Good evening,

I’m Glenn Hansen, president of the Faculty Association and Faculty Senate.

Tonight it’s time for my annual request for you to take a step further than is required and open the meetings to everyone by streaming it over the Internet. We have steamed and broadcast the meetings before. We did this until Dr. Breuder and Chairman Wessel ended the practice in 2009. This was after investing in the hardware and software. I ask you to do this again. If I can watch a city council meeting in a small town live, why not our meetings; especially at a time when everyone is still asking what is going on at COD?

Faculty members have been blogging at your meetings for a least a year, volunteers who are dedicated to the open access of information have worked hard to create a live stream of information. Our audience has grown tremendously, at one point crashing our blog site. I find out more about the meeting when read the blog than sitting in the gallery. It’s time for COD to step up and share the video recordings live.

We also endorse some other changes.

Besides streaming, continue to post the videos but don’t delete them after the next recordings are available. Archive them and make them accessible through the COD website indefinitely.

Last week there was discussion about closed meeting recordings. I wrote that they should not be available because of personnel issues, just as was advised by your attorneys. However, I did also suggest that the past years of verbatim meeting minutes should be turned over to the Attorney General. We don’t care how people talked to each other, but we would like to know if the discussion of Dr. Breuder’s retirement gift was appropriate and whether anyone saw the phantom contract extensions.

And lastly, we ask that the verbatim minutes not be destroyed, ever. Digital recordings take little space, a few pennies of hard drive or disk space, and therefore should be archived indefinitely. They are a part of our history.

I hope you accept these requests in the spirit they are offered. To move forward we have to make the extra efforts to be more than open.

Thank you.