The Friday Memo, written by interim Northfield City Administrator Joel Walinski and many of the department directors, managers, and supervisors, summarizes many of the staff activities for the week. Although it’s directed to the mayor and city council, it’s helpful for citizens to see what’s going, too. The Friday memos are published and archived in PDF form at the bottom of Joel Walinski’s web page.
Locally Grown (LoGro) Northfield Posts
If things look like they’ve gone to hell in a handbasket, they have. It’s late Sunday night (10:50 pm) and we’re whacking away at some big changes. Give us till…
For Xmas, I sent one of my sons the book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. I’d seen Beah on The Daily Show a while ago so when I saw the book at Monkey See Monkey Reads while doing my xmas shopping on xmas eve eve, I bought it.
I had already read Bonnie Obremski’s RepJ article a month earlier (Nationwide project soliciting participation from Northfield youth) describing War Kids Relief, a project being run by Northfield/Dennison-based Children’s Culture Connection (CCC). And I’d seen all the photos of the Iraqi kids on the walls of the Hideaway Coffeehouse and Winebar.
A week ago, the Northfield City Council met for a retreat (not AIG style, I’m told) and, among other things, decided to look closely at all areas of public engagement. (See last week’s Nfld News article, New council meets to begin teamwork, setting goals.)
Councilors Erica Zweifel, Jim Pokorney, and Kris Vohs are on the subcommittee to look at public engagement. They are expected report back to the Council in early Feb. with some recommendations.
I met with Erica earlier this week at the Goodbye Blue Monday to better understand the scope of their inquiry and talk a little bit about how online tools might be part of the solution.
Melissa Reeder, Northfield’s Information Technology Department manager, has set a goal to begin uploading streaming videos of the City Council meetings to the Internet in 2010, so long as there is money in the budget for the $8,000-$10,000 upgrade.
With streaming videos, image files flow to a video player on a Web site in a continuous stream and play when they arrive. Before streaming technology, a Web user would have to download an entire file before watching a video, which could take a long time. Reeder referenced Burnsville’s Web site as an example of a nearby community that uses streaming video.
A year ago, Tracy announced that we’d begun using a service called Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) that allows people who add comments here to put a face to their name.
Many of you who regularly comment have already set up your Gravatar. For example, here’s a snapshot of 8 comments attached to the Sweet Lou’s post:
Our guest this week, fittingly so for the first show of the year, was Mary Rossing, the new mayor of Northfield as of Monday evening.
She’s been on the job for dozens of hours but unfortunately, as you’ll hear, has very few accomplishments she can point to. Recall, anyone?
Here’s a Northfield-based business that I didn’t know about until I saw it on the cover of today’s Variety section in the Strib in an article titled Let the de-mess fest begin!
Nancy Aspaas (on the left in the photo of the paper) is professional organizer who has a business called Just Call RoomService.
A reception was held at the State Capitol yesterday afternoon to close out the Sesquicentennial and thank everyone involved. (I blogged a photo album of the event here.) The program included the official sealing of the Sesquicentennial Time Capsule.
Our legislators, Sen. Kevin Dahle and Rep. David Bly, signed a Sesqui banner (I missed the deed) which will evidently be placed in the time capsule, to be opened in 50 years for the State’s bicentennial.