Why is Salem S . . . L . . . O . . . W?

Everywhere but Salem, this is the symbol of enhanced transparency. Here's it's the symbol of missed opportunities. Image via Wikipedia

SLOW, as in Salem . . . . Lags . . . . Outrageously . . . . Why?

Salem's Community Development Department sends out a "Community Connections" newsletter --- it's a pdf, of course, because there is a huge paranoia among government types who seem to live in fear that if you make information easy to forward and share, people might forward and share it! So we use pdfs to prevent that.

What's weird is that Salem finally tiptoed ever-so-gingerly into the late 20th Century recently, creating an RSS feed for the public so that Salem residents could keep up with what's going on. Note the most recent flash announcement here at Salem's "City of Salem News" site -- that's right, it's an announcement that the replacement fire chief would be the fire chief for good. Great -- that's a fine thing to report. But is that really all that the official city has had to share with the public since April 6??? What about all the articles in this multi-page Community Connections?

Whomever ascends to the Mayor's throne next month should make fixing the retarded public outreach office a top priority. We're going to be cutting budgets for as far as the eye can see, and that's going to be a very painful process -- the only thing that will make it worse is if the city keeps using the equivalent of carrier pigeons to share information and keeps choosing to use information formats that are all about preventing people from getting the information quickly and sharing the parts that are of interest.

HINT to Salem: quit with the paranoia and the "We have to use pdfs or someone might change something and make it look like it came from us" -- believe me, if someone wants to spoof a City of Salem communication, it would be child's play to do. But nobody wants a pdf as the front-line communication media. The only thing you're communicating when you communicate via pdfs is that you aren't really much interested in communicating.