9. EXAMPLES IN COMMUNITY NETWORK PUBLISHING: CITY DEPARTMENTS AND COMMUNITY SERVICES DIRECTORY

9.1 City Departments

Creating an initial Web site for a City department is relatively easy; however, continued maintenance and support require strategy and dedication. Working with municipal entities requires patience. Each department has its own culture and politics to deal with. Community network staff need to remain sensitive to the needs and concerns of the partners. It's taken BCN a long time to work out a comfortable relationship based on familiarity and understanding.

As mentioned earlier, the City departments have several kinds of information they provide to BCN. Most of it is periodical in nature, and we receive e-mail attachments from various departments several times per week. In some cases the documents come in clusters of four to five. One student working part-time is dedicated to uploading, putting the text in html, maintaining the directories, and all appropriate links. City Council agendas frequently contain 20-25 links to other lengthy html files (http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/boulder_city/city_council/agendas/la test.html). The agendas can be very time consuming to format correctly and post in ample time for public review before the meeting. At 20 hours per week, it is a difficult job to get all documents posted in the scheduled time. Our student staffer currently does all authoring using a variety of tools that claim to simplify the task of formatting in html. The bottom line is that the process is time consuming and in some cases awkward. The following URL discusses some useful tools (http://bcn.boulder.co.us/bcn/training/author.html).

While we continue to do much of the extensive authoring required by the City documents manually, BCN developing tools that will offer far more advanced capabilities than the shareware and freeware currently being employed. The following description outlines the plan we are following for its use. Our product is designed to take the file, which has been stored in rich text format (rtf) or Word Perfect, translate it into html and then place it in the appropriate directory. We have created a standardization document that describes a process for City departments to follow (http://bcn.boulder.co.us/bcn/training/standardization.html). The document explains how city departments should consider their collection of documents.

9.2 Automation of Uploading Process

We are still in the process of developing the automation process. The following steps will be required once the tools are in place. These steps help us work with our information providers to organize and standardize the presentation of their material.

1. The first step in applying the tool is to identify all documents types that will originate from various departments. Each document type should follow a consistent format each time it is sent to BCN. For example, news briefs will always be in the following format.

March 30, 1995

Contact: Kelvin McNeill

Media Relations / (303)441-3090

(303)441-3851 (#4060) 24 Hour Paging

PRESCRIBED BURN PLANNED FOR CHAUTAUQUA MEADOW IN BOULDER

A prescribed burn of 2.6 acres of Chautauqua Meadow near 9th and Baseline in Boulder is being planned during the month of April. The City of Boulder Mountain Parks Division will coordinate the prescribed burn which is designed to restore fire as a natural, yet controlled, process in the management of a grassland area that has been heavily impacted by recreational use.

3. Each time a news brief from the City of Boulder arrives via e-mail to BCN, the script will be referenced by the automation software, and the appropriate formatting will be applied.

For this scripting tool to work, the information provider must agree to stick to the original guideline for text layout. If the layout should change, BCN staff must be notified and the script will be rewritten. The information provider must also agree to an established naming convention for the files they are uploading. Newsbriefs will always with the following header information.

To : incoming@bcn.boulder.co.us
Cc :
Attchmnt: 1. cbnb0412
Subject: Boulder News Briefs
----- Message Text -----

cbnb=City of Boulder News Briefs
04=month
12=date of publication

cbnb0412=City of Boulder News Briefs for April 12th

1. Secure executive support from the beginning of the relationship with any municipal body. A series of well-orchestrated workshops for top management supplemented with handouts for their staff assures a sense of security on their part. Without the support from top level management, the project is doomed to miscommunication and misunderstanding.

2. Never assume that people understand what they are getting into when they say, "we want to put our department on the Web using your community network." Unless that City department already has someone employed who thoroughly understands the Web, html, and basic UNIX, I can guarantee that the community network staff will be overwhelmed with demands and misunderstandings.

3. Hold regularly scheduled demos and workshops for "points of contact," or representatives within the various organization. Take them to various sites and explain what they are seeing in very basic terms. Everyone wants to appear knowledgeable, even if they are totally confused. It's easy to mistake a nodding head in an audience for understanding, when it's really just a nervous reaction to what they are hearing.

4. A streamlined process and schedule for uploads to the server need to be established and maintained. The schedule of incoming files should be verified with an exchange of e-mail.

5. Be sure to understand your partner's technological environment. If the partner does have e-mail, does it allow for attachments of great size? The City of Boulder has recently re-engineered its system so that anyone can send directly to BCN. Up until now, the process has been very complicated and prone to failure.