Advice to Mayor Hickenlooper
The Denver Post is asking readers to submit advice to Mayor Hickenlooper. They are
going to pick the best submissions and print 'em. Below is my advice:
Update: The Post didn't print my advice to the new Mayor so here it is. I can publish it without them. Perhaps both a strength and a weakness of weblogs. 
Update (August 3, 2003): The Post did print my letter. They edited it a bit. No news from the Mayor's office on whether or not he's going to start a weblog.
Mayor Hickenlooper please start a weblog. Writing about a subject helps focus your thoughts. One of the pushes of your administration should be an effort to democratize city government. Weblogs are a new type of conversation amongst groups and conversation is at the heart of democracy. Forward thinking administrators like David Fletcher over in Utah are using weblogs to aggregate information and collect input on wide and varied subjects. His focus is eGovernment and the efforts of state and local goverments to increase services by taking advantage of the economies of scale that web technologies provide.
I would imagine that your weblog would follow Howard Dean's model where most of the content would be produced by staffers. I would recommend that you post regularly also. That would enable a conversation with you, in your own voice. Sort of unfiltered.
Consider the possibility of posting links to the stuff you're reading at the time. People monitoring your weblog or RSS feed would have to opportunity to come to meetings prepared because much of the discussion, especially the defining of terms and the problem space, will take place online prior to the meeting. This is a technology that is accessible to anyone that has access to a computer with a connection to the public network.
Recently the Boston Globe [July 23, 2003, "Blogs shake the political discourse"] said, "Blogs are easy to create, cheap to set up, and commonplace on the Web. They can draw thousands of readers per day and dozens of posted comments in a running conversation," that one proponent, "likes to think of as talk radio for the wired."
Dave Winer writes, "I like photos taken by people with weblogs. I like weblog writing, rough and rambly, even angry and reckless. See, I think people expressing themselves honestly is where beauty comes from."
7:31:01 AM 
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