I worked at the State level of government as a senior web services programmer and was tasked with improving upon the paper-based process for posting public meeting notices.
Statute required (and still does) that all notices be posted for display in the Capitol building lobby at least 24 hours before the meeting was to take place. Meeting organizers would fax the notices to our main agency fax line and whoever was currently working the front desk was responsible for collecting and posting the notices.
Unfortunately, the building hosting the fax machine and the capitol lobby were located almost a mile apart. This meant that the front desk staff would have to walk the notices over to the other building several times a day to avoid missing any 24 hour notice requirements.
An ADA accessible touch screen/voice kiosk was setup in the Capitol lobby to display notices and was integrated with the existing intranet CMS system. An electronic form was provided at the kiosk and on our public site for people to request meetings and all submissions and staff approvals in the CMS system were tracked for auditing purposes. System was backed up everyday, and previous requests were archived in an online repository also accessible from the kiosk.
Making sure that government services are available to everyone is a huge consideration when implementing tech based solutions in government. There is the real possibility of a citizen suing state agencies for discrimination due to federal disability discrimination mandates/. For this project it meant that we had to continue to offer the fax and phone submissions regardless of the additional functionality and efficiency the kiosk/cms solution provided. Desk staff had to key the form data received via fax and phone into the CMS by hand.
This was almost 10 years ago and the system is still in operation. Process has been re-evaluated several times since then to fine tune different aspects of accessing the notices and to address system failure points as they were discovered.
An extremely uninteresting project overall, but a great insight into government work-flow in general.
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I worked at the State level of government as a senior web services programmer and was tasked with improving upon the paper-based process for posting public meeting notices. Statute required (and still does) that all notices be posted for display in the Capitol building lobby at least 24 hours before the meeting was to take place. Meeting organizers would fax the notices to our main agency fax line and whoever was currently working the front desk was responsible for collecting and posting the notices. Unfortunately, the building hosting the fax machine and the capitol lobby were located almost a mile apart. This meant that the front desk staff would have to walk the notices over to the other building several times a day to avoid missing any 24 hour notice requirements. An ADA accessible touch screen/voice kiosk was setup in the Capitol lobby to display notices and was integrated with the existing intranet CMS system. An electronic form was provided at the kiosk and on our public site for people to request meetings and all submissions and staff approvals in the CMS system were tracked for auditing purposes. System was backed up everyday, and previous requests were archived in an online repository also accessible from the kiosk. Making sure that government services are available to everyone is a huge consideration when implementing tech based solutions in government. There is the real possibility of a citizen suing state agencies for discrimination due to federal disability discrimination mandates/. For this project it meant that we had to continue to offer the fax and phone submissions regardless of the additional functionality and efficiency the kiosk/cms solution provided. Desk staff had to key the form data received via fax and phone into the CMS by hand. This was almost 10 years ago and the system is still in operation. Process has been re-evaluated several times since then to fine tune different aspects of accessing the notices and to address system failure points as they were discovered. An extremely uninteresting project overall, but a great insight into government work-flow in general.