Slashdot Mirror
Municipal Online Services Wishlist?
RaisinBread asks: "I may have an opportunity in the future to work for a decent-sized city. As such, I will likely work there for a short time to see how I fit before taking the job. After speaking to the City Manager about possibilities, he wondered what ideas I might have for potential projects. I have my own ideas, however I'd like to poll Slashdot on the following issue: What is on your wishlist for services you wish your own city would offer online? What existing services do you like or dislike?"
A well crafted portal website for city events, linked news articles relating to happenings, construction notices (why are they tearing such and such street up for example), sex offender registry. A small forum with q&a. People submit questions and city officials answer them. Also, you'll want online feedback forms. Make it easy for people to suggest new ideas, report malfunctions (traffic light, street lights, potholes). Keep track of these things, and possibly publish them for everyone to see (people like transparency in government) Polls could be popular too, but only pick ones that residents would be curious to know the popular opinion on. Like, "Best Park in City", "Best Public Park for Children", "Best Library for Children's Groups", etc.. Just my thoughts...I'd love a resource like that for my city.
Will get you sued. Society can only handle so much truth. I know from personal experience.
Cities do need to do some things. Citywide wireless is not on that list of things. Nor is a health club. Nor...
If you want them, remove the barriers to private companies providing it. Sure it will take a little longer at first, but if the private company does a bad job people can switch. (Unless you stupidly give them a monopoly like most phone and cable companies have) Don't make me pay for your health club even though I get my exercise elsewhere. Don't make me pay for broadband that doesn't meet my needs.
It would be nice to be sent an e-reminder when the street cleaning day is, so that they don't keep towing my car. Plus contruction, street or area relevent to me, etc would be very nice... Like a community newsletter but in more convienient, relevant form, flitered for my personal location.
The ______ Agenda
Consider looking inside the city's information systems. If my experience is any indicator, large decentralized organizations tend to be exceptionally bad at managing the flow of information amongst sub units.
For example, last year, a professor at Ohio State told me that every month he is expected to go over his phone bill (from a university owned provider), then transfer all of the long distance calls onto a separate set of forms. These forms get submitted to the department secretary and from there I don't know where they go. Presumably, they are eventually re-entered into some system by hand. I don't know if the story is true, and it's not something I have to do. However it is the kind of convoluted manual information change I have grown to expect.
So back to my original point... instead of trying to create new services for the public, focus on cleaning up the city's information systems. They are probably a mess and if you are going to build public service sites on top of them, then you should address problems in the foundation before you start.
Besides, people with stable government jobs love it when you make their work much easier.
If you are going to create new services for the public and you are a big city, my vote is for traffic & parking. Create a website you can check on to discover if your car has been towed, pay associated fees, get email reminders for street sweeping dates, etc.
1. public wifi.
Yes, it's not typically in a town's purvue [purview?], but a lot of small towns are doing it.
2. ALL PUBLIC DATA which is available by walking into city hall,
should be available on the web.
My town has web access to assessor's data, but not up-to-date;
yet I CAN get the latest data at an online terminal in city hall.
And last week I asked for a list of all addresses with demolition permits in the last three years. It's not on the web, but they were happy to make me wait three days and pay $26 for them to run one simple SQL query.
Finally, the complete public library catalog, WITHOUT needing a library card just to see the catalog.
Really. Government bureaucracies just aren't an efficient way to provide most services. Most of my dealings with municipalities have been fraught with corruption and incompetence. Please don't do anything more "for" me. Please.
As other posters have mentioned, the ability to report problems, e.g.: potholes, bad traffic signals, but also to request things like a stop sign at intersection X. This should be put into something akin to Bugzilla or RT and the actual follow-up and resolution kept open for review. Requests for new things should be added to council meetings agenda for review.
Any controversial zoning issues (e.g.: strip clubs, major retail development, polluting factories, etc.) be posted for public comment.
Ability to order municipal-specific supplies online (e.g.: lawn waste bags, dump passes, recycling bags).
Log of where all of those _freakin'_ sirens are going -- sometimes a local paper will print a log of emergency calls, but not always. Nicer to link into police/ambulance/fire systems.
Scheduling for public resources, e.g.: pavillion at a town park.
Town calendar featuring both private and public events, integrating the police ball with the memorial day parade with the local high schools homecoming game on one calendar.
Allow the entry of an arbitrary address and get back relevent informaiton, such as school district including which elementary school & bus schedule, tax records, building permits, sale records, neighborhood information -- including things like how much police/criminal activity is in the area, etc. Make it easy to like this with MLS (real estate listing) systems.
Registry of tradespeople (roofers, plumbers, sewer & drain, odd-jobs, etc.) detailing their certifications, licenses, insurance status, and providing a amazon.com-like rating system where you can post your good/bad experience with them.
You wanted ideas --there ya go.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
It is defeintely possible that this job is very well defined, but those doing the hiring know that, as it currently is, it will not take him 40 hours/week. In this case, it is the opposite of what you're saying - they are trying to make sure they get the most for their money.
Or, perhaps he's being hired as their website director. Again, this is hardly "wasting money" just because they ask him what types of projects he sees in the future for the website.
Q&A forum which could also be built into a series of (or single) FAQs and authoritativly answered by the appropriate dept. Also identify the dept. to relieve the main switchboards and give contact info for said dept. in the answer if more info is needed. Answers could be signed by their authors giving your noxious weed dept. a more personable image.
I'm sure every department has a lot of time tied up in repeating themselves with the same question from citizens espeically seasonal questions (lawn watering, licenses, xmas tree disposal or whatever)
Firefox &