Letter to Plainfield Officials: Put Board Meetings Online

Dear Mayor Collins and Trustees,

This short letter is to ask you to consider improving the Village communication with its residents for free.

Currently, Village Board and Plan Commission meetings are broadcast on local channels (Comcast/U-verse) on Mondays/Tuesdays. I am asking you to consider making these important meeting videos available online too.

Many of the neighboring communities already provide online videos of these meetings on their pages: 

Oswego:

http://www.oswegoil.org/government/village-board/agendas.aspx 

Romeoville:

http://www.romeoville.org/BoardAdmin/p_agenda.aspx

Naperville:

http://naperville.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=2

Joliet:

http://www.visitjoliet.org/index.aspx?page=273

Posting meeting recordings on YouTube is free and widely used by municipalities across the country. This minor update would not require an expensive proprietary solution either. Romeoville already makes all board meeting videos available online on a YouTube channel. This way high quality videos would be accessible from anywhere using any device. Residents can catch up on the village discussions at their convenience. The videos would not be limited to Comcast/U-verse customers anymore, all residents will have access to the same information. Residents who cannot record meetings on their DVRs will not miss the discussion either.

I would encourage you to sponsor this initiative to post board and plan commission meeting videos online. After all this initiative is:

• free
  
• requires minimal staff effort (as we are already set up to record and broadcast live)
  
• can be implemented very quickly
  
• with quite visible results. 

I believe Plainfield should be a model to the neighboring communities when it comes to communication with their residents and transparency. However on this one occasion this initiative will let us catch up to where they have been for some time. 

Thanks,

Mesut Tepebas 

Plainfield