Hi, I’m Michael Bishop. Two years ago I started watching all of the City of Tampa’s streamed meetings to get a lay of the land and see if I could find a place to contribute. I’m still looking for a place but in the time since I feel like there’s a lack of insight into the machine that makes my hometown run. I hope to fill that gap with this site.
Edit Since I wrote this page I’ve decided to be more of a blog focused on decisions facing and made by the city. Opinions will be shared. I hope to continue to build tools to help analyze the data behind those decisions.
Why did they…
Admit it. At least once you’ve seen a government project and asked why did they do it a certain way. At no other level than local do you have a better opportunity to influence how or if or where a project is implemented. But often we don’t hear about it until after a project has been approved and funded. I hope to reduce the friction for my neighbors to learn about what our city is planning and doing while advocating for the city to make the information more accessible.
But it’s all there…
It’s great that we have a video archive of all Council, Community Revitalization Agency, Variance Review Board, Architectural Review, and Barrio Latino meetings. There are also transcripts for each meeting generated from the closed captioning. Finally we have the agendas currently housed in SIRE with links to relevant documents for each item. SIRE a third party software that was end-of-lifed December of 2021. The city is in the process of migrating to a digital document platform from the same vendor that provided SIRE. We also have plenty of open data on the GIS side of the equation. Finally there is Accela, also recently the topic of conversation at City Council as to its user experience for the public.
What if…?
All of this was in one place? Yeah, what if. Until then, that’s the gap I hope to fill in hopes of helping educate my neighbors not only on the week to week decisions of council but how to advocate for issues that are important to them and their neighborhood.
Is it free?
Yeah, I’m not trying to build a subscription model, at least not at this time. I don’t even know if anyone will find this useful. I do intend to add a “buy me a coffee” tip button. I’m also available for web consulting, custom digital map development and slide deck preparation. Drop me an email at michael@webjanitor.consulting if you’d like to discuss a project.