Municipal website, Community website, or both The City of St. Louis Community Information Network ht

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Municipal website, Community website, or both?
The City of St. Louis Community Information
Networkhttp//stlouis.missouri.org

• Sonya Pelli, Manager Internet Services,
• City of St. Louis ITSA
• City of St. Louis, Missouri
• March 2006

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CIN Timeline
funding
milestones

• WWW and Enterprise Community Grant
• First CIN website is live
• MIT, WU, Coro Fellows
• Neighborhood web pages, community dial-up
  services, and not-for-profit web hosting
  
• Focus on Government content
• CIN becomes official website for City of St.
  Louis
  
• CIN operations integrated in new City IT Agency
• Efforts to merge systems conflicts with
  Community-based services
  
• Next Generation web presence

1994
Grants Enterprise Community Missouri Express C
orporation for Public Broadcasting
OJJP Ounce of Prevention
EPA CERP
1995
1997
1998
1999
2003
2005
2006
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Original Philosophy

• Community centric information
• Public participation/involvement features
• Capacity building, promoting early adoption of
  web
  
• Dial-up
• HTML training
• Free web hosting
• Privacy statements
• Accessibility
• Early Portal approach
• Ease of access to government data (dynamic
  content generation)

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The Early Years Citizen and Government Outreach
and Support

• Community
• Neighborhood Web Fairs
• Neighborhood Web Site Coordinators
• ISP Services
• E-lists
• News Archives and other databases access
• HTML Classes as a way to community content
• Government
• Same outreach as community, hosting, HTML
  classes, etc.
  

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CIN Then and NowEarly Adoption of Portal Approach
CIN in 2006
CIN in 1997
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Funding issues

• Outside grants and inter-departmental
  collaboration primarily funded all of CIN from
  1995-2003
  
• Pros creativity, interesting collaborations,
  fastest implementation
  
• Cons fiscal insecurity, staff morale issues,
  difficulty to implement a coordinated web
  strategy
  
• General revenue assumed full funding as of
  January 2004
  
• Pros basic fiscal needs addressed
• Cons more red tape, difficulty pursuing grants,
  creativity and out-of-the box thinking
  constrained, more political,
  

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Examples of Internet-Based Mapping made possible
through outside grant funds

• Map Data Portal. The Maps Data section of
  the Community Information Network (CIN) web site,
  serves as an interactive website that assembles
  and maps census 2000 data that can be used in
  neighborhood research by residents, community
  leaders, businesses and government. Users can
  map data by a City address or by selected
  geography and display census variables, point
  data, and geographic boundaries.
• Web address - l/

GeoStlouis. This is a prototype developed by
staff of the Planning Urban Design Agency.
Users can obtain parcel based information
available from disparate sources and tie the data
to on-line mapping. This system will be most
useful once a data integration effort is
completed. Web address - org/citydata/
Community Environmental Resource System (CERP).
This project was a joint initiative with the
East-West Gateway Coordinating Council to develop
an environmental monitoring on-line mapping
system. Maps and data for vacant buildings,
lead, illegal dumping, and brownfields are
available for the City of St. Louis and the City
of East St. Louis. Web address -issouri.org/cerp/data.cfm
Map St. Louis History. This is also known as
the Mound City of the Mississippi web site.
This is a joint effort with the Planning and
Urban Design Agencys Cultural Resources Office
and Research Division. The site chronicles the
history of St. Louis back from the 1700s to
present times. Users can use the interactive map
to located historic assets. Web address - //stlcin.missouri.org/history/beta1a/
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Frequently Mentioned Cities

• Albuquerque
• http//www.cabq.gov/
• Minneapolis
• http//www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/
• New York City
• http//www.nyc.gov

Phoenix, AZ http//phoenix.gov/ San Diego ht
tp//www.sandiego.gov Seattle http//www.seatt
le.gov/


Source Center for Digital Government, Best of
the Web competition
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Ongoing Issues

• Municipal website vs. community network
• Interface design
• Standards (design, metadata, taxonomy)
• Usability
• Interoperability
• Evolving best practices
• Educating up
• Fine Balance between internal staff and hired
  consultants

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The Importance of Standards

• W3C Standards
• Accessibility - http//www.w3.org/WAI/ and
  http//www.section508.gov/
  
• Design - http//www.w3.org/MarkUp/
• Mobile - http//www.w3.org/Mobile/
• Interoperability for government
• Fed Gov Standards Guidelines http//www.xml.gov/
  and http//xml.gov/standards.asp
  
• Dublin Core Metadata Standard http//dublincore.or
  g/
  
• UK Example Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary
  http//www.esd.org.uk/standards/ipsv/
  

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Standards, cont

• Why it matters?
• Good public policy standards facilitate the
  finding, sharing and management of information
  
• Pragmatic increasingly a criteria for funding
• Efficiency ability to share data
  (inter-departmental, inter-agency, .)
  
• Liability ADA Compliance
• Clarity when working with consultants

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Example Acquisition of a CMS

• Pitfalls
• Lack of clear direction from the start
• Too many cooks in the kitchen, delegation
  failures
  
• Process shapes and change requirements
• Failure to involve all stakeholders
• Difficulties of conveying complex considerations
  to non-technical decision makers
  
• Personalities can drive the process (one member
  can undo months of work)

• General process
• Business goals strategies
• Budgetary constraints
• Identification/structure of requirements
• RFI select short list
• RFP
• Vendor product evaluation/selection
• Contract and specific scope

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Next Steps for CIN

• Content Management Solution
• Streamline content production and delivery
• Homogeneous look feel
• Interaction with other applications
• End of legacy community services
• Dial-up
• Web hosting for not-for-profits
• Still TBD
• Web hosting for neighborhoods
• E-lists and other value-added services
• Extension of web tools to community (RSS, wikis,
  blogging, etc.
  
• More Community Based Collaborations

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Thank You!

• Contact
• Sonya Pelli
• Manager Internet Services and
• Community Information Network
• City of St. Louis Information Technology Services
  Agency
  
• e pellis_at_stlouiscity.com
• v 314 622-3400 x258
• Web http//stlouis.missouri.org