The Longest Now

Every city needs its own wiki; a single repository
for community information on its history, culture, landmarks and
ongoing events.  Arlington, for instance, needs its own
wiki.  The existing “Arlington Wiki” is dormant, part of a top-down Live from Arlington site.  On the other hand, the Arlington mailing list is active and the town is full of tech-savvy (and history-loving) people.

I brought up the idea tonight at the monthly meeting of a technical
advisory group.  I hope I didn’t offend anyone by suggesting that
a push-only website wasn’t the perfect model for an information
portal.  The “Citizen Needs” section of the seven-section Needs
Assessment the tech advisors carried out this past summer was voided,
rolled into the Town Website group… people decided that any citizen
needs would be covered by improved website design. 

Other citizen needs I can imagine :

• the need for a place to post important citizen-to-citizen town announcements,
• the need for a way to send public comments
  to the town (that others can see, add to, comment on) — this is being
  taken care of via the selection of a “customer response management:”
  tool (is that the acronym?),
• the need for a collaborative, up-to-date city calendar
• the need for better, more accessible archives of town data – property, legislative, judicial, executive
• the need for public schedules and timelines
  for important ongoing tasks.  Example : the Arlington cemetery
  plots are expected to fill up in 10 years.  A number of
  representatives from the cemetery came to the Selectmen’s meeting on
  Monday to mention this, and point out that we should start thinking now
  about how to proceed in 5 years so we don’t run up against a real
  crunch.  This had apparently been brought up previosly, perhaps 5
  years ago, with no progress since… It is not enough
  to see a three-line summary of this request in the meeting minutes —
  there should be a timeline and suggestion-repository, updated whenever
  the relevant groups make progress towards the goal of finding a place
  to expand, which can be followed this year, next year, and for the
  coming decade… keeping track of each revision of any public documents
  and proposals involved.
• the need for a good collaborative annotated map of the city — both at the present time and at key moments in history.  (For inspiration, see the Wikipedia project on geographical coordinates.)

Note that in each of these cases — as, indeed, in the case of the town
website itself — the services and information above could be provided
by third parties, asking for information independently and sharing it
with the world; not officially on government servers or part of a
government project.    But it makes a lot of sense for
the town government to directly provide,  facilitate, or cheerlead
such efforts, if for no other reason than that they are an important
part of a thriving community.  .

Arlington Wiki …