Accidental Bloggers

We didn’t set out to create a web log-- blog for short. We wanted to extend a discussion we were having with our colleagues on Council. With little public debate on the issues at meetings, and more and more business being conducted in the back room, and less and less information being made available to Council, and the coverage of Council activity by the Finger Lakes Times leaving more and more to be desired, we attempted to engage our colleagues by e-mail and stepped up our own research.

What we were trying to achieve was an open and honest conversation, and one that didn’t pull any political punches. Newsletters have a long production process, cost a lot to mail, and are not interactive. We couldn’t find any on-line forums that allowed discussion of local issues without careless, anonymous statements. So we sought out a medium where we could make our views known in a highly accessible way, keep them all together in one place so that anyone could read them at any time, interact with readers, and keep a steady flow of timely commentary and information. Turns out, those are the critical features of a web log and that’s how we became bloggers.

It appeared to be a novel concept; elected officials blogging about city issues, asking questions and analyzing decisions. It was certainly unusual for Geneva. The Finger Lakes Times has reported about the rants against it by a handful of angry City officials who were the reason it was started to begin with, but no article has delved into the reason that thousands of readers logged on keep coming back. As it turns out, many other communities have embraced the concept of local government blogging.

This Los Angeles District Councilor’s blog is an example of the kind of informational site that is maintained by council staffers (if the council has staffers!) which are mostly links to newspaper articles with some brief statement of the councilor’s position on the issue.

Some blogs are also campaign websites, like this one in Portland, Oregon or, this one in Dallas, Texas.

There are city councilors across the country who even include reprints of council e-mails to frame their analysis of issues, like this one in Pensacola, FL. What a great idea.

A Greensboro North Carolina native started this blog when she served on city council and continued it when she became a neighboring township’s administrator.

The Peoria Pundit has many good examples of blog posts that spark discussion, as evidenced by the long string of comments following most topics. Locally, a site called Rochester Turning is a great example of citizen participation in local government discussion.

The award for “Best Local Government Blog We’ve Seen” goes to Kent360. Get this: It is maintained by the City Manager of Kent, Ohio! It is supremely well-organized, and a comprehensive resource for all city issues. Their City Manager provides the public with links to the weekly updates that his council receives (much like those that Geneva City Councilors receive marked ‘confidential’), to work-session summaries, memos distributed to council, expert resources, community surveys, and his commentary on a variety of topics. Talk about open government--this is a site to aspire to!

The guy out in Kent, Ohio is not the only city manager that values direct and frequent communication with the people. A quick google search of ‘city manager blogs’ turns up many results, including strictly informational ones like this one from West Des Moines, Iowa to those intended to provide commentary on local issues from a staff perspective, like the City Manager of Davison, Michigan does (see the Jan. 4th entry), the City Manager of Ventura, California, and this blog written by the City Manager of Lowell, MA. In Eden Prairie, Minnesota, even the Fire Chief has a lively blog!

Of course, our blog, No Strings Geneva, cannot (and should not) be all things to all people. Instead, we urge the Geneva City Council as a whole to look at the City’s overall web presence, to consider ways to better engage residents in the decision-making, to inform people of council’s deliberative processes, and to provide ongoing opportunities for good ideas to be shared. No Strings Geneva might have been the first of its kind in Geneva, but we hope it’s not the last.