Council meetings are going high-tech, with each of the city’s nine councillors receiving an IPad to reduce the need for the printing and distribution of paper agendas, which are are usually more than 10 pages including memos and other materials.
The tablets will be city property and councillors will be responsible for the cost of lost, damaged or unreturned IPads as well as for the cost of Internet connectivity when they are not on city property. Although use of the tablets for personal reasons will be allowed under the usage policy, councillors will not be allowed to use them for personal profit or non-profit purposes such as advertising or buying and selling items, nor for illegal activities such as transmission or storage of copyrighted materials. Modification of the operating system to allow installation of applications not approved by Apple is also prohibited.
The decision to go with IPads rather than other tablets was likely based on a recommendation from Vern Sabeski of All-Net, which provides meeting agenda software and other products to the city and other municipalities.
Sabeski told the city in an Oct. 7 email that the company had had over 200 councillors open new accounts with All-Net Meetings over the previous year and that all but seven had gone with IPads, while the others opted for Windows tablets.
“We have had nothing but good experience reviews from users on IPads from both the administrators and councillors,” wrote Sabeski, noting that All-Net’s average councillor client is over 60 years old and on the lower end of the technology proficiency scale. “The reviews range from simplicity to easy to manage for administrators who are not very tech savvy. The reviews from the Windows users were not as positive as they continually experienced situations where councilors would adjust the settings, get viruses and had difficulty figuring out the difference between the start screen and desktop views in Windows 8. While I personally think Windows tablets are great, they seem to be a little too advanced for our average councilor as they still have the ability to make a lot of adjustments to their settings and staff are left to restore their devices for them and deal with technical questions.”
Sabeski said the advantages of IPads included cost (around $500 apiece), the fact that there are no settings that users need to adjust and that they can easily be restored if problems occur and remotely locked or wiped clean if lost or stolen.
