Re:e-government and our Boston City Council (Score 1)

By sending you a doc file your city is de-facto mandating that you buy MS office.

Or that you download the free Microsoft Word Viewer ;) Better yet, dsaklad or another local techie should contact them and offer to go show them how to save their docs as HTML, which Word has been able to do for years. That way the council can just email a link to the HTML minutes on the city's web site. 'Citizen participation, and all that. City Council members generally aren't elected (or appointed) for their IT skills so they're probably mailing .DOC files out of ignorance, not malice or the Great Micro$oft Conspiracy.