Going Paperless (More or Less)
It's been about a year since City Council decided to move to iPads, rather than having council agendas on paper. This was an idea put forward by administration, with the proposed benefit being that staff time and paper, and thus money, would be saved. The city bought twenty-two iPads, nine for members of council, the remainder for staff.
As with most changes, things have not worked out quite as smoothly as hoped. There is less paper being used, although I wouldn't use the term paperless to describe things yet. Last minute items are still hand-delivered to our homes, on paper, although not as regularly as before. We still occasionally get last minute reports, on paper, on our desks right before a meeting. If we had hoped to be able to reduce the number of staff because of reduced photocopying needs, that hasn't happened.
We are using less paper. The agenda for tomorrow's Executive Meeting, for example, is more than 300 pages, so when you multiply that by the number of members of council and all the administrative staff who come to meetings, times 20 or so meetings a year, that's a lot of paper that the city hasn't had to buy. (I don't use the argument that we've saved lots of trees – trees are a renewable resource, and paper is recyclable, and most foresters, including the one I'm married to, get frustrated by that claim, particularly since the pulp mill closed.)
Moving through 300 pages of an agenda on a screen isn't as easy as flipping through a paper document though. While you can highlight crucial points on the screen, bookmark stuff to go back to, and write notes in little balloons, I still prefer using a marker, and writing marginal notes the old-fashioned way. A sign of age, I suppose.