BrentI respectfully request city council to consider implementing the following:
In the interest of helping to improve community communication and engagement, for key city projects, develop informational slide presentations with narrative and audio clips attached to each slide.
The immediate key projects that come to mind are:
- Harbor Island Cleanup
- Chinook Pier Future Use
- Harbor Island Future Use
Why Do This?
Despite best efforts, many residents don’t know where to find information or how to interpret it. Also, many residents simply don’t engage. This leaves the city without guidance from the public. Too often, it’s too late when we finally wake up and care. That’s bad for the city, and bad for the residents. Attending council meetings or town halls is hard for many. Reading long, boring reports on a website turns others off. Today, more people, young and old, watch videos. Online shopping says 80% of the buyers watch videos before they buy. You Tube videos range from how to build a back yard deck to how often to pluck our eyebrows. Show and tell. Videos. Learn by listening. Learn by watching. That’s where the public is today.
The Technology?
Every PowerPoint lets you tag each slide with a narrative clip and an mp4 audio clip. As you watch the slideshow, you can watch, read, and listen to every slide. You can go at your own pace. You can pause and think. You can go back to see a prior slide. You can fast forward if you had enough. Building content slideshows of 3.5-5 minutes on our city projects, much as you build chapters in a book, would be a valuable way to share information with the public (at their leisure, on their time, and in their space). Would it be a total solution; no. But it would be a step in the direction of the future. Our youth are already there. We need to catch up if we hope to connect to them ,and them to us, on a city level.
How To Go About It?
We already have the information, the content. Our Harbor Island cleanup database is huge. Maybe build a “chapter” on What is Harbor Island? One on How did it get Contaminated? One on What are the Contaminates? One on What are Test & Monitoring Wells? One on What Steps are being taken to Clean it Up? Etc. The same for Chinook Pier. Etc. Small, short clips topic by topic, that get added to as the projects progress.
Use AI (artificial intelligence) software to create mp4 voice clips for the slides. It avoids the need, hassle, and cost of a live voice. The software is already here and easy to use. Just copy/paste the slide narrative into the software and 3 seconds later you have the slide voice. Easy to edit slides as facts change. Easy to add slides as progress is made. Easy to rearrange slides as storylines evolves. Etc.
Who To Do It?
Our local high school communications class and media club would jump at the chance to help build this. Engage staff at our Loutit Library to help guide the content layout. It would be ongoing, year after year as these projects advance and new projects come into focus. What better way to engage our youth than to draw them into these kinds of project tracking and archiving. Let the files sit on our websites, thoughtfully cataloged so the public can see and use them from anywhere, anytime, as often as they wish.
City Innovation
Are other cities using innovative ways to communicate and engage their residents, I don’t know. Are other cities using AI to help build and manage content on their major projects, I doubt it. We have an innovative city. We have a bright, skillful city staff. Why not let us showcase them with a project like this?
What are you thoughts about this? How would you engage the public better so city hall knows how the community feels and thinks?
