During the recent Mayoral campaign in the city of Ypsilanti I recorded the audio and video of the debate held at McKenney Union and then made them available as a podcast for the community. In the interest of continuing and expanding community awareness and involvement of what is going on in local government, I want to expand on this and start a new initiative. I want to record all the public meetings of the various local government bodies including the Ypsilanti City Council, the Township Board of Trustees, and the School Board. My idea is to setup an account on Podshow+ and create feeds for each body. This part is already in progress and I’ll let everyone know when it’s ready to go. The next step is to get all of these meetings recorded. Finally I will get them posted so that anyone can listen to them. Podshow is a company set up by Adam Curry and Ron Bloom to provide podcasts and podcasting related services. On the Podshow+ site they offer free hosting and bandwidth for podcasts. So this initiative will cost nothing other than the time it takes to record edit and upload the audio files. If anyone out there is interested in helping out with getting the meetings recorded, please let me know.

Update: It appears Steve Pierce has already had the same idea. I’m going to talk to Steve about participating in this project.