Wake Up, Local Government, and Supercharge Your (Weak) Web Presence
It’s almost 2010, and everyone is on the internet. Your parents? Check. Your five year old godson? Check. That little coffee shop down the street? Check. Your grandparents? Check.
How about your local government? Check.
Odds are, your municipality has, at best, a minimal presence. But how about a website laden with multimedia: social networking tools, pictures, relevant information, and most importantly, the basic municipal documents that serve as the underpinnings of government functioning?
Probably not, and it’s inexcusable.
We live in a time when website design, publishing, and hosting are all simple. Gone are the days when establishing a web presence cost thousands of dollars, or when a digital presence was not imperative for branding, outreach, and information. Today, anyone with even nominal computer training can launch a comprehensive website, thanks to inexpensive—yet high quality—publishing services.
Just like for a consumer good, proper branding is essential for a municipality, especially one that is hopeful for redevelopment. At a time when foreclosures are rising and downtown businesses are disappearing, it is critical that our local governments establish open lines of communication.
It’s actually really straightforward.
A great municipal website is 1) an information portal and 2) interactive.
An informative website contains not just meetings dates, a trash collection schedule, and a photo of the governing body (all typical), but also the code and master plan, complete meeting minutes (video and/or audio, too), maps, budget, policies, and an up-to-date blog, chronicling happenings throughout the community.
A truly informed community has online access to all of these documents.
While a municipal website serving as an information portal is an obvious tool in serving constituents—yet still lacking all throughout New Jersey—interactivity is not, possibly because conventional wisdom holds that business should still be conducted face-to-face and phone-to-phone, rather than through the internet.
False. The continual employment of an old school communication platform is disservice to internet savvy constituencies.
There will always be a place for personal communication, but in reality, it is inefficient and a resource drain, especially in larger municipalities. Countless services should be online:
- Filing a permit and receiving an approval;
- Reporting broken street lights, potholes, or ongoing suspicious activity by placing a “pin” on an interactive map;
- Communicating with municipal representatives via Twitter and Facebook;
- Streaming municipal meetings live via an outlet with a chat function, allowing viewers to discuss issues in real-time and pose questions to the municipal representatives;
- And, holding quarterly virtual town hall meetings.
These services are all easy and cheap to implement—even for a small municipality that may have financial issues.
Of course, with today’s ubiquitous and low-cost technology, there are countless examples of open government functioning, all of which dovetail nicely with President Obama’s transparency mandate.
So why are so many New Jersey municipal websites stuck in 1995, a time when the nascent internet was still inaccessible to the masses?
There is truly no good explanation.
Perhaps the legislature should pass a bill that requires municipalities to establish a web presence with at least some informational and interactive features? In theory, it’s a novel idea and seemingly a no-brainer, but in practice, it’s a potential political mine field.
New Jersey is a home rule state, meaning that the 566 local governments wield an enormous amount of self-governing power, so mandating open government compliance mechanisms is quite difficult. Everything is very political, so power struggles over such an issue (when soaring property taxes and unemployment are the issues du jour) are potentially inefficient and could alienate voters. Moreover, to some municipalities, open government is a dirty word, because it hinders power consolidation.
However, an informative and interactive municipal web presence—something so obvious in 2009—should not be a political issue. Rather, it’s a civic issue and actually quite elementary—something called “government serving the people,” a concept that we learned about in grade school.
My argument may seem so obvious. That’s true, and that’s the irony of the situation. It is obvious, but the actual implementation is so rare.
Get with the times, and empower the citizens.
It’s well overdue.
Once again, San Francisco’s City is Conducting the Innovation Train
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