The city council meets tonight with two big things on its agenda.
1) Toward the end of the meeting, an open data resolution will be put before the council. This resolution, sparse in detail, explicitly calls on the city manager to create an open data policy for the city. It’s a big first step for the city and one we’ve championed for some time, as discussed in our open letter on open data this past spring.
2) The council will also take up the new speaker rules spearheaded by Mayor Mike Signer. We wanted to analyze speaker data from this trial period and compare it to the previous rules. However, minutes from June and August remain unpublished by the city so we could not complete the analysis. We did, however, look at what speakers looked like in the two years prior to the rule change. This may give some context as to why rule changes were considered in the first place.
– 56% male
– 11.5 average speakers per meeting
– 277 unique speakers identified
– 1% of speakers (3 people) took 19% of used speaking slots
– 4% of speakers (10 people) took 38% of used speaking slots
– 9% of speakers (24 people) took 56% of used speaking slots
Speaking Spots Used
– West Main, Belmont Bridge, Downtown Mall and Steephill were the most numerous specific issues raised.
– Pedestrians/traffic and development/zoning were the most numerous general issues raised.
Tag cloud of specific topics from speakers
Tag cloud of general topics from speakers
