it is.
On hearing day, I try to get into chambers a few minutes early to
boot up and establish a connection. The wifi ESSID is
City_Cnty_Public
. Sometimes the wireless connection in the City
County Building gets flakey, and I'll lose connectivity for a few
minutes at a time, but it's the nature of the hearing that a realtime
connection is not critical.
Aside from the connectivity issues, there are a few drawbacks to the system:
- Page numbers referred to in the hearing are usually in terms of
the entire packet, instead of the original report. Page three of a
particular report might be page 127 of the distributed packets. Some
mental gymnastics are required to convert from one system to the
other. (Or maybe your neighbor on the dais is using paper, and
you can look over his or her shoulder to find the
real
page number.) - It's hard to annotate the reports themselves. I think you can do it using Adobe Acrobat or something, but with free software tools, the capacity doesn't exist yet.
- Perhaps most significantly, City Council member's laptops were unsuccessfully subpoenaed by a disgruntled petitioner in a suit brought against them in federal court. Even though the request to do a forensic examination of the laptops was denied, the city was still required to supply a list of websites the council members browsed during the hearing.
These drawbacks are offset, in my opinion, by the benefits of not having to carry binders full of stuff, the ability to search in the reports and packets, and network access, especially Google Maps and the city/county's interactive maps, both of which, I've been told half-seriously, qualify as ex parte communications. I reject that, though, because the same would apply in my decidedly non-lawyerly opinion to visiting the application site, which some commissioners do from time to time.
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