Virtual City Hall

What is a virtual city hall?

One answer to that question requires another question: What does city hall mean to most city residents. It could be a place to pay for services, a site of city governance or even a community meeting place.

Another answer also requires another question: What does city hall mean to the employees developing the site? In essence, the web designers impact the residents' view of the digital city hall in the same way that customer service impacts the residents' view of the physical city hall.

Of course both of these are impacted by resources, by the vision of city leaders to embrace new technologies, and by the employees' commitment and understanding of new technologies. It is this which will determine how Web 2.0 does and does not transform our virtual city halls.

Managing Employees in the Digital City

In his 2005 book, The Digital City: The American Metropolis and Information Technology, Michel S. Laguerre devotes an entire chapter to teleworkers and telemanagers. On page 91, he states, "It is not simply enough to learn how to manage at a distance, it is also important to learn how to coordinate the labor produced at the workplace with the labor produced elsewhere."

This is certainly a struggle that my supervisor faces as he supervises one employee telecommuting from eastern Washington and the rest of the staff who work within our office in Olympia.

City Wi-Fi Networks Can Be Successful When City Focus Is Kept in Mind

Oklahoma City's recently unveiled Wi-Fi network is considered a success, despite the failure of city Wi-Fi systems elsewhere. What makes Oklahoma's system different? According to a June 4th Associated Press story, rather than being created for the purpose of providing free internet to residences. Oklahoma's network was created solely for city government business purposes.

The network's focus is public safety. The $5 million system was paid for with public safety sales tax and city capital improvement funds. The network is the world's largest city-owned and-operated Wi-Fi network and covers 555 square miles through 1,200 routers across the city. These routers are structured as a mesh so that, if one goes out, another can take its place. The system is being used by city public safety personnel in the field for such purposes as accessing detailed topography maps or viewing building floor plans and other data quickly from city databases. Many other uses for the system are in the works.