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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?"
At least 3 days before the meetings. Also committee agendas.
Online forms for bad street and traffic lights, sprinklers, etc with followup tracking.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Slashdot had a recent post about neighborhood/zip based resources, but this is another great place to house them. Neighbors could exchange ideas/strategies for accomplishing regional specific things like commuting paths, best places to get a cup-of-joe, etc.. It would also be nice to have blogging by gov't officials, to get a sense that the person is actually thinking about the job, and the issues they are employed to solve between public elections.
I'd ideally like to also have a list of all ongoing road construction projects, estimated completion dates, as well as current progress (updated daily/weekly).
The pulic library system is likely not something you can directly influence, already having their own inter-library loan system, etc, but arrangements with them perhaps to crosslink with your resources.
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.
There are many times a few things would be handy, especially for people new to town:
That's just stuff off the top of my head that I would like to see myself.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
How about an online service that pulls data from traffic sensors?
The Puget Sound area has great traffic info online through WSDOT.
If you're in the IT dept, you'll probably have to coordinate with other departments, but this is a really useful app.
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
here's a link to the map they provide Christchurch map It's the first result for a google search of "christchurch map" which makes it easy to find.
Milwaukee was one of the first cities to embrace GIS with any seriousness, and it shows. Their Map Milwaukee interface is quite practical, and quite cool:
/instead of in person/ that would make it cheaper. Applications, questions, answers, information lookup, and all that.
http://www.milwaukee.gov/gis
The real question is, not what services can you provide over the web, but what services can you provide over the web
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.
That's just the publicly funded stuff, not counting free classifieds and job listings, home schooling, community access television (publically created, not just publically viewed) etc. We've got more stuff online than most cities I've seen even of a much larger and more affluent scale around the US. My hat's off to any city that has any of this; they're doing more good than they know.
The Virginia DMV site is excellent (http://www.dmv.state.va.us). Since VA has about 250 license plates (no exaggeration!), you can order them all online, including a preview of personalized plates. Also, license renewals, car registrations, tax payments, etc. can all be accomplished online (in firefox!) without trouble.
This is critical for us, because the wait at the DMV is usually 4-6 hours, even when you get there before opening.
The overall VA DOT site also has good info line which direction the HOV (express/commuter) lanes are going at any given time, and that info is in a fairly plain-html format that comes in handy when you want to load that information on a handheld.
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.
Look into the transit system, there's probably some cool projects to do there. At my City, the transit system has an online application that will determine bus routes for you. Everytime I use it, I think "man, this would have been the coolest project to work on." And it's a really useful app too!
If you want to see it, www.winnipegtransit.com, it's called "Navigo"
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 &
One would be time tables for commuter transport or, better, a route planner showing which buses and trains will get you from one address to another.
Another, would be to show parking lot status. This might be harder politically, if the city has balkanized its parking managment. But the idea would be to have information about how many empty spaces are left in each lot. Some cities, again like Copenhagen, have real time displays at key intersections so that drivers don't waste time, money and fuel while hunting for parking. Furthermore, getting cars off the road decreases the severity of traffic jams and reduces the number of cars idling in gridlock thus reducing photochemical smog and improving health ($$$) and quality of life.
You could take either one of the above a step or two further and offer an SMS service where, once a day at a time chosen by the subscriber, a message regarding the delay status of a certain route or the parking lot status be sent.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.