Commentary From Elsewhere: Disappearing Agendas

      As some may have noticed, I regularly attend the Town of Mendon Board meetings. And as with most (all?) governmental groups, they produce an agenda for their meetings. Again, as is common, that agenda is posted on their website. The Village and School do the same (as do many other groups, but those are local ones). All this is good and I approve.

      In documenting my observations elsewhere, I noticed the link to the Town’s agenda never changed. Yet each month the agenda itself did. Which is to say, the current agenda (for whatever date it covers) will disappear, to be replaced by a new agenda. In contrast, the village and school share past agendas on their websites (although their methods are different).

      Unfortunately, the system the Town uses for their website does not appear to lend itself to the quick and simple ways of adding documents. With most web design methods I have seen, future agendas could be easily added and readily predictable. Either through a drag/drop interface, or FTPing the contents of a folder.

      Case in point, here’s a link to the next Village Trustee agenda (and while I’m at it, the minutes for the meeting after that). Keeping to a pattern isn’t that hard either, here’s a link to next months Town Board agenda. None of those files exist at this time, all of those links will currently return errors (variations of 404). But if you were to try them again, in a month or two, they should all work. Without me having to edit this post, the links are predictable. And once up, they should remain indefinitely. Mind you, since I brought it up here, something will happen to change the pattern on at least one of those links, thus making them invalid.

      I am sure the Town would happily give you any agenda you might want, if you were to ask (disregarding that Freedom of Information Laws require them to). But I am of the viewpoint that all FOILable information should be available on the appropriate website. Thus there is no need to ask for the information, it’s already available. The most that would be needed to ask for is being pointed in the right direction.

      It is ironic that what was originally one of the simplest things to do with a website, list the contents of a directory (and use ftp to change the contents of that directory), has now become too difficult for some groups to handle.

      I should probably be clear here, none of this is intended as a criticism of the Town of Mendon. They chose a tool to solve a problem, and it works well enough for them. That other tools exist that could also do the job, if in a different way, is of no fault of theirs.

      And really, this is all a round about way of me saying “I am amused by how the Town of Mendon handles posting it’s Agendas”.