- Austin City Connection is a top-notch web portal; what has been your role in its development?
As Web Content Manager for the City of Austin, I oversee the general strategic direction of our Web resources, manage the production of new or redesigned departmental or program sites and ensure the City's social networking policy supports our overall communications strategies. I've been working with the City's website since 2006; the accomplishments I am most proud of in that time include a "refreshing" of Austin's homepage (www.cityofaustin.org), the redesign/rearchitecture of the most-used resources on the site and implementation of Austin Notes, a Web-based signup that allows residents to sign up for e-mail updates on the City topics that interest them most. I'm also very proud that we have worked with employees across the entire organization and put the site on track for an overall redesign to be completed in 2011.
- Can you summarize the history of Austin's web portal?
The City's municipal Web portal launched in early 1995 and was one of the nation's first and best. For awhile we really set the bar for what a City website should do. But a lot of City services suffered in the 2002 economic downturn, and it seems like the site really plateaued in quality around that time. We started losing a consistent look and feel, content and design governance went out the window, and we didn't embrace a publishing system or editorial standards that support usability and customer service. We made efforts to make improvements and built a solid team of designers and content specialists, but most of the real improvements we made were to the City's employee intranet - an important improvement but not one that obviously benefited the public. By 2007, the Austin public had made it heard loud and clear they wanted and needed a new municipal website , and Austin City Council Member Lee Leffingwell (now Mayor of Austin) sponsored a council resolution calling for a redesigned site focusing on transparency and open government.
When City Manager Marc Ott came on board in 2008 he didn't hesitate to tackle the issue, and the redesign is a key part of his efforts to make Austin the best managed City in the nation. Our Chief Communications Director Doug Matthews has taken an aggressive leadership role in all the City's communications initiatives including the website. Doug recognized that we had all the pieces for success, we just weren't putting them together correctly. Under his leadership and sponsorship we implemented the improvements I have discussed and got the City Web redesign project (www.austingo.org) back on track. We completed a successful RFP in 2009 that gives us a roadmap to a new, transformative design, a technology recommendation and an overall implementation roadmap. We'll work closely with the City's Chief Information Officer Stephen Elkins to get a new website in place that will support new e-services, mobile applications and open data.
- What are the overarching objectives of Austin's current e-government initiatives?
I think very simply to improve on our success of the last year and deliver a transformative, transparent and transcendent website in 2011 that will serve as a platform for the incredible communication revolution that I anticipate we will see in the next decade. But at the same time we're doing everything we can now to improve user experience and transparency. We're not waiting anymore. We will deliver ongoing improvements to the site up until the day the launch the redesign, and when it's in place we'll find new ways to reach Austinites about City services and initiatives.
- How has citizen feedback influenced the development of Austin's e-government services?
Austin residents are some of the most politically and socially active in the country, and they have had a strong voice in this project throughout. For almost three years we have conducted town halls, online surveys, focus groups and outreach to key stakeholder groups. As we do this online interview, we are engaged in a very successful outreach involving an online discussion forum and social media campaign allowing Austinites to weigh in on the first design and navigation proposals for the new City homepage. (http://speakupaustin.org/austingo)
It's our goal that this outreach continue even after the new site is implemented, probably through the inclusion of comment fields and user ratings on every Web page.
We have also embraced online outreach to get residents involved in the last two budgets our City Manager coordinates. We set up a variety of online resources in the last two years allowing residents to prioritize the budget items and needs they felt were most important, creating a more transparent budget process than any Austin has ever done.
- In what ways has social media (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) allowed you connect more directly and personally with the citizens of Austin?
Social networking has been an incredible benefit to us. We got onboard social media a little later that some government entities but I think when we did, we had a policy framework that supported our strategic communications goals. And we're not interested in just generating masses of followers and fans with no followthrough. We want Web 2.0 tools to support our effort to create leaders in the community who can play an active advisory role in the implementation and improvement of the site. In a very short period of time we have created successful Twitter, Facebook and Youtube resources, and we also have a Flickr account that is becoming more and more popular. We're working directly with Gowalla - a local company - and Foursquare so we can correctly list City assets like Barton Springs, one of Austin's most popular tourist destinations, and possibly even offer incentives through those social media.
- Where do you see e-government heading in the next 2-3 years? Are there any exciting new features or services currently in the works for Austin's web portal?
When the Web first began to be popular, I think there was a real excitement about the interactivity and personal involvement in political and policy issues it offered to the public. While no one can say the Web hasn't changed our lives and the way we as government communicators do their jobs, I don't think we really hit the real promise of the transformative effect of the Web until the last four or five years with the popular acceptance of social media and the explosive popularity of mobile devices and smart phones. Just look at the way the Obama campaign used meetup.com in 2008 and how the Tea Party movement uses social media now. It's only begun.
I suspect in the next several years we will see enormous changes driven by mobile devices and open data. We already have residents who want to report Austin code violations or road issues as they encounter them in realtime, and we're working with 3-1-1 to figure out a way to offer that service. We're seeing more and more public information requests that require data base administrators to write specialized queries to pull the information from a database, so I think it's vital we allow people to create the queries themselves online from open data.
To me the biggest story affecting government communicators right now are the ongoing controversies around Wikileaks. Wikileaks had existed for years and most of the documents on it were very banal and harmless, but for some reason the information was hidden from the public. While it's entirely appropriate for some information to be kept confidential - like medical records, active criminal investigations and e-mails of private citizens - there's very little information that the City of Austin gathers that couldn't or shouldn't be available online as soon as is administratively possible. If people think their government is some information from them, the government may very well see ALL their information leaked out to a world audience. It's my hope that as we transform the look, feel and architecture of Austin's municipal website, we can also transform the way people interact with the data we collect. The second goal is probably as important as the first.