Parry Sounds ~ Ideas and Opinions, In and Around Parry Sound

Woo-hoo! My job has just become a little easier with the online publication of the Parry Sound Council meeting packages. This was one of the implications of the town’s decision to reduce paper use and move to electronic documents for council meetings. The package for the September 3rd meeting is about 250 pages and takes about 7 MB. That’s a pretty small file for this many pages including scanned correspondence.

It will be interesting to see the looks on the faces of the councillors this Tuesday as they try to wade through some 250 pages on an iPad. As I noted earlier, I’m not sure this is gong to work for the councillors. You really can’t get through that many pages on a tablet sized device. How easy is it to flip back and forth between sections? How easy is it to make a note on a page and then quickly find it in the meeting? You can’t just write a note on a ‘sticky’ and put it on the page of interest. Yes there are electronic ‘stickies’ but they are not that easy to use and certainly not as intuitive. I expect there will be some unhappiness.

For my part I’ll be going through the package on my laptop computer. The screen is larger and I can easily have more than one page visible at a time. I have been working with the council package ‘electronically’ for some time now, shlepping up to the library, taking photos of the pages of interest and then reading them on my computer. It works, but it was always nice to flip through the library’s paper copy to catch the highlights and quickly determine what was of particular interest.

Want to see this inaugural e-verison of the council meeting package? Here’s the link.

I’ll post my usual pre-council notes no later than Monday.