And the award goes to . . .
The web channel we’re saluting for the week of Nov. 8, 2013, is the City of Sioux Falls’ YouTube channel. At a crossroads between the nation’s east and west, Sioux Falls has arts, culture, parks, scenery and — of course — the needs of any city for basic services, safety and overall management. All these are represented well on Sioux Fall’s active YouTube channel, including public chats with the mayor that would be hard to imagine in many cities. For the mayor of Sioux Falls, it’s just another day at a restaurant with some friends.
Okay, I will give the city some credit, they have a YouTube Channel, WOOT! WOOT! So do many elementary students featuring videos of them farting and making funny faces. But the ‘salute’ to the YouTube channel isn’t my issue, it’s the assumption that Government Video makes about transparency in our city;
For doing a great job of making government friendly and accessible, Government Video salutes the City of Sioux Falls’ YouTube channel.
Friendly and accessible?! Okay. Let’s go;
SIRE is broken, it has been broken for several years. (SIRE is the online program used to watch public meetings & to see documents related to public meeting agenda items)  Issues include;  long intros to videos (sometimes up to 20 minutes dead air before meeting starts), missing videos, bad audio, missing documents, and documents not showing up on the online until minutes before a meeting starts. This is not ‘friendly accessibility’ it is form of ‘soft’ censorship hiding behind perceived software issues.
While Central Services, Media Services and the City Clerk’s office has been told several times that SIRE isn’t functioning properly they have given many excuses, including denying it isn’t functioning properly. The Clerk’s office blames Central Services. CS has denied to me there is any problems, even though there clearly is. Weekly, there is at least one or more public meetings that doesn’t work right, disappears for several days, or has other issues. Remember, the city spends over $1,000 a month for the maintenance of SIRE by the software company that makes it. The city has also spent thousands of dollars over the past year on software upgrades and a backup cooling unit for the server room at city hall.
I find it hard to believe that Central Services, the clerk’s office and Media Services are all this incompetent, that is virtually impossible.
My speculation is that certain employees within the city are being ‘instructed’ to make the appearance that SIRE isn’t working properly. Remember, the city budget address wasn’t handed to the city council until a few minutes before the address. Is that the kind of transparency you want between City Hall & the City Council? I know what kind of ‘Salute’ that deserves. I have this underlying assumption that somebody is tampering with our ‘accessibility’ as citizens. And until SIRE is fixed and working properly, I will have no reason otherwise to assume this is NOT happening.
So a SALUTE to the city for accessibility is laughable at best, sad, disheartening and distasteful, and I encourage Government Video to retract their salute.
UPDATE: (H/T – GP)
Follow the links on the upper right hand corner (screenshot above). The person in charge of the channel has some weird fetishes.
Please note how Google relates the City Of Sanford Falls channel to others, then read the descriptions.
Related channels on City of Sioux Falls’ YouTube channel (upper right side of page):
SUPERIOR HISTORY (The rarest and best military history videos on the internet for the serious and technically disciplined. Stay on subject or get hit in the head with a ratchet.)
nuclearvault (Atomic Films Courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office)
Primeda (Tales of the Gun – Early Guns)
DarkFellowships (WW2 – WW1 – Third Reich)
Vasile Iuga (Scorched Earth S1/E1 – Panzer Battles)
lord lucan (some old news of the day when britian was great, purely for educational purposes)
Verrrry Interestingggg. You see when you do not clear your cache files before setting up your channel, Google takes your computer’s tracking history and links to it. Now we know what they are doing while they are supposed to be working and it certainly isn’t repairing SIRE.
l3wis 