If an ALA Councilor Fell Over in a Forest…

Most days my brain hurts when I get home. Today only my feet hurt, because a Very Important Person and I did some MBWA (Management By Walking Around) by literally walking through all of one library and three other physically separate sites today. It took us from 8:15 to 4:30, with one break for lunch, and I took a slew of pictures, most of which I won’t post anywhere because they were of things that need addressing, and it would misrepresent MPOW to single out these issues.

But anyhoo… I was sitting here trying to get my nerve up to send out a couple more essays when I read Michael Golrick’s piece about sharing Council proceedings online.

As Michael notes, I’ve written about this before. Here’s the evolution of this issue:

* Late 1990s, in my first term on Council, I introduced a resolution to require the uploading of Council transcripts to the Web. Councilors laughed at it (quite literally, on the floor of Council). It received less than ten votes out of close to two hundred (Marvin Scilken and the Superintendent of Documents voted with me).

* I continued to raise this issue, each time met with objections and arguments. My favorite is that the transcripts aren’t “perfect”–even though we produce them in part so hearing-challenged Councilors and others can follow the proceedings. So, in other words, they’re good enough for deaf Councilors, just not good enough for everyone else.

* Once in a while, someone High Up would express interest, but things never happened, though I never pushed hard myself.

* I resigned Council last year after a budget crisis at FPOW made participating in ALA Council (a lengthy commitment twice a year) financially unrealistic.

It’s my guess that in five years this will be moot and in ten years people will not remember a time when we didn’t provide the transcripts.