Decatur Strategic Plan: Session #3 – Communicate!
Decatur Metro | August 12, 2010The final of Decatur’s three Strategic Planning sessions took place from June 1st thru 5th, where residents were asked eight questions on the topic of communication. In his Session 3 report, summerizer Otis White boiled down the essence of the eight questions to just these two:
How can the city strengthen connections between the city government and citizens and among the citizens themselves; and what roles should citizens, organizations and institutions play in improving Decatur?
From the nearly 70 pages of answers, White determined that the main concern of citizens was both a “desire for more information, delivered in different ways” and a “desire for more and different groups to be involved and effective”.
I scrolled through those 60+ pages of answers and noticed that some of the suggestions were things the city was already doing. So I thought a quick recap might be useful to old-times and new folks alike:
- You can watch all Decatur City Commission meetings on Comcast Channel 25 live on Monday nights beginning at 7:30p. (The production value of this is really quite good!)
- The City has three official blogs run and written by city staff: The Decatur Minute (run by the Community & Economic Develeopment Department), Be Active Decatur (formerly 231 Sycamore) and the Decatur Tax Blog.
- The city also maintains a Facebook page and a variety of Twitter accounts: such as Downtown Decatur, Decatur HR, Decatur Forums, and DecaturNext (specifically created for the Strategic Plan).
- You can submit service requests – from complaints about barking dogs to requesting maintainable at many city-owned properties – online HERE.
- Decatur doesn’t just have a Code Red telephone alert system for “emergency situations”, but also one for “Weather Warnings”. If you’re not getting either of them currently, you can sign up for them both HERE.
That’s by no means a definitive list of every Decatur communication tool available to you – feel free to chime in with others – but hopefully it gets a few more people in the know!
Latest from Decaturish
Is a Comcast subscription required to watch the commission meetings on TV?
Can I get the re-runs free on Hulu?
Unfortunately, yes (to your first question) and no (to your second).
The City could archive the videos on its site.
From what I’ve heard, I believe the commission videos will be available once the website is overhauled and relaunched.
This is the first I have heard of all of those with the exception of two. I think that might be part of the issue with the city’s communication.
There’s a possibility that there’s TOO much information out there. People are busy, and not going to spend their free time watching a city commission meeting. The value of DM, newspapers and other media is that somebody you trust condenses stuff.
I’m the secretary of a neighborhood association, and we have a devil of a time communicating with the neighbors. We have an email list, we’ve put stuff in every mailbox. Not much response….unless the topic is crime in the neighborhood. People want to know about that.
I think you’re spot on regarding this Diane.
If you ask a person if they’d like more info they’ll say “yes!”. But in actuality they have a limited amount of time in a day. And as an information source – be it a taped commission meeting or a blog – you compete with everything else that person has to do in a day.
So it’s gotta be good, which runs the gamut from good writing to interesting topics to important topics. The filter is key.
Your observation is also why automated aggregators just don’t work. Sure, it’s much cheaper and easier to let a computer do the work for you, but you end up with too much news about Decatur, Illinois and Decatur, Alabama. Too much crap.
One of the good things that’s come out of this “media revolution” is the reassurance that news and info sources need to have a human voice behind them. Computer generated anything just doesn’t cut it.
I’d love to see the City add some old school communications to ensure all Decatur folks are able to get updates. It’d be terrific to have community bulletin boards in neighborhoods & other spots. It’d also be wonderful to have a weekly radio program sharing community news. And I sure wish they’d work on making the Commission Meeting broadcasts available to non cable customers too.