Brian Sweeting

Yesterday I saw some workers digging a trench about a block west of where I live. The trucks had an “Atlantic Engineering” sign on the side. I remembered hearing something about Atlantic Engineering being the company that was working with the City of Provo to install fiber for the iProvo project, a municipal broadband project offering FTTH (Fiber To The Home).

So this morning I called up Mstar, one of the service providers for iProvo (as well as Utopia). I was elated to hear that my area was now built out and ready for service. I set up an appointment to get iProvo internet and cable television, bundled together for $79. I also tried getting the VOIP telephone service, but the provider Veracity seems to be having some issues, so Mstar is not taking orders for that yet.

This marks the beginning of the end of my relationship with Qwest. My DSL speed is currently “up to” 3Mb down and 1.5 up. With iProvo, I will have a 10Mb connection up and down. This is going to be sweet. I’ll blogging more about my experience with my fiber connection, and other services as I get them. Installation is set for Monday, September 19th.

We recently launched a new website for Saratoga Springs, Utah. Their old website was badly in need of an overhaul. Each page was made up of sliced images and they were editing it with Corel Draw! Their old site’s home page was around 200K.

The new website is to promote their new identity (not designed by us), as well as the views and everything else that Saratoga Springs has to offer it’s current and potential citizens. The site is now valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and uses CSS for layout. The site uses RSS for News and RSS plus .ics for Events.

Saratoga Springs now has a strong foundation for adding more web services to its citizens. The first of them, Online Bill Payment, should be available very soon.

The site was designed by Jared Hahne and implemented by myself for our employer Eli Kirk (formerly Xponential).

I am a resident of Payson City and tonight I decided to attend the City Council meeting. The first thing I did is to check the city website for an agenda to see if there was anything I might be interested in. No luck. So then I decide that I’ll just go check the meeting out anyway, since I have not attended a CC meeting since I’ve lived here. Now wait a minute…what time does the meeting start? A quick check of the city’s website again leaves me in need of information. So I call the city offices to find out what time the meeting is. I must have called about 6 times within 20 minutes each time getting a message telling me they were “receiving a high volume of calls” and to “please call back later”. “Hmm”, I thought, “must be getting tons of calls from people who can’t get information from the website.”

I have been in talks with Payson City before about working on their website, but either the budget isn’t available or in other cases they say they have found someone to work on it for free. But it is my opinion that they would be serving the citizens 100 times better even if they resorted to setting up a $4.95 per month TypePad account and just having city employees post information in blog format. This may not be ideal, but at least there would be a way for the information to get online.

Looking at Payson’s current website leaves me feeling like I’ve been magically whisked away to 1994. On second thought, it’s worse, because even in 1994 websites had content.

Phil Windley gives the Salt Lake County Recorders Office website an “F” grade for accessibility. Apparently the site requires all visitors to use Internet Explorer 5.5 and up. The site doesn’t try to be nice about it by saying the all so common “This site is best viewed with [insert browser name here].” It just redirects you to a page that directs you to download IE. I think it is pretty absurd to assume that owho wants to use your website will not only download a new browser to do so, but also switch operating systems as well, since IE 5.5+ is only available to Microsoft Windows users.

Other than a dhtml top navigation menu, I can’t see what would warrant such a decision. Now if that was the deciding factor, I could recommend at least a hundred different cross-browser compatible dhtml menu scripts they could use. If more government agencies would pay more attention to web standards and less attention to whizbang menus or other non-cross browser code, they could make their sites more accessible, not only to multiple browsers and platforms, but also to multiple devices including PDA’s and screen readers for the disabled. But they feel like they are depriving their users of some invaluable experience that can only be supplied by IE.

Today Phil Windley mentioned an article in Governing about sharing code and data across agencies. It seems like the problem these agencies are finding is that customization of these applications, to make them work in their own environment, is not taking much less time than it would to create the application from scratch.

I think it is up to those defining the direction of enterprise architecture to create policies regarding application development in order to make application sharing easier to implement. Government organizations cannot afford to build applications that are tied to specific backends or that are difficult to customize or integrate.

I agree with Phil that embracing open source software is important to eGov, but wouldn’t it also be great to require that all logic behind future eGov apps must be built so they can be consumed as a web service? I don’t think this would take much more time to do as long as the application was well thought out and then developed correctly.

That is definetely no small undertaking, but in the meantime, developers could, at the very least, use abstraction where ever possible so their code is not tied to a specific data source.

OpenSector.org, a repository of public sector open source news and initiatives from around the world picked up my post Banding Together for eGovernment”.

The site was given start-up assistance from OSAF and annouced at OSCON 2003 by Mitch Kapor.

Here is an article in the Daily Herald talking about what Utah County and the cities within it are doing with eGovernment.

Utopia is “a Utah interlocal agreement agency (17 founding cities) dedicated to accelerating economic development and quality of life for its citizens and businesses by deploying a publicly owned advanced telecommunications network over the last mile to all homes and businesses within member communities.”

I think Utopia is a great idea…individual agencies banding together, to build for its members, something that would be too costly for any single member to build on their own. It will result in first-class telecommunications infrastructure for its member communities as well as creating an economic opportunity companies in markets such as service providers (ISP, VoIP, cable television, VOD, etc), network electronics (switches, routers, etc.), network operations, physical plant construction and maintenance, and engineering.

I don’t believe this type of cooperation need be limited to telecommuncations infrastructure only. What about a similar agreement for providing an eGovernment services infrastructure that can be developed for the group as a whole and utilized by each one of its members. It is often said that local governments are slow to move when it comes to providing eGovernment services, and I believe the main reason for this is high cost and lack of understanding and resources. But if you can develop these services in an ASP (application service provider) model where they can be centralized, the cost and complexity is reduced dramatically.

Usually local governments have similar requirements to be met by an application. For example, multiple cities could use a single application for utility payments. Although there may be minor differences in the way it is implemented and in the presentation layer, the logic is essentially the same. (See a previous post on this concept.) I picture these applications being developed as a set of web services APIs similar to models used by Amazon and Google. This way we build open applications that can be interfaced using SOAP. This would better support the member organizations’ existing infrastructure and is completely scalable by extending the API.

Local governments have two choices when it comes to providing eGovernment services: 1) Develop it in-house or 2) Outsource it. Both choices are very costly. My proposal is choice number 3) Found an “interlocal agreement agency dedicated to decreasing the costs of taxpayers and increasing quality of service for its citizens and businesses by deploying publicly owned advanced eGovernment services to all residents and businesses within member communities.” Sound familiar?

For all those reading this who are involved with eGovernment, please share your comments by clicking the link below or send me an email..

Here is a series of articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) about using opensource software in State and Local Government. Here is a quote from the third article:

Not only can state and local governments benefit from free software, but they can also benefit from a community of developers who are creating “pluggable” applications that can be integrated easily and modified if necessary.

I see the following as the necessary combination of components for state and local governments to base their web infrastructure on:

• A content management system that allows non-technical users to update content on the website. Ideally, this would use existing directory infrastructure (i.e. eDirectory, LDAP, ActiveDirectory) to manage users and security.
• eGovernment Apps (built on an open API) that would allow sharing of these components and could be easily integrated and modified to meet each organizations’ individual needs.
• A user-centric portal system for providing personalized services to various roles: such as government employees, citizens, other government agencies, suppliers & vendors.
• Platform agnostic. (able to run on Windows, Linux, Mac, Solaris…whatever!)
• Datasource agnostic. (meaning that it uses abstraction to connect to any datasource whether it is Oracle, MySQL, or LDAP)
• Also the sytem must be scalable (both forward and backward), meaning that it could support a large government organization at the state level as well as being able to adapt to the smallest of local governments.

Now if I could find an opensource system that meets all of these qualifications, I would be one happy camper!

From reading Dave Fletcher’s weblog, I see that part of the new Utah.gov portal launch includes the incorporation of RSS feeds for news. Just for fun, I thought I’d see if the RSS feeds would validate and unfortunately 2 of 3 failed to validate

• Utah Headlines RSS validation results (valid)
• Governor’s News RSS validation results (invalid)
• Business Portal RSS validation results (invalid)

Now I understand that these are new feeds and there are always bugs to work out, but hopefully the necessary steps will be taken to ensure that these new RSS feeds are valid.

On a side note, I also checked the Spanish Fork RSS feeds and they were not valid due to a change I made a couple of days ago by adding a dublin core (dc) date without specifying the appropriate namespaces. I have fixed this problem and both the news and events feeds are now valid.