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So Really, What’s Next?

Line sketch of hands typing on keyboard.

I originally started out wanting to make it easier for folks to keep up with what’s going on with the City of Tampa by documenting council meetings. That turned out to be labor intensive and felt futile knowing the online agenda was changing. Linking to documents that were at temporary Urls seemed senseless. So I decided to wait until the migration away from SIRE was done. That was this summer. Within the next week, we are supposed to finally see the replacement in action.

No doubt it will be better. If for nothing else if we don’t have to type a Captcha it will be an improved experience. My gut tells me it’s going be mostly more of the same with slightly better technology behind it. But what ever it is, it’s the system we’ll be using for the foreseeable future and I can revisit how I document and review the meetings.

My current thinking is I will review the agenda over the weekend and post a “What to keep an eye on” and be able to link to a more accessible and reader friendly agenda. Post meeting, I will write a re-cap with timestamp links to the important discussions vs trying to link to each individual agenda item. Ideally the recap will go out as a Sunday morning read with the upcoming post Monday morning. In between I’m sure I’ll expand on issues from both.

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Always-on data tools that keep watch between the stories — built and maintained by the Monitor.

The AgendaA reimagined version of council's weekly agenda.Updated weekly
Capital ProjectsThe city's five-year capital plan & life-to-date spending, every project.FY27 snapshot
Agenda KeywordsEmail notification only if keyword appears on the agenda.Public Beta