Matt Hampel | matth.org

Mostly a way to prove that I’ve been thinking about this.

Civic records are documents produced by city government. Substitute any public organization for city, if you wish. Documents might be PDFs, or Word documents, or plain text, or excel files, or large-format architectural drawings, or video recordings of meetings, or nearly anything else.

It’s worth thinking about the ways cities can post these things online.

Ann Arbor uses SharePoint. I dislike SharePoint because it’s an expensive, proprietary product that is tied with the Microsoft way of doing business. It has functions (files, wikis, blogging, comments, whatever) that resemble the standards the rest of the world uses. They’re poor approximations.

But the truth is, it works. It integrates with whatever Microsoft file server and authentication and whatnot already exists. Its search can be configured to include the contents of files as well as webpages. Some research has gone into its interface. It’s approachable by City staff familiar with other Microsoft product.

(technical sidenote: SharePoint search does not query its own database; instead, it produces a search index by CRAWLING ITSELF at administrator-defined intervals)

Your Microsoft administrator can probably take some expensive classes and be able to do nearly whatever you want with SharePoint.

That solution maximizes the ease-of-use by City Staff.

The best open option for running a City website that comes to mind is Plone, which is based on the open-source Zope server. It has quite powerful versioning features, and a user interface that is not difficult to master.

What it does require is significant implementation time. The civil servants who will be making it work need to know the language it is written in. They also need to know how to manage a server. Time will need to be spent integrating the city’s login system with whatever the City already uses.

Unlike Drupal, upgrading Plone generally does not break all the work you’ve done before.

That’s immaterial, though, since both are tools in the hands of experienced wielders; the problem being cities don’t have money to hire those folks and if they do they’re busy doing other things.

More thoughts later on architecture. There’s a layer above all this also warrants some thought.

1) Who gets to add and subtract from the website?
2) How do you announce additions and subtractions?
3) Where are documents kept? How?
4) What about public commentary?

1) Who cattle-prods staff into posting stuff to the website? Who decides what kind of information must be posted, and how often?

Maybe you create a central information czar whose job it is to frustrate overworked staff by demanding documents. It becomes part of their annual reviews, have you provided relevant information to the Czar? That won’t go over well.

Or you hope that staff will be conscientious enough to put things up in a timely fashion. This assumes a] that they aren’t overworked (they are), b] that they won’t withhold or delay things that are important to them, c] they know how to use a computer, or d] they feel that they have a public obligation.

2) Announcing new information doesn’t seem so hard. But there are some got some sharp edges once you want to go past the minimum.

Okay, so you make an RSS feed of changes to each collection of information, whatever that may be. And you CMS provides an RSS feed of changes to each individual piece of content. Great.

What about all those folks who don’t know what RSS is? So you set up an automated email system.

Now you’ve got this email thing to code into that Content Management System you’re using. And the vendor isn’t about to add it.

The solution to that is to get a $10,000 Knight News Challenge grant or an equivalent and pay a] someone offshore or b] local programmers and have them do that for you. Then you contribute your addition back to Plone or Drupal or whatever so people can use it (add $5000).

Is that enough? Should you organize people by neighborhood, so they can get info about their neighborhood without having to wade through all the crap about people living 2 miles away? How much extra tagging burden does this add for staff?

Outsource that work. Pay someone in who-knows-where $0.25 a document to add predefined tags that categorize document. Does this violate the fair labor practices part of your city charter?

3) Putting documents somewhere simple is important. But what’s simple? Create a directory by topic (aka budget, planning, …) or organize things by the city org chart? For ex, the cable commission in Ann Arbor is stored in the Community TV section of the website. Does this make sense? Should there be one section on the site just that holds subfolders for each commission, regardless of its affiliation with a city unit?

What do you do with documents when they’re outdated? Do you throw them away? That makes no sense. Move them to some sort of archived position. Maybe you can use your storage system’s revision tracking feature

Stop posting PDFs as scanned files. It makes you look like a luddite if you don’t know how to remove Tracked Changes or combine multiple files into one.

That has the added benefit of making the files searchable, which is something people do with Google, not your website’s useless search engine. Why do you think you can search your own site? You cannot. You do not have an army of Computer Science Ph.Ds. Do not devote resources towards it. Use those resources to make your website searchable by other peoples’ systems.

Let’s say the City budget is this huge PDF. If you want someone to find info in it, what do you do? Do you just say, download the PDF, and go to page 144? Or can you post that PDF in such a way that you can link right into page 144? Should you post the parks section of the budget on the parks section of the website? If you take that latter route, you now have many pieces of the budget that all need to be kept up-to-date.

4) Does it make sense to allow citizens to comment on City documents on the City website? Should people be able to add annotations to that budget? Well, they’d at least need to be clearly marked as separate from the original document. So maybe the official version lives on one part of the site, and another section of the site is devoted to public markup and commentary. You’ll need to take some time to integrate anti-spam features. Or maybe all that’s the role of newspapers, to post those documents in a form that people can use in public discourse.

Coming up when I feel like it:

The difficulty of going past the minimum

legistar and posting documents on line

Also, how creating a system like this is quite possible in receptive communities, and what to think about that.

How long do you need to be embedded in the organization before you have the legitimacy to propose undertaking these features?

The tricky issue of video, and how others have partially solved the problem