Raise the Hammer

I sent the following email to my Councillor Jason Farr. I encourage everyone to email your Councillor about this enraging waste of our funds.

Councillor Farr,

As you will surely learn of from our national media today as this becomes a national story, the City of Hamilton has spent $400,000 on a consulting firm to engage the public in seeking suggestions to solve our infrastructure deficit of $150-mil a year.

I'd like to suggest that we not waste money on consultants that do not provide value to our City.

Case in point:

1) The website for "Our Voice" is a poorly modified $50 wordpress theme: http://themeforest.net/item/earth-ecoenv...

2) The survey is a SurveyMonkey powered site which does not meet the requirements of MFIPPA because the information is stored on US servers. (It's cheap, they are using the $19/mth version)

3) The website's poor coding and design means it is completely inaccessible to those with visual disabilities.

4) The site includes a picture of the Hamilton OHIO courthouse as being in Hamilton Ontario.

5) The site also includes a T-Shirt promotion Hamilton WASHINGTON state.

6) They do not know what the HSR is

7) The big picture on the ourvoice.hamilton.ca page is of a bike path in Ottawa, Canada.

In short, we just got taken to the cleaners by a consulting firm. We need to stop being taken to the cleaners like this.

In the next week, a group of citizens will meet and launch a Hamilton version of Change By Us - a program designed by the City of New York in partnership with its citizens. The program is open source and can be launched at no charge in other cities.

Please take a look: http://nyc.changeby.us/

Here's the version in Philly: http://philly.changeby.us/

Phoenix: http://phoenix.changeby.us/

Chicago and Memphis plan to launch city-supported versions as well in the next few weeks.

Please notice something about NYC and Philly's site - they have strong municipal leadership support.

Joey Coleman Citizen