Ever since the latest Byron city council elections brought in some new blood, there have been some great strides in community engagement, communication, and transparency. Alan De Keyrel is a first term city council member in Byron, MN, and he has been bringing his expertise as an IT business owner across to his new role as a representative of the city of Byron. The result has been a very impressive array of “web 2.0″ techniques to keep the Byron community informed of current happenings.
New Byron Web Tools
- Byron MN Blog
- Byron Better Project: Make Suggestions to Improve Byron
- Byron City Council Live Video Cast
- Follow City Councilman Alan De Keyrel on Twitter
New Byron Blog
As a resident of Byron myself, and father to three kids under five, I have always had an interest in what is happening within my local government, but I’ve never had the time or energy to be able to attend and keep up with city council meetings. Then I found a new blog, http://byronmnblog.com, which has been giving updates in down to earth terms on the latest hot topics being addressed by the city council. From the firing of the city administrator, to the latest in road repair projects, Alan De Keyrel has provided a conduit for a busy, increasingly tech-savvy audience to learn the “behind the scenes” details and facts about these topics.
Soliciting Suggestions to Make Byron Better
De Keyrel has also leveraged some free web tools to help get community engagement and participation in Byron issues, such as creating a Byron page on a website called “The Better Project”. This tool allows anyone to submit ideas on how to improve Byron, and there have been suggestions ranging from new potential eateries to road topics.
City Council Web Video Stream
The third web tool that was tested out at the last Byron city council meeting was streaming the meeting as a web cast from the website Ustream.TV. Again, another free and creative use of technology to help foster a more transparent local government.
Summary
Sometimes it just takes the right mix of motivation, technical expertise, ability to leverage free tools, and the result is an impressive effort to use technology to inform citizens of the inner workings of local government. I applaud Councilman De Keyrel for his innovative ideas in this arena, and I look forward to seeing more communications in the future. My one suggestion to the Byron City Council would be to advertise these new communication portals to Byron residents more effectively. Many people I have talked to have not heard of these new tools, so it’s only spreading by word of mouth right now as far as I can tell.
Keep up the good work!