I came to a startling realization yesterday afternoon -- most City Council members are much cooler technology-wise than your average 30 to 50-year-old person.

The tech-savviness of city staff and City Council members proves both a benefit and a challenge, however. On the one hand, your alders are accessible through almost any form of communication, be it text message, Facebook or Google Chat. On the other hand, many of these forms of communication, like texting and Facebook, are difficult to archive, which presents a challenge for open records law in the city.

Ald. Zach Brandon and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz have dealt with many of those challenges in drafting a new open records policy (the policy is under Legislative File Text) for the City of Madison that amends state law. to create a more comprehensive policy. In particular, it recognizes the inability of most cell phones and instant-messaging programs at this time to save messages, thus making them ineligible for open records requests.

However, the policy - which was criticized by Ald. Brenda Konkel on her blog - was amended to discourage council members from using text messaging and instant messaging for official city business, and to keep records of them as e-mails (alders' city e-mail accounts preserve every e-mail for open records purposes).

The amended policy reads:

IM/TM has all of the attributes of instantaneous exchange of ideas, as does a regular telephone conversation. Furthermore, the data exchange has the same
technological issues as to capturing and storage of data that is present with regards to voice-mail with an additional concern - the raw data is often only briefly stored or not stored at all by the third party vendors or hosts that provide these services. Thus, this technology is even closer to a true telephone conversation than are voice-mails. Therefore, City employees shall refrain from using such services for official communications purposes or for matters that would result in a public record if another format such as email or written communications were employed. In the event that IM/TM are used for such communications purposes the employee shall
preserve a copy of such communications by either copying them to
their email account, downloading the communications to their city
computer, making a computer file of the communications or by
printing and retaining a copy of such communications.

I personally have saved text messages to a Word document when I was switching phones, and my new phone actually deletes old messages for me after a week, so I can attest that it is somewhat of a pain to transcribe them (although compared to a 60-minute interview recording, it's a breeze). As I have said in an earlier blog about Metro buses, however, technology tends to change faster than city policy, and archiving programs for saving texts to e-mail are already cropping up, while some instant messaging programs like Google Chat and Apple's iChat either automatically or relatively easily save conversations, which will take some of the PITA effect (as Ald. Mark Clear described it) out of saving instant and text messages in the future. And to be fair, typing a text into an e-mail is a lot easier than typing the message to begin with on most phones (mine included).

Ultimately, though, evolving technology comes with a price, and as Brandon pointed out, the policy tries to be "cutting edge" without being "impractical or costly." And he's right. There are always ways to circumvent open records law - meeting in person, talking over the phone - and unless we install cameras or voice recorders all over the City-County Building, in council members' homes, in their local hangouts, and on and on, we can't capture every discussion regarding city business. In some ways, it's a matter of trust that city officials will use the technologies that can be preserved - writing, e-mail - so that reporters like myself can get the full story from them when needed.

For those of you who are less technologically minded, take heart: one of your own is on the Council, as well. CCOC members joked about adding in a "smoke signal" open records clause for Ald. Tim Bruer, who apparently has not been hip to using text messages like most other alders.