Tiny towns and big towns use the web to provide information and services to their residents.
The Town of Tolland is tenth from the bottom in town population in the state, 426 residents. Their website is up to date, informative, and appealing. Tolland's meeting minutes can be found on the website for each board or committee. Content management is through town employee email postings through the software vendor
The Town of Barnstable website has everything from soup to nuts, calendar, requests for quotes, complete financial information and video on demand of every televised board or committee meeting. The content is provided and maintained by the town IT department.
Don't think volunteer efforts can help ...
...provide a website, look at the Town of Gill Here's what the DOR website ion E government says about Gill's website,The Administrative Assistant to the Board of Selectmen “with support and maintenance by a local volunteer staff. We are fortunate to have a web site design firm in Gill, Starstruck Design, who takes care of the hosting and trained me to use the software, Microsoft Frontpage. We also have IT support staff from the Northfield Mount Hermon private school located in Gill on the town IT team that assist with network connections (actually set up and installed the network at Town Hall), email and computer related issues including purchasing etc. The only cost to the town is the annual fee of $100 for hosting the website and of course my time. I spend approximately zero to four hours a week, dependent upon the need for changes to the website. We recently added a recreation page highlighting programs and schedules and hope to add a separate page for library programs and board minutes in the future as well.
With a vision for what is possible and a commitment to make it work, even a town the size of Gill (population 1,620), can post Select Board agendas and minutes on their website
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Town Websites
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16 comments:
Bill, GILL come on it's population is 1379 how many hits do you honestly think they get in a month 5 maybe 10 tops. To be honest with you that website is not much different than what we aready have.
Bill, if you want me to take this seriously you have to do better with examples. 2 towns with miniscule populations and, your favorite, Barnstable with an entire IT department and much higher taxes. Any website worth having will cost some money simple as that. If it's to be updated and kept current for a town this size time will be spent or we might as well stick with what we now have. I'm sorry Bill, but throwing these concepts out there, getting hopes up, and then seeing the examples - there's a disconnect for me. It's one thing to say 'why not do it like this' and actually making it happen. False hopes do noone any good.
The anti-change people are at it again. Don't look at any other way of doing things. Don't look for examples of how other communities do something. Lets just keep saying we can't. It's much easier.
The fact is I am not anti-change. But I want promises to be reality-based and I have looked at each case Bill referenced where they do things 'better' or differently. Throwing up all these ideas as things Dartmouth should be doing are good but it takes more than that to make it happen. Usually a part of the 'more than that' is money. We are now tied up in lawsuits with the EA situation so he's not going to be doing this work, the interim EA guy, Ed, has not been appointed - see above as to the reason - and the SB are part time volunteers. How do we make our government 'E' friendly during all of this? Is it even a priority given all of the other pressing problems we face? What are our priorities? Who sets them? Are we 'adrift' as a recent letter to the paper suggested?
To 7:37,There are no promises. Plain and simple. We know what we are currently doing will not be sustainable, so we need to explore different ways to provide services. We are not going to find a town exactly like Dartmouth to compare (population, form of govt., etc.)
It seems ridiculous to sit around and come up with why we can't do this and that! That is part of our problem! Read the DORs E-government site. There are MANY things that we are not doing that could save us money. Dartmouth needs to come out of the dark ages. Just for example,our minutes should be on the town website. No one will be arguing about how much time the EA has to spend copying paper for residents. Barnstable is an example for Dartmouth. Look at Barnstable's website! We have to start somewhere. If you don't like the examples provided, why don't you look for yourself. No, instead, it's "we can't do this, this gives false hope, too much, no can't do". I applaud the tiny town of GILL, they seem way ahead of Dartmouth in a lot of ways!
agendas and minutes? I do that for the school committee unofficially on my site and its always up to date. I tried Google video of SC meetings but no one watched so I stopped. I dont think a good town site(not great but good) should be such a difficult chore. For example why are there no updates to the fincomm agenda or minutes since April of 2008? If the IT people are as swamped at I believe they are ,perhaps some outsourcing for the town website should be looked at.
I agree with phil. At least we could try! From what I've heard, the IT people are swamped because they are fixing broken PCs. Here we are talking about someone who could maintain the town website with direction from town leaders.
We really should be taking advantage of the website to provide more for our town.
The point is that towns with only a few employees have the resources to have informative, effective websites. They do it because it works. Ms. Dias has said that our employees don't have time to copy minutes for taxpayers. The agendas and minutes are being typed already for distribution on paper. One more step, post them on the web. Result, fewer requests for copies, less work.
The goal should be to have every thing that is typed, then entered into a electronic document management system. Such a system is available from the same company that provides our Munis financial software, Tyler Technologies.
Surely this suggestion will also be met with many reasons that it can't be done. Once more to the naysayers, what are your alternatives? The town will either change our way of doing business or not provide services.
Depts don't have access to put things on the website. Maybe they should. Everything needs to go through computer services.
For your information, a website committee has been working towards creating a better website for out Town. They have been working for the past 6 months and will be presenting there findings to the select board in the near future.
Good to hear.
Hmmm... I wonder why there's nothing on this blog about Diane Gilbert's attack on Kevin Lee.
It is obvious that Kevin Lee wants attention so he can try to save his job. Notice the photo-opt on the front page of the Standard-Times. Oh, poor me, they are attacking me! Sorry Kevin, but you should be ashamed of yourself. Anyway, Youth Advocate has not been funded as far as I know and maybe that's for the best. His job was saved last year because of the override, it has nothing to do with the pictures.
to anon 6:31am, I see the smear campaign against Gilbert is in full swing. Isn't that nice?
No need for a campaign. She does a great job of revealing her true self without the help of others.
The Youth Commission meeting is tuesday night feb. 24th at 6:30pm in room 118 at town hall.
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