YACK on: Meetings
Grant Sanders
Ihate meetings. Hate them, hate them, hate them. Unfortunately in the business world, we have them all the time. We have input sessions and touching-base sit-downs and planning meetings. We even have online meetings.

My new computer has a little camera in the bezel and when I turn it on, I can broadcast my face to anywhere in the world and receive a video feed in return. This is a little better than a conference call because you can see the faces of the people you are talking to (And greater than 50 percent of all human communication is non-verbal, or so I've read, so that's important), but it's not nearly as good as a conference call in other ways in that, for me, it necessitates shaving and a concerted hair care routine which can be quite a struggle in order to present myself to the web camera. Just so you can see what I mean, here's a picture from my web camera of what I look like right now.

Scary, huh? (That's really where I work. You can see my dog's collar on its hook behind me and my white board with my cryptic scribbles on it.)

But aside from the need to beautify my admittedly unbeautiful face and hair, technology has been a real benefit for me. It means that I can make fewer trips to boring meetings and can spend more time sitting in my comfortable chair with my dog at my feet and a massive cup of coffee within arm's reach. It also means I can work with people around the world and still live on our beautiful, friendly island. I recall about a year ago I was working with some people in Norway in the morning and another group in Los Angeles in the evening. Those were long days.

Business meetings are not the only meeting we islanders have to worry about, however. If you go to the town web site, there are 25 meetings posted on the meeting calendar there for the month of September. And those are only the scheduled meetings. Dozens of other meetings take place that aren't posted on the site.

As we all know, the Board of Selectmen alone meet 8-10 times a month, not counting executive sessions. The planning department, to their credit, holds all kinds of informational meetings on traffic and new projects. Budget work groups meet often in the fall to get the ball rolling and put feelers out about where the money will come from and go in the coming year. And then there are the dozens and dozens of non-profit boards and subcommittee meetings that one could attend all around the island, all year long.

The upshot of it all is that no single person could possibly go to all of the meetings. In addition, it's nearly impossible to know which meetings to attend. First of all, the town does not make it terribly easy for the average citizen to find out what's going on in those meetings. Most agendas, which could easily be posted on the town's Web site, are hard to get hold of. Only the HDC does a good job of posting agendas on the web with any kind of consistency. I just checked the site and found that the last time a meeting agenda for the Planning Board was posted there was July 23rd. Why aren't agendas posted on the site? They don't have to by law. The site states that:

"In accordance with Mass General Laws Chapter 39, Section 23B, the official meeting notices are posted on the "principal official bulletin board" of the Town located in the foyer of the Town Hall."

Well that's just great. I hear lots of people bemoan the fact that participation in government is at an all time low and in order to actually participate, we have to drive into town, during business hours, find a parking space, go to the town building and read a board made of wood and cork to see which meetings we should attend. That's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard given that the town just paid a pile of money to have a new Web site created that could easily put a digital version of that cork board in everyone's living room.

Something tells me that many people within our town government really don't want "we the people" involved. The last time I went to a Planning Board meeting there were about half the needed chairs for everyone in attendance. The room was dark and uninviting. The experience was terribly unpleasant and the board was argumentative with nearly everyone who spoke. I have to believe that the Park & Rec Commission is pretty happy that no one came to the recent meeting where they voted to replace the wooden boardwalk at Jetties Beach with an $18,000 corrugated roll of plastic designed by the decedants of the Marquis DeSade to torture small children's bare feet. And I'm pretty sure the HDC was glad to see a relatively empty room when they voted to adorn our new massive water towers with the word "NANTUCKET" in large friendly letters in case anyone might have mistaken the place for Delavan, Wisconsin. If you read the agenda, that line item merely says "Water tower" and not "Water tower graphics, mural or battleship grey paint discussion," which would have brought me out, I can tell you that.

So, enough with the griping. Here's a solution. Let's use the Web site we have. Let's actually require that all department heads post their meeting agendas on the web like they're supposed to. Let's not neglect or discourage the electorate, if we can help it.

Better still, let's not stop there. If I can have video conferences with Norway in the morning and L.A. in the evening, with no training or special equipment, I have to believe we could put teeny tiny web cams in all of the town's meeting spaces, purchase a multi-user streaming server, and put every single town board and commission meeting on the web for anyone to view, in real time, or in an archive.

Q: How hard can it be? A: Not hard. At all. Hyannis does it now.

The next logical step would be to put every meeting on TV. The only thing standing in the way of that is getting the Board of Selectmen, the only board that's actually on TV, and, according to my research, the most-watched show on Channel 22, to vote to ask Comcast to raise our cable bills a smidge in order to fund a public access, education and government TV channel. I'm all for it.

That way, instead of shaving and combing my hair to go to all of the meetings I attend, I can sit at home in my comfy chair, unshaven, un coifed, petting my dog with one hand and drinking a massive cup of coffee with the other.

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com and he conserved over 2,900 gallons of water and a whole tank of propane last year by not shaving or showering every day. His views are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of the Nantucket Independent. Or his wife.