Josh Carney
JAMES WOOD
Staff Writer
Director of the Office of Information Technology Josh Carney spoke in an exclusive interview about his involvement with the Bedford County government and how the Board of Commissioners has continued to follow the trend of introducing livestreams and website upgrades to allow for more transparency and accessibility.
Since beginning his job with the county in 2013, Carney, along with the rest of the community, has seen the need for new infrastructure to allow a growing community like Bedford County to access important government information.
“There became a need, especially around COVID, for the government to allow an exception for people to remotely attend meetings.” Carney said.
Even as the pandemic began to subside, the demand for accessibility continued to increase, which led to a series of improvements in the county government.
“It gives anybody, even if somebody doesn’t have a vehicle, the ability to attend a meeting,” Carney said.
He additionally addressed the benefits of archiving meeting information on the internet.
“I learned a long time ago that if you put something on the internet, it doesn’t go away,” Carney said. “I think that there are several things that I feel like are instrumental in that, with one of those being the archival of product.”
He further spoke on the importance of offering more methods of viewing local government public information.
“The more information that’s available and accessible from the public, the more it can be shared,” Carney continued, “I feel like not everybody has always had the same access to information, but with sharing this data online, the public can read it and share it as well.”
The advent of social media and its impact on public discourse was also noted by Carney, particularly on its ability to make information more widely available and to hold local governments accountable to public feedback.
“When you go home for the day, you know that everything you did is accessible through either a live stream or on social media,” Carney said. “It’s my personal philosophy that crowdsourcing information is a great way to make improvements.”
According to Carney, the current goal of the county government is to continue to improve on making a high quality product when releasing important information to the community while making it as easy to access as possible.