Modernize town data practices and technology

West Lakeland is the third largest township by population in the seven county metro area. Start modernizing going forward with documents that are searchable. When there is a digitized version, leave it up on the website – don’t take it down. Put back the items that have been removed. This is a simple change with almost no work involved. A critical analysis of the requests for data over the past few years to see where making data available immediate and for free would save staff time.

Need some microphones that work. There’s a reason these old microphones were free. Another organization installed modern ones and were throwing these out. Fix the computer monitors and practices so movie trailers are not randomly popping up on the displays behind the board members. Add more monitors so that people sitting in the audience can read the data. Use a virus checker on computers to make it possible for public presenters to bring in a flash drive so data can be easily shared instead of a just hardcopy copies of the presentation. Put the public copy in a meeting packet on the town website like some other townships do. Most people have a cellphone they could use to follow the discussion or know if they should attend. Have a QR code for the public copy at the public copy station so people can easily get to it a nd follow along on their smartphone.

Make all meetings hybrid meetings (combined in person and virtual) and make the recordings available on the town website like other government units such as Baytown do.