This is a small personal grievance.
The district, USD116, obviously wants to keep appearances of being in compliance with the Open Meetings Act. To this end they need to upload the recordings of the meetings, if they were advertised. But this is not good, – the vile disruptors might listen to and mock them.
What to do? Answer: to muddle the terrain. It requires some skills, but the district is up to the challenge.
Take the Board of Education meeting on March 8, 2022. The Board webpage states that all of its meeting will be streamed worldwide. Well, sometimes, mostly not. (A plank at the bottom of the page sends you to a a playlist which is full of often ghosted, often mislabeled links to various meetings, past and future.) The 3.8 meeting agenda, however, sent you to a different place to watch it: a youtube channel.
If you were foolish enough to believe that, joke is on you: nothing was broadcast at. the time. The show started about an hour later, and without the sound. The resulting recording sits here.
Anyway, a week after the meeting, the district released a longer recording, still incomplete, but with the sound, on the same channel, here. So, now we have two recordings on that UPTV channel.
You would think the picture is clear, right? Some equipment failure, it took some time to recover the recording and to repost it, correct?
Well, turns out, there is a third version of the same meeting, seemingly identical to the second one, posted not on the UPTV channel, but on the relatively unused USD116 channel, dedicated normally to kids’ performances. And, it seems, that version was streamed right away, on the day of the meeting (somewhat selective equipment failure)…
However incompetent the IT department of the district is, this alone wouldn’t be enough to explain this mess. The ineptitude is skillfully weaponized to create a maze where finding a recording requires stamina and time.
Here’s an analogy to explain all of this. In Putin’s Russia, a while ago, the parliament (in a rare impulse to improve governance) adopted a pretty strong transparency law. It is largely neutered now, but at the start it was making the life of corrupt schemers quite hard: all tenders were published online, and searchable. Competition improved.
So the corrupt officials started some little tricks: say, replacing in a key description a letter “а” (Cyrillic) with the Latin “a”. If you do the fonts right, the text looks identical, but the search returns nothing.
The appearance of the compliance with the law was there, but functionally the tenders were invisible to the potential vendors, except those connected to the government (knowing where to look). And so the crooks were winning all tenders.
The crooks were winning. That was obviously bad. But on the other hand, people made inferences. And now everyone knows that if you win one of those super profitable contracts, you are a crook.
Somewhat similar dynamics, we believe, works here, in USD116. On one hand administration’s tricks are tiring and make our life harder, – win for them! On the other hand, these nasty little victories just tell us in no uncertain terms who they are.
Go figure.