The Lost Well
Thought Recorders for Local Government Officials
RECEIVED Tue., March 8, 2011
Dear Editor,
I just want everyone to know that in my secret laboratory I've been working on a special device that will record politicians' thoughts. It's harmless and easy to install. These new thought recorders will allow us citizens to truly get inside our elected officials' heads. We'll be able to monitor every untoward comment before it even gets into the council members' e-mail or text message. All thoughts will be instantly encoded and streamed live to the Web. The open source code generating the thought stream is based on the RSS 2.0 specification. The thought recorder will provide unfiltered, uncensored raw data for all thoughts created inside every politician’s mind. Categorization of thoughts will be crowdsourced. End users will tag thoughts using a folksonomy system combining both user-generated and predetermined tags. The incredible revelations we've learned so far, such as Mike Martinez's use of the word "jokes" to describe upper echelon city staff and Randi Shade's declaration regarding Robin Rather's sanity level, will pale in comparison to the wealth of knowledge that the thought recorders will unleash. It's estimated these innovative devices have the potential to save a significant amount of taxpayer dollars and staff time by eliminating the need to defend against open records lawsuits. The good news is that the thought recorders have been specially designed to only work on government officials. Average citizens need not worry about prying eyes reading their thought streams.
I just want everyone to know that in my secret laboratory I've been working on a special device that will record politicians' thoughts. It's harmless and easy to install. These new thought recorders will allow us citizens to truly get inside our elected officials' heads. We'll be able to monitor every untoward comment before it even gets into the council members' e-mail or text message. All thoughts will be instantly encoded and streamed live to the Web. The open source code generating the thought stream is based on the RSS 2.0 specification. The thought recorder will provide unfiltered, uncensored raw data for all thoughts created inside every politician’s mind. Categorization of thoughts will be crowdsourced. End users will tag thoughts using a folksonomy system combining both user-generated and predetermined tags. The incredible revelations we've learned so far, such as Mike Martinez's use of the word "jokes" to describe upper echelon city staff and Randi Shade's declaration regarding Robin Rather's sanity level, will pale in comparison to the wealth of knowledge that the thought recorders will unleash. It's estimated these innovative devices have the potential to save a significant amount of taxpayer dollars and staff time by eliminating the need to defend against open records lawsuits. The good news is that the thought recorders have been specially designed to only work on government officials. Average citizens need not worry about prying eyes reading their thought streams.
Stefan Wray
