Remember: our rules allow pointed disagreement, but require respectful discussion.
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On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, Russell W Peterson wrote:
> Has the City of Minneapolis considering going in with other
> cities on its website development?
[snip]
> It seems to me that cities across the country have a lot in common
> and Minneapolis and other cities could gain some real efficiencies by
> working together. Does anybody know if this is happening?
I can only speak for St. Paul, but a limited ammout of this does go
on. However, its mostly amongst systems that share data between eachother
anyway. The City of Saint Paul has a fairly good GIS system in place, and
that is shared with Ramsey County, as RC provides a large chunk of the
data. In turn, other municipalities in Ramsey will eventualy be able to
hit the GIS data that St. Paul hosts.
There are companies out there that sell Content Management systems to
government entities like municipalities. In fact, the City of Saint Paul
is currently pondering an RFP on this very topic. Larger cities tend,
tend mind you, to have large enough Information Services infrastructure
and people-resources to be able to manage their own web-sites quite
well. Smaller cities like Edina, Blooming Prarie, or St. Louis Park may
be small enough that they don't have the needed resources to do
that. Those are the kinds of customers that would benefit from
efficiencies in website management.
Each City is unique in terms of services it offers, so a modular approach
would have to be pursued. Then the problem of getting content to the
sites, while taking in to account potentially very different IT
infrastructures at the same time. Governments haven't been that good at
such things in the past, which is why private corps tend to do it.
Greg Riedesel
City of St Paul employee speaking privately
SSP
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