Could perhaps there be some organized and automated harvesting of PDFs from the city web site, so that you take that as a fixed point to start from and work around whatever it is?

I could imagine e.g. a derived feed from it that pulled all PDFs, dumped them all into Scribd or some other PDF holder for viewing, and ran OCR on each one in turn and posted some part of the text into another stream.

At this point I get a little bit of this through GovDelivery – which is better than what they had before, but just illustrates how bad what they had before was.

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As for open formats for storing information, I’m all for it, but I can understand organizational pushback against sharing more than just page images. Do you really want to be able to get the same Excel worksheet that the bean-counters used to count beans, and do they want you to see the formulas and unstated assumptions they were using?

I’m also talking about open formats for storing information. Legistar is a for-profit corporation, and it offers proprietary software. When rates are raised or significant innovations were requested by cities, I don’t think its commercial lock-in will be a benifit to cities. There are benifits, of course, and I’ll touch on those soon.

I would also point out that there is significant opposition to Legistar from elected officials in Ann Arbor. They say that while it works quite well for City staff, it’s not built for the processes of governing that they want to follow. See for example the May 2008 Cable Communications Commission for some good discussion