MA Social Media

When I left Birmingham to go home to the United States for christmas holidays, I couldn’t have predicted that I would end up creating a little buzz in local politics. As part of the Enterprise module, I created a project called myTown. While working on the module, I decided to take this idea a little further and implement it in my own hometown of Jonestown, Pennsylvania.

At home, I got myself a meeting with the Mayor of Jonestown. Turns out it was the Mayor’s last week in office, but that didn’t keep him from getting me in touch with the Borough Council’s Vice-President (now the President), who manages Jonestown’s website. While having a chat with him, he asked me to come present it to the Borough Council. At first, I was extremely excited to present it until I realized it was the first meeting of the year for the Borough so there will be quite a crowd there.

I opened my presentation with the following, “MyTown is a social enterprise which aims to build a stronger community by education and empowering the citizens digitally to ensure sustainable civic engagement.” Looking around I saw some confused yet excited faces, which to me meant that they were eager to find out more about it. The presentation ended up being good enough for the Borough to unanimously adopt it with a budget of $200.

Since, it was the first meeting of the year, the local newspaper was present there along with the County Commissioners of Lebanon County. One of the Commissioners, Jo Ellen Litz, who already films the weekly commissioners meeting and uploads them to YouTube, got in touch with me and asked me to come present the same presentation to the rest of the commissioners. I immediately said yes, without considering the fact that they had already declined to do this when Commissioner Litz asked them almost a year ago. Commissioner Litz thought that since Jonestown’s Borough unanimously agreed to adopt the project, why not see if it can be adopted for the entire county.

As I was preparing for the presentation, I spent nearly three hours looking for data relating to Lebanon County. Let me tell you there is very little public data available. Lebanon County website does no justice at all either. Taking account of this, I decided to spend majority of my time talking about the need for transparency in local government. The county commissioners meeting occurs every Thursday at 9:30AM. I was given 20 minutes to talk about the project and majority of my talk I focused on why the county should adopt it. I also mentioned the fact that many people couldn’t attend this meeting because it was during business hours and most of the people are working full-time jobs.  They listened and moved to a vote, no one second therefore it was not approved.

Their decision to not approve gave me my 15 minutes of local fame and put the two commissioners in a situation that could have easily been avoided with a simple yes. Turns out the story about them declining the offer to have their meetings webcast, turned up on the front page of the local daily newspaper. People who follow local politics were outraged from this and posted their comments on Lebanon Daily News’s website. The day the story was in the paper, I was also invited to talk about it on the local radio station WLBR 1270 AM.

Even though my offer was declined, I have decided to continue on convincing them to adopt it later in the summer. There is a bit of irony to this, which is, during the presentation, one of the things that I talked about was how streaming the meeting would mean the commissioners would be talking and taking actions directly in front of their constituents. Their constituents would know exactly what they would be saying, not something they would hear from the local newspaper or radio station. Turns out the commissioners want to wait and see the results of live streaming the meeting in the Borough of Jonestown, before they decide on taking the project up in the county. However, that wasn’t conveyed in the newspaper correctly. Only if they would have listened to me!