City Council Meeting Prep: There’s an App for That [VIDEO]

LaTricia Woods serves as Public Information Officer for the City of Maricopa, Ariz. Previously, she served as Assistant to the City Manager in the City of Scottsdale and Public Information Officer for the City of Wichita. Her career expertise includes public relations, strategic and crisis communications and marketing for government, nonprofit and media organizations.

Embracing New Technology

The Maricopa City Council has always looked to technology as a way to enhance the way it meets the needs of the community. With the growing success of the iPad, many Council members wanted to turn in the laptop and try the new device. In a relatively short amount of time, the entire City Council had asked to switch. Once that happened, they began exploring different apps that would help them carry out their responsibilities.

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Why Keyword Search is a Powerful Tool for Public Access

Would you like to know more about a powerful keyword search tool available to your staff and citizens with the Government Transparency Suite? Great! Let’s take a few minutes to discuss how search can drive better public access.

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Los Angeles Leverages the Granicus API to Enhance Public Access Without Disrupting Existing Workflows

The City of Los Angeles was one of our first customers to connect in-house systems with Granicus through the Granicus API. This enabled them to enhance public access to council meetings without requiring staff to change the way the run their public meetings using in-house software.

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New Federal Government Meeting Services Released

Our latest news, Granicus Introduces New Federal Government Meeting Services, means big things for federal agencies that are charged with increasing transparency, participation, and collaboration under President Obama's Open Government Directive. Over the past two years, we’ve worked closely with federal agencies and advisory committees to build services that enable them to reach unprecedented levels of transparency and participation related to their public meetings through webcasting and other interactive technologies.

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Montgomery County Council Video On-Demand

Montgomery County in Maryland finished their Meeting Efficiency Suite training and have already started broadcasting their public meetings live and on-demand for citizens to watch!

The clerk’s office has really excelled with the solution – Donna, Linda, Crystal, MaryAnn, Jill, and their IT staff - Michelle. Since MoCo has weekly council meetings, the clerk staff got ample time to practice using Granicus.

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Measuring Open Government Success

I was reading a blog post recently “Sophomore Slump for Open Government,” by Federal News Radio, discussing some perspectives Ellen Miller, the Sunlight Foundation’s Co-Founder and Executive Director, shared at the Gov 2.0 Summit about how the administration's efforts at using technology for transparency to meet Obama’s Open Government Directive are not measuring up – suffering from the “sophomore slump.”

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Our Previous Meeting Process Was "Old-school"

We worked with City of Hesperia to highlight the success they’ve seen since brining Granicus to the city. I spoke with Melinda Sayre-Castro, Assistant City Clerk, and learned the challenges they faced prior to Granicus and the results they’ve seen since. Melinda has been with the city since 2006 and worked briefly in HR before moving to the City Clerk’s office. She holds a Masters in Public Administration and says one of her favorite hobbies is spending quality time with her family.

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