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By

Monday January 16th, 2012 @ 2:15pm

City News

Screenshot, City of Windsor website

The City of Windsor will begin using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr as “an additional way to collaborate with the public” if a Social Media Policy is approved by the City Council next week.

The City surveyed 21 other municipalities in Canada last year and found that 19 of them were utilizing Facebook and Twitter to varying degrees.

The City plans to use Social media to increase awareness of municipal services, allow for customer comments, and send out information to the “walls” of citizens rather than rely on citizens visiting the City’s website for updates, among other plusses.

Using Social Media the City plans to “develop trust and humanize the City” by “being present and open to discussion with residents in a medium in which they feel comfortable”.

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  • Randy

    I’d be more impressed if more of our City’s documents were in searchable electronic form.  Even documents that were originally electronic appear to have been printed, scanned as images, and posted as images.  Fortunately you can still sort of search them with Google, due to Google’s built-in OCR, but if you access them directly from the City’s own website, you get a document that’s not as useful as it should be, and appears to have been deliberately degraded to achieve that end.

    For example, picked entirely at random, this is “Report No. 11″: http://www.citywindsor.ca/DisplayAttach.asp?AttachID=25256

    It’s a PDF file containing images scanned from a printout of an electronic document.  As far as I can tell, it’s not searchable.  The original document could have been converted directly to epub and pdf formats, for use on mobile and PC devices.

    If you use Google web search to search for specific text from this document, like “a precommitment in the amount of $2.067 M” , Google will find the document on the web.  No big deal.  But you’ll be able to view the document using Google, and even see an HTML version which contains searchable text (not the original text, but OCR’d).  So, it’s come full circle, from electronic, to paper, to scanned image, to image file, back to electronic text.  Just give us the original text.