The results are in: the best state website in the country belongs to Michigan. So says a study released recently (and which unfortunately costs $250) of state, county, and city websites by the National Policy Research Council and Computerworld Magazine. Here’s a list of all the winners — the only Massachusetts site that made the list was Cambridge’s, which did well among cities with population of 50,001-250,000. And here are some excerpts from the article describing why Michigan won:
At Michigan.gov, citizens can find licensed day-care providers, reserve a campsite, renew licenses and get alerts about road closures delivered to their wireless devices…. Michigan has made nearly 300 online services available on its Web site, and they’re heavily used… Some of Michigan’s newest services include RSS feeds, streaming video of education board meetings and the ability to download the governor’s weekly radio address to iPods, said Mike Shanahan, director of the IT department’s e-Michigan Web development division, which has 15 staffers…. A common theme among governments with top-ranked sites was a penchant for listening to what local citizens and businesses want via online surveys and comment fields. Citizen suggestions led Michigan to make its site bilingual and provide a text-only version for people with disabilities, Hogan said. According to McArthur, one problem with many government Web sites is that they’re organized by department, whereas most users want to accomplish a task – like paying a water bill – without necessarily knowing which department is involved. “The best Web sites offered on the home page a menu of all government services regardless of department,” he said.
Go to it: what do they got that we ain’t got?
That’s what Michigan’s got that we ain’t got.
How ’bout with: Maybe their site links actually work?
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In contrast to my less than satisfying experience when I went browsing the MA site (thanks, David)
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I guess they didn’t release all of the grades, so we cannot see what MA received? Either way, there’s no question that MA’s website could be improved. I cannot stress enough the key thing here:
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This is absolutely true, and is probably a more important insight than everything else mentioned combined (although there are some other good points made as well).
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By the way, the MI website has a link to their grade in the survey, under the headline: “Michigan Web Site Receives Only an A+”. Is this a little sarcastic bragging (i.e. “we received only an A+, suckas!”) or an actual mistake on the best state website in the country? Hmmmm…
It’s not the individual ideas, those are what brings people back again and again.
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It’s how this forum is put together. I am not a computer savy person. I live by the “Toaster” definition of technology. I don’t care how it works I just want it to toast the damn bread.
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Instead of thinking about individual issues, think about the network.
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What can this administration create that will serve as the infrastructure for engaging people.
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The answer begins by letting those who know what they are talking about to do it.
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The two leading centers for e-government are:
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UMASS:
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link: http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/
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The Rappaport Institute at Harvard:
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link: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/netgov/html/
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Let the pros create the forum and the agencies provide the service.
for state employees to actually update with new information is flawed as well from a microlevel. If I have new information to share, it needs to go through a couple layers of supervisors and then to our web people who may put it on the back burner for a couple of weeks depending on their workload. There is little to no drive towards supporting or encouraging employee to show initiative on keeping websites up to date or engaging.
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Mostly it’s a lack of understanding of the power of the web to share information, not a conspiracy but frustrating nonetheless
apparently understands the power of the internet to share information. Myabe we need to get new supervisors and web people who get it.
I could not get the link to it to work, but I did find a section called Michigan votes where you can check the voting record of every Michigan Legislator. It looks like it is a service that is put together by a public policy center. Maybe the Massachusetts legislature or the Governor’s office could partner with one of the many educational and/or research groups in Massachusetts to create the same type of resource.
Massachusetts has recently revised its website and, in my humble opinion, it’s even worse then before. For example, what happened to the links to the State Legislature? How do you find links to constitutional officers other than Romney and Healey? It’s hard to believe that this website has actually been changed for the worse.
Our state web site is a horrible mess. Much of what you may want to find is there, but usually, Google is the best way to find it – and sometimes that doesn’t work, because mass.gov isn’t especially search-engine-friendly as far as indexing terms. Much of what’s there isn’t in useful form. For example, if oyu want to find out how legislators voted on something, you need to read through house journals from the right date. A lot of stuff is unbookmarkable, too – for example, the agenda for a ConCon is on a link that updates with each ConCon, so if someone posted a link to last year’s, that same link now refers to this year’s.
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Overall, their basic problem is they’re thinking in terms of information they’ve got, and how to throw it up there. They’re not thinking in terms of information people might want to look for, and how they’d go about finding it. (with a few exceptions)
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What they need is some usability testing: Get some groups of people together to brainstorm what kinds of tasks people might want to accomplish using the state web site, then write up each task clear, and bring people in one by one to go through those tasks, observing them as they go. They’d find that almost every common task would confuse the user, and they’d find out how and why.
When I want to find a state statute on a particular topic, I always use Google rather than the Mass.gov search, which really sucks.