How should town government use the Internet?

This week, a political hand grenade lobbed, feebly, by selectman Brian Chadwick went off. The intended targets are unscathed. But the voters caught a big piece of shrapnel in the neck.

During the selectman’s comments period at a recent Board of Selectman meeting, Brian brought up the fact that there was a small button and a link to YACKon.com on the website for the Town Government Study Committee. (TGSC) The site also contained links to a very long podcast I recorded and put on the web. As part of the agreement with Sarah Oktay, the private webmistress of this particular site (which she maintains for no pay and funds herself) I placed a 15x80 pixel button on the yack home page and allowed her users to access the podcasts and she added the button to YACK and gave YACK credit for allowing the link.

Brian’s beef is that YACKon.com is a private, commercial site that accepts advertising (one ad, out of around ten, is for a political candidate, and hopefully more will soon follow) and that the town site is government-run and not for profit. He claimed, when he first brought it up, that it implied an endorsement on the part of the town of yackon.com.

I spoke to town counsel, Paul DeRensis, about this, and his thought was that the whole problem could be solved by adding a simple line of text to the bottom of the TGSC website: This website, which is privately funded, provides the above link to yackon.com as part of a reciprocal, informational link agreement but it in no way constitutes an endorsement of YACKon.com on the part of the Town of Nantucket.

Brian pushed the issue, ignoring advice of town counsel and got Town Administrator, Libby Gibson involved who made an administrative decision that a commercial link on a town web site was a violation of the town’s unwritten, unpublished and apparently heretofore unknown web policy.

She did not, however, remove the other 22 links to commercial web sites throughout the town’s web pages, including links to all airline carriers, boat lines, bus companies, and several other web sites that make money through advertising, including the link to the I&M. (After I mentioned this, she removed links to the I&M, Nantucket.net, Nantucket Online, and others).

The chair of the TGSC, who is a wonderful and temperate person was not happy about any of this and referred to this as a freedom a speech issue. I’m not nearly as nice. To me, it’s nothing more than political thuggery. In my opinion, this is payback for some criticisms I’ve made of Mr. Chadwick in the past. Nothing more.

Brian overlooks all of the good things that YACKon.com has done for the town including posting town job openings, posting emergency info during storms, providing shellfish and red tide notices free of charge, and aiding the Nantucket Police Department by posting a request for citizen information in connection with a crime. Not to mention a general raising of the awareness of the issues that surround us on this little island.

Brian is forgetting all of that stuff and chooses to single out one business for political and personal reasons.

When my father in law was a younger man he owned a liquor store on Steamboat Wharf, and the owner of a competing liquor store, who was on the Board of Selectmen, used that post to strike out against his business competitor and cause him expense and pain. This is the same thing. Brian is ticked off that yackon.com is growing and becoming influential in the political scene on the island. He’s angry at me for voicing my ongoing disappointment in him as an elected official.

(The disappointment continues. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how Brian can spend so much precious time on such a silly, petty, personal and small-minded endeavor when the community has so many pressing and important issues to face like housing, healthcare, affordability and water quality.)

The thing that irks me most is not the loss of clicks to the YACKon.com site. In all honesty, the number of clicks yackon.com received was fewer than 50 between June 1 and October 1. Not a whole lot. But what really gets me steamed is that some of us seem to be missing the fundamental idea behind this new-fangled world-wide-web thing. That connections are good. That links are a way to offer valuable information. That the more we help the people who live in the town and visit the town to better understand how the whole town government thing works, the better.

Clearly, the town does not know how the web really works or how it could potentially work for us as a community. Either that, or they favor a less informed community over a more informed one. How can I say this? Because when the TGSC originally came to them to establish a web site they said they didn’t have the staff to handle the extra work. Which is why Dr. Oktay built the private site in the first place. C’mon, folks. If I can single-handedly run a web site like yackon.com which receives more than two million page views a year and receives new content daily, in my spare time, surely the town can upload new meeting minutes to a site once a week. This is not brain surgery.

Here are some things I think the town can and should do to make the web more useful for the entire community.

1. Use video conferencing technology to broadcast meetings.
There are nearly a dozen vendors who can supply the technology for the town to broadcast every single meeting. The total cost of the equipment and service would be less than $20K. It would be a simple web-based teleconference set-up using a $70 camera, some microphones and a laptop PC. The meetings could be stored and played back on demand by anyone.

2. Create a town mailing list.
Instead of using the web as a brochure, the town could send out email alerts automatically when new important content was uploaded to the site. These could go out weekly or daily depending upon the popularity. This could also be used for school closings and emergency info.

3. Invite participation.
The Internet is ideal for establishing a dialog. Because it is a mass medium and a larger and larger number of people on Nantucket now have access to a computer, more people can participate in forums, discussions and online polls. Some people may never participate, but they will feel better about their government knowing they can if they wish.

4. More links to more information
It really does not matter where the info is — on a government site, on a commercial site, on a blog or a personal web page or something like YouTube or Wikipedia. If it’s good information, the town should link to it and make themselves the source for good community information. No reason to be proprietary about it.

5. better search features.
The town web site has a lot of stuff on it. That stuff should all be in a database instead of on static html pages. People should be able to call up what they need when they need it instead of having to thumb through pages. The old linear method of web publishing is just that...old. The new method is far more dynamic and customizable.

6. Personalization
Today, it is possible to make a web page your own. On some sites, you can specify what content you want and where and how often you want it updated. The town should make it possible for people to have a “My Nantucket” which contains the info they want most. Their tax info. Headlines on sewer upgrades from external news sources. The latest political posts from yackon.com, and more. By making the town web site customizable, users will be more likely to actually, uh, use it!

Imagine that...

Nantucket First!