CAPo di Tutti CAPi

Craig at Broken Heart does a number on CAPS Beat 2431 today:

Besides, 2431 can't even keep minute notes updated on their lame CAPS site without being hounded to update the community on what's happening. THE FULL PIECE...

I have also been critical of CAPS Beat 2431 (and others), primarily for being out of touch and out of reach.

CAPS 2431 (and most other beat groups) do not share information well, and when they try to it is weeks or months old. It means that CAPS meetings, most anyway, are nothing more that bitch sessions, with the same group of regulars complaining about the same thing, over and over and over, meeting after meeting after meeting, and little or nothing ever seems to come of it. Note: I did not say nothing ever comes of it. Sometimes some good comes out, but not often.

Currently, Jayne Hoffman of 2431 is working on a new way to get minutes up on the web more quickly. Her idea: Convert the minutes to Adobe PDF files and upload them. While this will make them available, it is not the best way to do it. Some people do not have the Adobe reader, and some are not savvy enough to download it. PDFs can take up a lot of memory. PDFs are difficult to copy text from. PDFs, while great for some uses, are not the best alternative.

I've suggested it to CAPS before, I'll suggest it again: The simplest, cheapest way to post the minutes would be to be to type them up on a computer MS Word (something you would do anyway) and then simply copy and paste them into a Blogger blogspot. Voila. In seconds the minutes are up, viewable by anybody, or only by members of that particular blog. You can accept, moderate or reject any comments. It is secure. It is free.

However, the typical academic, bureaucratic elitist attitude we get from CAPS, beat 2341 in particular, is to find the most complicated, slowest and inaccesible method possible. Inertia, indecision and lack of internet savvy rules the day. Like the government.

Related posts: 24th District CAPS: A Failure To Communicate and CAPS Crap