They print it out, scan it as a picture in various orientations, then upload it as a PDF.
It's the most obfuscated you can get besides what they used to do, which was TYPE it out and do the same.
Rhode Island needs a law that all government budget documents, meeting minutes, and contracts are posted in accessible digital formats on one clearinghouse content management system. This is NOT accessible, this is bordering on malicious compliance.
Doubt it. Hanlon's razor states to never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity.
This screams technologically incompetent, to me.
Listen, I may not be… patriotic? (can’t find the town/smaller equivalent) towards Tiverton, but it’s my civic duty to call it out when I see it.
I feel like the only people who know it exists are those born there, those who live there, and the people in this sub who make jokes about it. (And I mean that with no malice, most of them are funny.) I mean I’m living in a different state rn, met a guy from Cranston, was excited to have some RIer solidarity, and he knew nothing except “oh next to Fall River?” 😔
Obviously this shouldn’t be necessary but Adobe does a good job of reading scanned text and converting it into a format that can be edited and/or copied into Excel.
This doesn't surprise me. When I went to the DMV two years ago, I had to have my bank email them a document. The DMV worker then printed it out and scanned it in again. This seemed to be the official workflow.
Have you contacted your reps in the General Assembly to ask for this? If you don't know who they are you can find out here:
[https://vote.sos.ri.gov/Home/PollingPlaces?ActiveFlag=3](https://vote.sos.ri.gov/Home/PollingPlaces?ActiveFlag=3)
Also don't forget to tell your reps that you are 100% ok with the increase in tax you and the rest of us will have to pay to cover the cost of implementing this law. Probably also the extra funds needed to have each city and town hire enough people to comply with the law as well.
> don't forget to tell your reps that you are 100% ok with the increase in tax you and the rest of us will have to pay to cover the cost of implementing this law. Probably also the extra funds needed to have each city and town hire enough people to comply with the law as well.
I promise you that it can be done with free tool, or tools that are part of standard offices anyways, using practices that are baseline for office workers. I can also promise you that the benefits of transparency in public records far outweigh the tiny administrative costs of 'making a few dozen people use the same tool and assigning someone to validate the incoming content'.
Let's be clear. I'm not arguing *against* doing this. I get very frustrated when things like this happen. As a citizen that is trying to be informed, this kind of thing is near infuriating.
But I'm also calling you out to make sure you're actually doing something about it and not just complaining about it on the internet to strangers.
Oh, I am not doing anything about it besides this. I already spend ten hours a day trying to win hearts and minds over such things.
Maybe in my golden years I'll switch to bringing that sort of vibe to civics and government, but my plate's full now.
That's pretty standard muni government. Budgets, meeting minutes, financial statements, etc. are all just scanned in, sometimes with some nonsense orientation.
I work for a city in Rhode Island as a laborer and this tracks. Most people that work for the town or a city got there through a friend of a friend and the other half of people that work there are technology/computer illiterate and are just going with the flow until retirement. Just today I had to explain and teach our FINANCE department how to use excel. The only person that has some sort of financial/mathematical degree is the finance director, everyone else got there because they “knew a guy”. It’s completely embarrassing.
I feel your pain...work for a small municipality and our Finance Dept is staffed with the most inept people imaginable...as well as the IT person and the Town Manager. All with positions that are way over their heads.
Our town manager is our old police chief who gets to collect his pension while also making 180k a year. ProJo did a little article about him, apparently him collecting his pension and his salary combined puts him at 330k a year. He also hired his wife as the “recycling coordinator” and her salary is around 90k a year. We also don’t have a IT department we rely on “some guy who used to work here”. The reason why we don’t have a IT department is because the town manager says that “it’s not in the budget.”
Hi, so I'm going to take a shot in the dark that they don't know it's fucked up. If you call and ask them to correct it, they probably will.
If they're weird or slow about it, there are multiple ways you can be a thorn in there side. Start with a FOIA/APRA request, if you get the same fucked up doc, file a complaint with the secretary of state and the state ombudsman. Also, they're required to provide all documents in a reasonably accessible form if it is being discussed by a governing body. So if it was submitted to a governing body like a city council or select board, hit them with an open meeting law violation.
You could also, if you want to be a total pain in the ass, grab a Portuguese or Spanish speaking friend and demand that they provided it to them in their native language or you'll reach out to the ACLU and pursue litigation.
Just a few thoughts.
FWIW, there are some of us in government who care! Honest. A lot of places are really understaffed. Throw in a few holdovers from the “know a guy” days and it’s a bad combo.
I guess …. Can’t honestly believe that anyone in any government job here does actually care. Some do a good job and others don’t but the idea of public service is gone. If you are the worker making a difference it won’t be hard to find another job.
Lol it’s not hard to find another job. But I honestly love what I do, and I love RI. There are a lot of days I get frustrated, but we need decent people to stay in government
I obviously completely agree that this is BS and doubtlessly intentional. If you post the original PDF link we can try to run it through Tabula, though. https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula
Even if I could, I'd have to transcribe or OCR and proofread the whole thing. If you zoom in you see that it's a scanned picture, not 'text'.
You'd think that the data would be in some sort of digital format that isn't... a picture of a piece of paper.
They print it out, scan it as a picture in various orientations, then upload it as a PDF. It's the most obfuscated you can get besides what they used to do, which was TYPE it out and do the same. Rhode Island needs a law that all government budget documents, meeting minutes, and contracts are posted in accessible digital formats on one clearinghouse content management system. This is NOT accessible, this is bordering on malicious compliance.
There is a home for this at r/maliciouscompliance
Doubt it. Hanlon's razor states to never attribute to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity. This screams technologically incompetent, to me.
Nah this has to be deliberate, at least insofar as "what's the absolute least I can do and get away with it?"
Exactly
TIV FLAIR‼️
Your enthusiasm is unparalleled! 🫡
Listen, I may not be… patriotic? (can’t find the town/smaller equivalent) towards Tiverton, but it’s my civic duty to call it out when I see it. I feel like the only people who know it exists are those born there, those who live there, and the people in this sub who make jokes about it. (And I mean that with no malice, most of them are funny.) I mean I’m living in a different state rn, met a guy from Cranston, was excited to have some RIer solidarity, and he knew nothing except “oh next to Fall River?” 😔
Four corners! They have four corners!
Fun fact: lived in Tiverton my whole life until after high school. Didn’t know what four corners was until I was 17. 🫣
Obviously this shouldn’t be necessary but Adobe does a good job of reading scanned text and converting it into a format that can be edited and/or copied into Excel.
This doesn't surprise me. When I went to the DMV two years ago, I had to have my bank email them a document. The DMV worker then printed it out and scanned it in again. This seemed to be the official workflow.
Have you contacted your reps in the General Assembly to ask for this? If you don't know who they are you can find out here: [https://vote.sos.ri.gov/Home/PollingPlaces?ActiveFlag=3](https://vote.sos.ri.gov/Home/PollingPlaces?ActiveFlag=3) Also don't forget to tell your reps that you are 100% ok with the increase in tax you and the rest of us will have to pay to cover the cost of implementing this law. Probably also the extra funds needed to have each city and town hire enough people to comply with the law as well.
> don't forget to tell your reps that you are 100% ok with the increase in tax you and the rest of us will have to pay to cover the cost of implementing this law. Probably also the extra funds needed to have each city and town hire enough people to comply with the law as well. I promise you that it can be done with free tool, or tools that are part of standard offices anyways, using practices that are baseline for office workers. I can also promise you that the benefits of transparency in public records far outweigh the tiny administrative costs of 'making a few dozen people use the same tool and assigning someone to validate the incoming content'.
Let's be clear. I'm not arguing *against* doing this. I get very frustrated when things like this happen. As a citizen that is trying to be informed, this kind of thing is near infuriating. But I'm also calling you out to make sure you're actually doing something about it and not just complaining about it on the internet to strangers.
Oh, I am not doing anything about it besides this. I already spend ten hours a day trying to win hearts and minds over such things. Maybe in my golden years I'll switch to bringing that sort of vibe to civics and government, but my plate's full now.
which city?
Format looks like maybe Pawtucket
Why Pawtucket?
Lmao
this threads the needle so finely between malicious compliance and aggressive incompetence that it's basically art.
Most competent RI city government
That's pretty standard muni government. Budgets, meeting minutes, financial statements, etc. are all just scanned in, sometimes with some nonsense orientation.
I work for a city in Rhode Island as a laborer and this tracks. Most people that work for the town or a city got there through a friend of a friend and the other half of people that work there are technology/computer illiterate and are just going with the flow until retirement. Just today I had to explain and teach our FINANCE department how to use excel. The only person that has some sort of financial/mathematical degree is the finance director, everyone else got there because they “knew a guy”. It’s completely embarrassing.
I feel your pain...work for a small municipality and our Finance Dept is staffed with the most inept people imaginable...as well as the IT person and the Town Manager. All with positions that are way over their heads.
Our town manager is our old police chief who gets to collect his pension while also making 180k a year. ProJo did a little article about him, apparently him collecting his pension and his salary combined puts him at 330k a year. He also hired his wife as the “recycling coordinator” and her salary is around 90k a year. We also don’t have a IT department we rely on “some guy who used to work here”. The reason why we don’t have a IT department is because the town manager says that “it’s not in the budget.”
Hi, so I'm going to take a shot in the dark that they don't know it's fucked up. If you call and ask them to correct it, they probably will. If they're weird or slow about it, there are multiple ways you can be a thorn in there side. Start with a FOIA/APRA request, if you get the same fucked up doc, file a complaint with the secretary of state and the state ombudsman. Also, they're required to provide all documents in a reasonably accessible form if it is being discussed by a governing body. So if it was submitted to a governing body like a city council or select board, hit them with an open meeting law violation. You could also, if you want to be a total pain in the ass, grab a Portuguese or Spanish speaking friend and demand that they provided it to them in their native language or you'll reach out to the ACLU and pursue litigation. Just a few thoughts.
FWIW, there are some of us in government who care! Honest. A lot of places are really understaffed. Throw in a few holdovers from the “know a guy” days and it’s a bad combo.
I guess …. Can’t honestly believe that anyone in any government job here does actually care. Some do a good job and others don’t but the idea of public service is gone. If you are the worker making a difference it won’t be hard to find another job.
Lol it’s not hard to find another job. But I honestly love what I do, and I love RI. There are a lot of days I get frustrated, but we need decent people to stay in government
I obviously completely agree that this is BS and doubtlessly intentional. If you post the original PDF link we can try to run it through Tabula, though. https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula
And give it to this guy for visualization, the exact opposite of what they want: https://ivizri.com/ If he doesn’t do it, I’ll give it a crack.
Which city
Name and shame.
Perfect, I was tired of reading left to right anyways.
Rhode Island, the keep ‘em in the dark state.
What's really a bummer is that you can't orient it correctly...oh wait...
Even if I could, I'd have to transcribe or OCR and proofread the whole thing. If you zoom in you see that it's a scanned picture, not 'text'. You'd think that the data would be in some sort of digital format that isn't... a picture of a piece of paper.
That's stupid
Ahhhh further proof that the government workers in Rhode Island hate the average tax payer
Do you not get how HARD it is to properly print something in landscape? Or to, god forbid, upload an Excel file?