The City of Toronto's website is a perfect metaphor for city hall itself: anyone who, as a result of experience and education, knows what they're doing can move deftly to locate and seize upon the information and resources they need. Otherwise, you're left banging your head against the wall of an unresponsive bureaucracy and largely indifferent political system, as you try to negotiate yourself past the spin and on to the hard facts.

Also true of both the online and offline city halls, learning the tricks and shortcuts is much easier than you'd think; the City of Toronto takes pains to make itself open and transparent, and the fact that it isn't usually has more to do with its own cluelessness regarding how best to go about that rather than a deliberate effort to shut the public out (although there are indeed times when the latter is true).

Case in point: until recently, the default item on the pull-down menu under the “Accessing City Hall” column on the city's homepage was “Agendas,” providing a quick and easy entry point for citizens wanting to learn what was, is being, or is about to be dealt with by City Council. But when someone decided to include a link to a page on Statutory Accountability Requirements (the Lobbyist Registry, Integrity Commissioner, and other essential offices and mechanisms required by the City of Toronto Act), it bumped down the “Agendas” option, such that it might as well not even be on the front page.  It's poor web design, simple as that, and serves as an example of how the city's website, in its own way, is almost as haphazard and accidental as the TTC's.

But some advances in accessibility (“accessibility” being used in the broad, almost philosophical sense, rather than in the sense of overcoming practical physical barriers) have taken place, involving the convergence of the electronic and corporeal manifestations of city hall, to the benefit of both.

The Meeting Monitor initiative, originally launched in 2005 and gradually refined and improved since, has very recently been expanded to include meetings of City Council.  Originally tracking only community council and standing committee meetings, Meeting Monitor provides real-time updates that show the progress through an agenda, including the number and name of the current item being discussed, whether items already discussed have been adopted, amended, referred, or deferred, and which items are being held for debate and by which member of Council. Not only can this be accessed online, but last year the clerks set up a computer monitor on the desk by the east entrance of City Hall's Committee Room #1 so that anyone, upon entering the room, could quickly learn where in the agenda the committee was; this later evolved into a much larger, wall-mounted LCD screen.  Instead of the live TV and web broadcasts of Council being graced with a lower third communicating the current agenda item, there is now a statement that in order to follow the progress of the meeting, one should simply head to www.toronto.ca/meetingmonitor, which effectively saves much stumbling through PDFs of the convoluted “green sheets” (order papers) that are out of date moments after a day's proceedings actually get underway.

At its best, the Meeting Monitor, like City Idol, is a kind of political karaoke: it allows you to not only follow along but prompts you to the right words by linking you to the reports up for discussion, giving you an opportunity to form an educated opinion before belting out your own take. But the city's website is sort of like that; it's a backgrounder to life in Toronto, serving up reports and databases that touch on many elements of democracy and city living.  You can read about building permit applications and Municipal Licensing and Standards investigations, check your property line, view the last two years of health inspection records for every restaurant, learn whether a child care centre has any serious problems, discover which lobbyists and business interests want to talk to which councillors and staffers and about what, and find out why certain councillors may be more inclined to listen to those interests than others.  

The tools and ammunition for all sorts of advocacy and activism are readily available to those with the courage to dig.  Digging shouldn't be necessary, of course, but the first step to changing city hall is burrowing your way inside of it.

Jonathan Goldsbie, a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee, writes on politics and public space for Toronto Notes every week. Email Jonathan@publicspace.ca.