Recently, we’ve has been doing some thinking about how to upgrade the public meetings to go completely wireless/cordless. I know this may sound like a silly notion, but we are looking to reduce the amount of friction for planning and holding public meetings and collecting robust feedback.
We currently run most of our meetings using web-connected laptops, a note-taker, a facilitator, keypads, and lots of tape and power cords. That last part is what we want to get rid of. We have been using AnyWare (an internally developed brainstorming tool) to collect feedback from a large group of people and poll on issues on the fly. Our interest in this is to reduce the level of public meeting fatigue by making the meetings iterative and productive toward a set of next steps or actions. We want to reduce the cost per participant in a public process while increasing the quality of the feedback and interaction. As such, our goal is not to remove the public meeting altogether but to augment it with innovative web applications that can help move a meeting toward real results and lower the amount of recording, synthesis and reporting that normally happens after a meeting.
Right now, the live collection of notes has been working well for us, but it lacks a group view of the notes as they are entered. We have worked around this by either having people gather around the computer screen when finalizing notes, or by having a facilitator work off a flipchart.
Our ideal vision of the electronic public meeting is to go completely battery powered and add pico projectors to the mix for visual feedback of what is happening on the computer. We believe we can accommodate up to 100 people for less than a one-time $10,000 investment. This investment involves 10 $350 netbook computers (9 to 11 hour life on one charge), 10 pico projectors, 20 projector battery packs (at 1.5 hours a charge), and 10 replacement netbook batteries to extend the life of the investment. Altogether, the cost of this investment is $9,549.
This is our ideal setup, but throw away the extra batteries and you can get the investment down to about $7,769. Don’t need to run 100 person public meetings, that cost can go down even further to $3,639 for 50 person meetings.
Our goal at PlaceMatters is to push the interactive public meeting into common practice and make the barriers to entry low enough that any planning department can run one with a very low amount of friction. With a completely wireless setup, there will be no more taping and running cords in complex arrays just to get every table powered up.
In an effort to upgrade our public meetings we are beginning a small capital campaign to fund this investment. We believe in ground testing our theories and will use the equipment to enhance the work we do around the country and to develop materials that other planners can use to do this on our own. We believe in developing and sharing best practices and your tax-deductible donation will help us contribute to the community of practitioners that are advancing effective and efficient public meetings.
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Tags: civic engagement, iterative, Planning, public meetings