Why is the city so right and we are so wrong?

The defenders of open government often miss some important points, mainly delivering information uninterrupted.

As if SIRE used by the city of Sioux Falls wasn’t built on absolute crap, we now can’t get anything off the SIRE system without annoying pauses, spinning arrows or plain dead links. The Tuesday October 16th, 2019 meetings were bad enough but now we get to see the Charter Revision Meeting prove it again. 

The system just proves the system is built on crap and will continue to be crap. The IT and Innovation Department must be in place just to find innovative ways to kill public involvement in Sioux Falls city government. Sure am glad the city spent a lot of hard cash to get this upgrade.

This was the response from City Clerk Greco in an email;

Gentlemen,

I appreciate your bringing up the streaming issue from Tuesday night; we also noted the same issue during the meeting.  We contacted the vendor asking them to review any issues they may have had Tuesday night or last night.  There were no issues associated with recording the meeting and it was uploaded immediately after the meeting adjourned. 

Of the 125 or so meetings we’ve streamed since deploying the new software, we’ve had great success particularly when compared to the previous system. To date, we’ve experienced one other streaming issue in December for an informational immediately after deployment. Our protocol is to conduct a web streaming test prior to each meeting.  We also intend to upload videos at the conclusion of each meeting– there were short interruptions in 2 recordings a few weeks ago requiring additional time for upload to ensure the complete video was posted online; Tuesday night I stopped the informational upload so I could begin the City Council meeting recording.

Despite the problem Tuesday night, we’ve found great benefits from the new software.  Among those are the ability to view meetings on all types of devices, a significantly better search capability through the agenda program of the more than 1,800 meetings online, and closed captioning during the streaming of City Council Meetings.  Additionally, the software has provided for public access to over 26,000 original ordinances, resolutions, minutes, election returns– some of which date back to 1907–  campaign finance documents, and raffle notifications.  This can now be found through our webpage under “records” and I hope you find it useful.

Thanks, Thomas Greco • City Clerk • City of Sioux Falls

I actually thanked Greco for his ‘in depth’ explanation. But when it comes to open government, and failures a simple ‘sorry’ would suffice