I’ve shared bits and pieces of how I came to start Tampa Monitor but I’m not sure I’ve ever written about it. In 2017 as the first models for Hurricane Irma started showing a track around the Keys and up the west coast of Florida, I reached out to the Code for Tampa Bay¹ Slack channel to see if there was any kind of digital response I could help with and it turned out there was. Folks in Houston had spun up a response after Hurricane Harvey to address deficiencies in the National Shelter System run by the Red Cross. As Irma was bearing down on what appeared to be Miami, a companion response was formulating around the same technology used in Houston. We continued that work through the next hurricane season with Florence and Michael, including interfacing with FEMA and other organizations doing digital response. Which led to further talks with the Red Cross on how they could incorporate what we were doing into their work. By late 2019, they’d improved their technology and reporting which now, if you see a map from the county or state of available shelters, is a direct result of the work I contributed to.

We set out with the goal to become obsolete and considered it a success when we wrapped it up in 2020. From there, with the lessons learned from my time around Code for America, I looked local to where I could continue to contribute. Ultimately that led to watching Tampa City Council meetings to better understand what was going on, where our city’s citizen facing technology was and how I might help.

One of the first things I built was the land use map that includes both current and future designations. I’m still not sure there’s a single place you can view both in one place, especially on a single map. That work has evolved into embedding a map with the agenda each week with the applications highlighted so folks can better visualize what is being proposed and what the pattern is now. The base land use map is the most visited page on the site every month.

Which gets to the one year of agendas. The domain was registered in December of 2022 and on February 9, 2023 the first post appeared. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but there was a vision incorporating the agenda with the video along with notes/context to help folks follow along. Over the next year and a half various iterations of that post came sporadically as I tried to learn and understand the processes and systems myself while sharing my personal thoughts to council². Last year, for the November 9th meeting, I committed to doing a preview and a “user friendly” version of the agenda every week. This week marked a full year save for the weeks council was off, though even some of those weeks saw a post with a wrap of the previous week or a preview of what was coming when they returned. That’s not counting the many wrap up and informational posts written over the year.

The first versions of the agenda were created by manually copying and pasting the clerk’s agenda into my code editor and searching and removing the boilerplate legalese that I feel is unnecessary to get the gist of the agenda item. It may be legally required for some archaic reason I’ve yet to get an explanation for, but it certainly doesn’t need to be there for the public. An axiom I picked up from a software engineer is “manual until it hurts.” So my cut/paste process evolved into scripts which have evolved into more scripts so now the whole process is automated save for the final posting on the web. The script parses the clerk’s agenda, grabs all of the links, identifies the summary sheet/staff report and pulls the relevant text storing it all in a machine readable format. That’s then used to generate the markup for the map and post which I copy/paste into WordPress. I’m quite proud of where it stands now—especially with the included staff background material—though I’m not sure it’s as used as much as I’d hoped.

When I left Twitter I wanted to give folks a way to continue to follow along if they weren’t moving to Bluesky (I was on a full Facebook/Meta boycott as well) so I added the “newsletter” option of subscribing by email. But Tampa Monitor is and always has been a website—a blog—first. What goes out in the email starts as a post on the site first. The contents are the same though a few elements can get lost like a chart or an interactive map in email. I’ve settled on the full text in the newsletter for folks that prefer to read there; I didn’t want to feel like I was forcing anyone to the web. That list has quadrupled in size over the past year. Monthly visitors to the site have grown more than 300%. It’s all still small potatoes in the grand scheme of things but it has been encouraging to see the growth in interest. And that’s not even getting into being picked up in syndication as part of the Tampa Bay Journalism Project, a nascent Creative Loafing Tampa Bay effort supported by grants and a coalition of donors who make specific contributions via the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation. But to be clear, I nor Tampa Monitor are financially compensated at this time through this relationship. The goal of Tampa Monitor has always been to raise awareness of what’s going on in the city through the lens of Tampa City Council and our inclusion in this project furthers that goal. A non-paywalled source of local information is imperative to an informed public and I’m proud to be a part of that.

Which gets to the final point. Where does it go from here? Thus far Tampa Monitor has existed on shear will and some timely contributions from readers to help cover the fixed technology costs of building and running the site. That’s not sustainable long term so what’s next is figuring out how to build more financial support or settling on a limited publishing schedule. I would prefer the former, continuing to get better and further build on the foundation I’ve established. I am open to direct sponsorships for the newsletter or the land use map page. I’ve experimented with Google Ads, and may try another, but the reality is the amount of traffic and the subject matter isn’t conducive to that type of advertising. For me it degraded the reading experience with no benefit and I removed them after a couple of weeks. Swag was one idea, but I ran into a wall finding a reliable print on demand service. So friends, readers, please share your ideas and thank you for engaging with the community and trying to make our little spot on the globe a better place.

If you would like to make a contribution or become a monthly sponsor, your support is appreciated. If you have other ideas or are interested in sponsoring a page or the newsletter, please get in touch.

1. C4TB was brigade in the now defunct Code for America Brigade Network. Brigades, as in fire brigades, were civic technology focused volunteer organizations in cities around the country. Their goal was to bring technology focused community members together with other civic minded folks to better their communities. Some had formal relationships with their local governments, some were just folks that wanted to bring awareness to their towns. ↩︎
2. The only times I have spoken during public comment were related to the fiasco that was SIRE and the planned migration to Onbase, the platforms that run the agenda. ↩︎