Category: Cluetrain (Page 2 of 10)

They approved a budget today, which from what I can tell includes this:

• Redesign county website with a modern easy-to-use look and feel.
• Utilize Web 2.0 technology (example: Twitter) to disseminate information to
public in a timely useful manner.

But, there’s a nuance point to be made here, that in the budget document they still want to “disseminate” rather than “engage” or “exchange.” The real power of Web 2.0 isn’t to get information in front of passive eyes (although the web has great power to do that) its to have a dialogue.

I think it’ll take more than a new website and tools to create a culture of online exchange at the county.

Another line of thought for this longer line of thought. I had the curiosity this morning to look at the county’s website and poke around for food inspection reports. Seems like a pretty basic thing to post online, right? Nope.

Well, that’s not all that surprising, I guess, not everything that is interesting gets posted (see city council packets in Lacey). Kitsap and Pierce counties do.

But, what is really interesting, is this note:

The Health Dept conducts periodic inspections of food establishments to help prevent the spread and reduce the risk of food borne illnesses. Violations are corrected through a combination of education and technical assistance.

Our food service inspection reports are available through The Olympian newspaper or you may request copies of inspections from our office by completing a Request for Public Information Form…

So, I can fill out a form or read it in the Olympian. I’m assuming they email the information to the Olympian and I’m assuming I could email the request form to the county. So why can’t the county post the actual reports online?

This seems like one of the duties that a daily newspaper used to have to serve in a local community, gathering and disseminating essential data collected by the government. Births, deaths, marriages, food safety inspections are all important, but there’s no reason now why they can’t just immediately be posted.

This could have been one long post, but I think three posts (here and here as well) is better.

So, the big reason for the lack of a decent (but lets not confuse that with uninformative) website is governance.

Like most Washington state counties that have not gone through the home rule process, Thurston County is a collection of independent elected officials from three county commissioners to a sheriff and an auditor and more. In the current way things work, each independent office has the job of maintaining their own website. So, what you get is a mishmash.

My understanding of how things are run right now is that a department under the commissioners, central services, provides general web support to most of the county. The independent offices, auditor, sheriff, and the rest, get some technical support, but tend to maintain their sites on their own. Most of the folks that develop and maintain the websites for the independent offices do so on a part time and ad hoc basis. And, when a person who then leaves the county who was maintaining of the sites, but didn’t have that job officially part of their job title, they take that experience away with them.

So, instead of a fully funded web administrator at the middle of all the offices, you have part time web managers throughout the county, each with their own ideas and levels of experience. That they the sites look different doesn’t matter to me, but the redundancy in duties and differing ways the sites are put together matters a lot.

I think the county would actually save money and be able to develop a better overall web presence if they rolled all the web functions into central services. Not saying that the folks in the independent offices who maintain the websites don’t work hard, just saying they work a bit too hard.

Additional thoughts from my post below. From Capitol Hill Seattle:

But the weather wasn’t really the problem. The problem was information. Seattle was hit with a situation that required systems of communication and information distribution that it did not have. The city’s dying newspapers couldn’t keep up and City Hall’s various departments were too busy trying to dig out from underneath the snow and ice to turn to their antiquated systems of information distribution. They couldn’t connect information to the neighborhoods and streets where it was needed.

In emergencies, government agencies need to distribute information quickly. Very, very quickly. Radio stations are still king here and we’re lucky around here to have more than a few that can still get out information quickly because they’re run by people rather than computers.

But, the web is just as important. And, if you don’t have the turn on-a-dime-ability with your current government website, it will hurt you.

Recently I was part of a group that met twice to discuss redesigning Thurston County’s currently horrible website. To put it shortly, the website is a reflection of a lack of technical progress (the pages are still manually built from an html editor) and the disjointed governance of the county.

The website being in the technical backwoods is less troubling to me because the website is actually very informative. The county’s technology manager attended our second meeting and said that getting everything possible on the website had been their first concern. To me, that puts them on good footing for where they need to go next.

And, despite the casual framing of the project as “redesigning” the county’s website, that is the last thing they need to do. Yes, its ugly right and it should be prettier, but not prettier in terms of a slick design. Drastically simple designs like craigslist.org’s or wikipedia’s would get the county where they need to go.

So, I wouldn’t call it a redesign, but rather a restructuring. The first step should be scrapping their current method of updating the website and implementing a Content Management System. Easier, open source solutions are available, but it sidesteps the concept of a “redesign,” which would seem to focus on the aesthetic and drive you toward the usable.

And, just one more thought:

I like RSS feeds a lot. If I could subscribe to a portion or an entire government website, that would be great. I’ve created some Pag2RSS feeds for some parts of the city of Olympia’s website (like city council agendas and planning commission), but an entire government website with RSS tied to it would be great.