{"id":208,"date":"2005-09-15T23:41:13","date_gmt":"2005-09-16T03:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/09\/15\/arlington-wiki\/"},"modified":"2005-09-15T23:41:13","modified_gmt":"2005-09-16T03:41:13","slug":"arlington-wiki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/09\/15\/arlington-wiki\/","title":{"rendered":"Arlington Wiki"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a1065'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Every city needs its own wiki; a <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">single repository<\/span><br \/>\nfor community information on its history, culture, landmarks and<br \/>\nongoing events.&nbsp; Arlington, for instance, needs its own<br \/>\nwiki.&nbsp; The existing &#8220;<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Arlington Wiki<\/span>&#8221; is dormant, part of a top-down <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Live from Arlington<\/span> site.&nbsp; On the other hand, the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Arlington mailing list<\/span> is active and the town is full of tech-savvy (and history-loving) people.<\/p>\n<p>I brought up the idea tonight at the monthly meeting of a technical<br \/>\nadvisory group.&nbsp; I hope I didn&#8217;t offend anyone by suggesting that<br \/>\na push-only website wasn&#8217;t the perfect model for an information<br \/>\nportal.&nbsp; The &#8220;Citizen Needs&#8221; section of the seven-section Needs<br \/>\nAssessment the tech advisors carried out this past summer was voided,<br \/>\nrolled into the Town Website group&#8230; people decided that any citizen<br \/>\nneeds would be covered by improved website design.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>Other citizen needs I can imagine : <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the need for a place to post important <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">citizen-to-citizen<\/span> town announcements, \n  <\/li>\n<li>the need for a way to send <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">public comments<\/span><br \/>\nto the town (that others can see, add to, comment on) &#8212; this is being<br \/>\ntaken care of via the selection of a &#8220;customer response management:&#8221;<br \/>\ntool (is that the acronym?),<\/li>\n<li>the need for a collaborative, up-to-date city <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">calendar<\/span><\/li>\n<li>the need for better, <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">more accessible archives<\/span> of town data &#8211; property, legislative, judicial, executive \n  <\/li>\n<li>the need for <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">public schedules and timelines<\/span><br \/>\nfor important ongoing tasks.&nbsp; Example : the Arlington cemetery<br \/>\nplots are expected to fill up in 10 years.&nbsp; A number of<br \/>\nrepresentatives from the cemetery came to the Selectmen&#8217;s meeting on<br \/>\nMonday to mention this, and point out that we should start thinking now<br \/>\nabout how to proceed in 5 years so we don&#8217;t run up against a real<br \/>\ncrunch.&nbsp; This had apparently been brought up previosly, perhaps 5<br \/>\nyears ago, with no progress since&#8230; <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">It is not enough<\/span><br \/>\nto see a three-line summary of this request in the meeting minutes &#8212;<br \/>\nthere should be a timeline and suggestion-repository, updated whenever<br \/>\nthe relevant groups make progress towards the goal of finding a place<br \/>\nto expand, which can be followed this year, next year, and for the<br \/>\ncoming decade&#8230; keeping track of each revision of any public documents<br \/>\nand proposals involved.<\/li>\n<li>the need for a good collaborative annotated map of the city &#8212; both at the present time and at key moments in history.&nbsp; (For inspiration, see the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates\">Wikipedia project on geographical coordinates<\/a>.) \n  <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Note that in each of these cases &#8212; as, indeed, in the case of the town<br \/>\nwebsite itself &#8212; the services and information above could be provided<br \/>\nby third parties, asking for information independently and sharing it<br \/>\nwith the world; not officially on government servers or part of a<br \/>\ngovernment project.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But it makes a lot of sense for<br \/>\nthe town government to directly provide,&nbsp; facilitate, or cheerlead<br \/>\nsuch efforts, if for no other reason than that they are an important<br \/>\npart of a thriving community.&nbsp; .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every city needs its own wiki; a single repository for community information on its history, culture, landmarks and ongoing events.&nbsp; Arlington, for instance, needs its own wiki.&nbsp; The existing &#8220;Arlington Wiki&#8221; is dormant, part of a top-down Live from Arlington site.&nbsp; On the other hand, the Arlington mailing list is active and the town is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-la-mod"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}