Section 4. PROJECT EVALUATION

The abagOnline project proposal to TIIAP was designed to address the fundamental problem that local governments were not using the Internet, the "Information superhighway," to improve their efficiencies and communications with citizens. This fundamental problem actually was comprised of a complete set of problems, hurdles and obstacles which abagOnline endeavored to resolve for the Bay Area. By and large, we believe we were successful but certain issues remain, primarily because of our lack of understanding of their nature or extent at the start of the project. This evaluation presents the specific problems detailed in the project proposal, the actions undertaken by ABAG and the results we have achieved as of June 1996.

PREPARATION BY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

Local governments were poorly prepared to take advantage of the information superhighway. ABAG staff addressed this problem initially as an issue of education and training. It was our belief that local governments were poorly prepared because many did not have knowledge about information technology and the information superhighway. Consequently, this led to lack of resource allocation for training or hiring staff, obtaining equipment and accepting a new method of conducting business and reaching citizens.

In response, ABAG implemented four major activities to educate and encourage local governments. ABAG staff conducted on-site demonstrations of Internet access and Web browsing. These demonstrations were performed at Boards of Supervisors, City Manager associations, professional societies and meetings of elected officials.

ABAG staff also conducted abagOnline Advisory Committee meetings to which were invited government employees, community organization members, businesses and citizens. Every meeting was opened with a real-time tour of new government sites on the Internet, followed by lectures and discussions of Internet related technology.

Communications Department staff at ABAG produced articles for the ABAG newsletter, Service Matters, which was mailed to elected officials and city and county departments. News releases were prepared for the print, television and radio media. The topics stressed new developments at abagOnline and how those developments could be used by governments and citizens for better information exchange.

ABAG staff, and contractors, conducted training courses, as described in Section 2, Task 16. These courses targeted local government employees and helped to prepare them to use the Internet.

Most presentations in these outreach programs stressed what could be accomplished, has been accomplished and is being developed by local governments in the Bay Area and throughout the nation. The emphasis on examples served to both inspire local ideas and enthusiasm, and to promote a sense of urgency about joining an inevitable national trend. Additionally, by showcasing practical applications, skeptical agencies, concerned about embracing a possible fad, were convinced about realistic potential savings in government operations.

The result of these efforts, as an overall assessment, was the growth of participating agencies in abagOnline from two in April of 1994 to 80 by the end of June 1996. While some local governments are still cautiously presenting a simple home page on the Web, others have advanced to extensive on-line presentations of information and interactive exchanges with citizens.

The fundamental change which we have seen during the course of this project is an acceptance or acknowledgment that the Internet and the World Wide Web represent a new, permanent, albeit evolving, arena for conducting government business and communication with citizens. It would be wonderful to claim that abagOnline was singularly responsible for this change in perception. However, we acknowledge the critical impact of promotional efforts by the President, Vice-President and Administration on behalf of the Internet. The President's and Vice-President's visit in 1996 to the Bay Area to wire a school for Net Day drove home the point that the information superhighway would be a fact of life in the near future.

An example of how local governments are now devoting resources to building an Internet presence could be found "close to home." Michael Dufner, abagOnline's first Project Manager and Webmaster was hired by the City of San Francisco to develop their web site.

INTERNET ACCESS

Cities, counties, special districts and state agencies did not have Internet access in the Spring of 1994. There were elected officials and individual employees scattered among the local jurisdictions, who did have personal access through their employers or, in a limited fashion, with CompuServe accounts. With the exception of the City of Palo Alto, no local agency had permanent access to publish information via gopher or World Wide Web. Palo Alto was given access through a donated server housed at Digital Equipment Corporation as a promotional/demonstration project. abagOnline, during its first month of Web publishing, April 1996, was hosted on a commercial server by Stanford University graduate students who helped design our first pages. It was not until June 1996, when ABAG opened a service account with BarrNet and installed a Sun Classic server did we have permanent access to the Internet.

A critical factor for local government participation in the Internet/World Wide Web was the perceived cost of entry. The abagOnline Web site, with all equipment and consultant fees, cost over $25,000 to implement. To that is added the leased line charge of $300 - 1,200 per month from the ISP, a local telephone carrier service charge of $125 to 550 per month and, for abagOnline, a half-time system administrator knowledgeable in Unix. This cost was, and still is, a very large obstacle for revenue-short local governments to absorb. However, ABAG quickly realized that once abagOnline was operational, we immediately had excess capacity. This enabled ABAG to offer low cost hosting services for public agencies on ABAG's Web server. Now for as little as $50 to 100 per month, far less than the expense of just the leased line, local agencies can operate an extensive Web site on ABAG's server and obtain several email boxes with a dial-up PPP account at a common ISP.

To enable local agency staff to access the Internet for Web browsing or email services, ABAG arranged with CRL Network Services, a national Internet service provider with several Bay Area points of presence, to offer an additional 10% discount off CRL's highly competitive rates to local government agencies. Also during this period anyone associated with computers was being inundated with floppy disks from America Online and CompuServe, offering a free Internet access trial period and a paid account thereafter.

Finally, to encourage local governments to use the Internet, and through that use, develop a desire to obtain permanent access, ABAG created two databases on abagOnline-ACE and GLOBE. ACE (ABAG Contracts Exchange) allowed local governments to post notices and requests for proposals on the abagOnline Web site at no charge. GLOBE (Government Listing of Bay Area Employment) permitted local governments to similarly post employment openings. Local agencies could easily submit a notice as part of electronic mail. If the organization did not have electronic mail, the notice could be submitted by mailing to ABAG a floppy disk with the required file. The intent of this exercise was twofold: 1) to demonstrate a positive business application for local governments; and 2) to encourage at least the opening of email accounts.

The results of these efforts were generally positive but mixed. As of June 1996, twenty-five organizations took advantage of the abagOnline hosting services. Of those, two-City of Mountain View and Contra Costa County-have moved on to their own Internet servers. An additional number of cities have selected local Internet service providers (ISP) for hosting services. Examples of these include Belmont and Newark. Often the city site is provided at no charge in exchange for the publicity an ISP receives.

No organizations have taken advantage of the discounted access offer from CRL. Many people started with the 10 free hours offered by AOL, CompuServe and others and then moved on to other providers. Very often these access accounts are personal and there is a lack of agency-wide staff access among local governments.

A number of agencies which started posting with ACE or GLOBE, using floppy disks, still submit files in that manner. Apparently the value of a common posting area is recognized, even if staff are not yet provided with Internet access.

INFORMATION ORGANIZATION

Local government information was not organized for electronic presentation. At the start of this project, ABAG staff had a vision of government data banks opening to pubic inspection over the Internet. There were concerns that proprietary data base software for compiling land use, tax roll, sales tax, property values and the like would be incompatible from one jurisdiction to the next, placing a burden upon the inquiring citizen. After several meetings between ABAG staff and local government employees, it became clear that local staff were not yet ready to address presentation of databases. The immediate perceived need was to present information about the jurisdiction, events, council agendas and minutes of meetings.

ABAG staff recognized that no consensus could be reached among local governments about database presentation until experience was gained presenting the basic information about jurisdictions. The abagOnline training courses and workshops therefore stressed simple page markup in html, embedding in-line images and inserting mailto programs. For a short period of time, the native word processor used by a jurisdiction was a concern because reliable word processor to html conversion programs were not available until 1996. ABAG staff did adopt and promote html as the standard format for presentation on the Web portion of the Internet.

ABAG staff also experimented with a gopher server for the first nine months of the project. Gopher servers presented basic ascii text and were the primary method for publishing information prior to the advent of the Web. ABAG staff published via Gopher server the same content found on the Web pages, but without the images. We came to the conclusion that gopher services were used primarily by university students and researchers. The content was rather dull and bland in contrast with the Web content and the vast majority of citizens and newcomers to the Internet were being attracted by the Web. Because of this, and the enhanced ability to present visually appealing information via html pages, abagOnline discontinued use of the gopher.

ABAG staff tried to lead by example. Many of the basic documents local agency staff wished to publish-agendas, minutes, general information or special reports-were similarly available at ABAG. Therefore ABAG staff taught classes and demonstrated how we converted existing word processing documents into html and enhanced them with simple graphics. ABAG also published advanced data sets containing over 1,000 maps of earthquake shaking hazards. This was done both as a service to citizens and to encourage local agencies to take the extra step and release, via Internet, city and county databases.

The result of these efforts is that the overwhelming majority of local government information is posted on the Web in html format. No information is being posted via gopher servers. Clearly this is not just the consequence of abagOnline. The phenomenal international growth of the World Wide Web has set most of the standards we use for publishing. San Carlos is experimenting with some pages offered in adobe Acrobat format and some text provided via a True Speech audio format. ABAG is providing some audio files in Real Audio format and moving images using Macromedia Director. However, these are still experimental applications and have not yet achieved the widespread, universal acceptance of basic html pages.

A number of html pages created by ABAG have been copied directly into the Web sites of local agencies. Also the formatting of local government information has been preserved from the ABAG pages to the local government pages. This shows that local staff did, as initial steps, follow the examples set by abagOnline.

As to the development of useful, local databases on the Web, the City of Oakland has struck out in a new direction. At the city's Web site http://199.35.5.18/Oakweb/index.htm  the citizen can find parcel maps for the downtown area, generated and drawn specifically for each request. This is a first-of-its-kind Bay Area application and will be discussed at the next abagOnline Advisory Committee meeting.

POLICIES FOR DATA RELEASE

Local governments had not established policies or procedures for releasing or securing data. This issue is more complex than just selecting which information a local agency should publish on the Internet. Most local government data is public but access to it has been controlled or restricted. City and county staff are used to having citizens order a specific data set, such as birth records or land ownership, by mailing a request or standing at a counter and maybe even paying a processing fee. This data could easily be provided over the Internet; however, local government staff need to be comfortable with the general public "browsing" through the records, often with no particular reason to do so. This issue has not been addressed or resolved by the current project. ABAG, by releasing on the Web over 1,000 earthquake hazard maps, maps which normally are sold over-the-counter for a fee, hopes to demonstrate that the increased efficiencies of letting citizens find their own information outweigh any benefits of control. We also recognize that some sets of public records, welfare rolls for example, could be deemed sensitive. Release of such data over the Internet would require a wider national discussion than is possible within this project.

One additional point related to this topic is the practice of charging for public information. Proponents of charging claim that local agencies should be reimbursed for the incremental effort required to publish data on the Internet. The cost of that incremental effort can be easily determined for some jurisdictions where a contractor would be paid to collect public information and repackage it for Web presentation. Local governments in general accept their responsibility to release information. However, in an era when local finances are inadequate to fund traditional city/county services, administrators are reluctant to expend resources to publish data in a "new" media without some form of reimbursement for its effort.

Opponents of fees and charges argue that local data, collected with the use of tax moneys, belongs to the citizens, who should not be charged a second time to access the information. This issue was discussed at the ABAG conference "Electronic Government." This topic has also been debated on national Internet-based discussion groups with no resolution or victory for either side.

While the abagOnline project has not resolved this issue, ABAG staff will continue to seek out databases of local information which could demonstrate the efficiency and cost-reduction of publishing data on the Web vs. providing the information for custom orders.

STAFF READINESS

Local government staff and equipment were not organized or assembled for citizens' electronic access. In early 1994, methods of communicating or conducting business with local governments had not changed in decades. Most jurisdictions could not provide a computer as a productivity tool, on every employee's desk. Local area networks, an internal model of how an Internet based citizen network may work, existed only in the largest cities and counties. ABAG's challenge was to show local governments how the Internet and World Wide Web could be used to conduct business with citizens and how these new activities could be incorporated into government operations.

ABAG staff compiled a list of exemplary local government sites-each demonstrating a unique service-from across the nation. This list was first used as a Netscape bookmark file for presentations to agency employees. The list was later published in the local government section of abagOnline allowing any visitor to find ideas and inspiration. The list is updated as we find new local government application sites.

Using the abagOnline site for demonstrations, ABAG's contractor installed a mailto program letting citizens send email to ABAG staff using their Web browser software to fill out a form. The staff person could be selected and addressed from a scrolling window of all ABAG staff. Shortly after the abagOnline mailto program was operation, the City of San Carlos used the same contractor to create a citizen complaint form using mailto to direct the email message to specific city departments selected, again, from a pull-down list. This is an example of how abagOnline innovations encouraged local governments to also try new Internet tools.

A key obstacle to local government participation in the Internet/Web was the perception that the activity would add yet another chore to overburdened local staff. To some degree this is true. A local agency Web site must be assembled with planning, and fresh or current content routinely added. ABAG staff, having gone first through the experience of maintaining an active and growing Web site, searched for, tested, demonstrated and promoted the use of automation tools. For example, if a city clerk is typing on a computer a city council agenda for public posting, the automation tool should directly convert that agenda into a text or html format that quickly could be posted on the city's web site for only a few minutes of additional effort.

At the beginning of the abagOnline project, document conversion tools were few and very primitive. By June 1996, most word processor programs could save documents into html format with a few clicks of the mouse. Sophisticated document conversion programs were created that could accept any word processor file as input and even handle tables and embedded graphics. ABAG staff tested and demonstrated these programs as they became available. Local governments were urged to take advantage of these tools in order to minimize staff time.

The result of these cumulative efforts is that Bay Area local government pages on the Web are growing in number and sophistication. All of the agencies participating in abagOnline provide basic information such as agency addresses, personnel, hours, history, and mission. Many have added email addresses for key personnel and elected officials. Some go as far as providing forms with which they solicit citizen input. Overall, the Bay Area has the greatest concentration in the country of local governments actively participating in the Internet/World Wide Web.

SEARCH PROTOCOLS

Search protocols for local government information had not been selected. Two years ago there was a perception that local governments would rush to the Internet with their vast databases of land use, economic, tax and social service information. Search engines and search protocols to uncover specific data sets in the government data warehouses were expected to be a necessity.

Fortunately, during the last two years there has been great growth in the "search engine" business. A number of free public search engines now help citizens find anything on the Web, from the mundane to the esoteric. Choices among YAHOO®, Web Crawler®, Magellan®, Excite®, Lycos®, and Infoseek® among others, provide cursory or detailed searches into the depths of most Web sites on the Internet.

Once a citizen reaches a local agency Web site, finding specific information should not be a time consuming process. abagOnline offers the Excite® search engine which has indexed every page on our Web site. Other similar products are available and we urge extensive local government sites to add their own search tool. At this time, with the current level of information provided by Bay Area governments, nationwide and local search engines provide adequate tools to help the citizen find anything that exists.

FRAGMENTED GOVERNMENT INFORMATION

Local government information in general is fragmented and hard for the citizen to find. Before the advent of the Web, citizens needed to telephone, write or visit local agencies to find the information or help they needed, and may have had to check with several agencies to find the proper source.

abagOnline was created with directories of all local agencies participating on the Web, and the directories are constantly being updated. Current listings include cities, counties, special districts, school districts, regional agencies, state agencies and federal access. This Bay Area directory service is intended to help citizens find the agency they need and, in time, will include all Bay Area local governments.

abagOnline also has demonstrated the regional grouping of similar local government information. The ABAG Contracts Exchange (ACE) lets a potential contractor look in one place for any possible opportunities with Bay Area agencies. The Government Listing of Bay Area Employment (GLOBE) is a complementary listing service for cities and counties to post employment notices making job hunting an easier process.

A new feature of abagOnline was introduced in June 1996. The California Environmental and Planning Electronic Clearinghouse (CEPEC) is an experimental posting board for draft Environmental Impact Reports and Statements, draft planning documents, and notices of federal grants and actions. CEPEC provides a simple, single location for notices and documents from a variety of projects throughout the region, which in the Bay Area number approximately 300 per year.

The citizen's usage of CEPEC is too new to generate any meaningful measure. The abagOnline directory of local agencies now receives 80 to 100 visits per day (almost 3,000 per month). The ACE board activity varies with the number of postings, but normally receives 700 visits per month. And the GLOBE board receives about 1,500 visitors monthly.

ABAG believes that these efforts point to a new model of accessing or providing information on a region-wide basis. Rather than having each jurisdiction provide similar information on a local, agency-by-agency basis, the Internet allows citizens to search the Web for specific data types and find the data quickly for all agencies posting on the Web. An additional example of this concept is in a relatively new section of abagOnline-the Telecomm Forum. ABAG is compiling and posting local ordinances, policy documents and contracts related to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While primarily a service to member governments, the Telecomm Forum is a unique resource for citizens researching government response to new wireless communications services.

OFFICIAL AND SECURE COMMUNICATIONS

Citizens lack validation of "official" information presented on the Internet. The InterNIC has established a domain name classification scheme for local government agencies publishing information on the Web. For example, www.ci.albany.ca.us is a valid site for the City of Albany in California. However, local government "sites" also are established by chambers of commerce, community networks or private firms which cannot use the government naming scheme. How is the citizen to identify a legitimate site from one established as a hoax or in opposition to a local government's wishes?

As a part of this program, ABAG staff have assisted local agencies with the registration of a domain name. For agencies using the abagOnline hosting service, the domain name can be transferred when the agency constructs an independent Web server.

The abagOnline directory of local government sites only points to officially sanctioned sites. When a request is received to link to an agency server, ABAG staff verify that the server officially represents the agency before the link is placed in the abagOnline directory. This service helps citizens read "official" sites.

The abagOnline server also contains the Netscape secure server program. The secure server program was developed to facilitate on-line commerce. Using a matching browser, individuals could safely submit encrypted financial information such as a credit card payment to a secure server site. This new technology also can have applications for local government. Citizens could some day submit securely permit applications, parking fine payments or voter information to a local government server. ABAG is testing the Netscape secure server with credit card transactions for agency publications. Staff hope to develop sample applications for mainstream government business. Until that time, the credit card transactions demonstrate to local governments the possible security on the Internet. The secure server is available for use by local agencies hosting with ABAG.

One area of Internet communications not yet securely developed with common standards is user authentication. This means that even a secure server receiving an encrypted credit card transaction from "John Smith" does not have proof that John Smith actually sent the message. A government transaction, such as a permit application from John Smith, may or may not have come from John Smith. Serious conduct of government business awaits user authentication. Current new schemes of authentication being tested in the marketplace require users to pre-register with a third party and receive a password. The third party "guarantees" that a financial transaction with that password is authentic. It is yet uncertain which scheme will survive the test of the marketplace.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL

Prior to this project, local agencies were faced with independently learning and developing Internet skills and access. It is certain that within each local jurisdiction some staff members would need to learn about the Internet, how to use it and how to publish agency information on the Net. For jurisdictions that chose to also maintain the hardware of an Internet server, some staff would need knowledge of Unix, TCP/IP, routers, gateways and a host of exotic minutiae. Even with that knowledge, the rapid evolution of the Internet technology, notably the World Wide Web, and the lack of local government experience on the Internet meant that a lot of operational and policy decisions would require investigation and research.

ABAG undertook, as a part of this project, to develop a shared learning and investigative process. Information collected by ABAG staff and abagOnline members was distributed to local governments for the benefit of all. The primary mechanism of this sharing was the abagOnline Advisory Committee. At committee meetings, attendees were given lectures by industry experts, provided demonstrations of new technology and local government applications, and participated in discussions of policy issues.

Additional mechanisms of sharing information and experiences included basic Internet and Web page design classes, telephone support for local government staff and presentations at meetings held in local agency offices. ABAG staff shared with local agency staff CGI programs and Web page design tips. Finally, a discussion group for local government information systems staff, abagNet-infosystems, was created using on-line Web based forms and a list server, to provide a mechanism for local staff to help each other.

At the conclusion of the project, ABAG hosted a conference, "Electronic Government: Opportunities in Conducting the People's Business on the Internet." This conference offered presentations on the developments in other TIIAP grants in Northern California. Speakers addressed freedom of information policy issues, economic development uses for the World Wide Web and on-line permit processing-a report from Smart Valley, Inc. The Electronic Government conference was attended by 145 persons. Over the duration of this project, over 800 persons attended meetings of the abagOnline Advisory Committee and are now on a mailing list for regular updates. Also, over 100 local government employees took advantage of the introductory Internet classes. These mechanisms helped ensure that abagOnline was a shared experience in the San Francisco Bay Area.

ACCESS BY DISADVANTAGED CITIZENS

There was a universal concern that local government Internet activities would not be accessible by a community's disadvantaged members. When the abagOnline project was begun, there was little citizen access to the World Wide Web. Published estimates of Internet access were less than 10 percent of the population. (Current estimates are that 30-40 percent of the Bay Area population has Internet access at home or work.) And the participants were required to have a computer, modem and an account with an ISP. This clearly excluded many economically disadvantaged families.

ABAG addressed this issue in several ways. The abagOnline Advisory Committee meetings were regularly attended by public librarians. The librarians were learning about the Internet and possible services they could offer patrons. For example, librarians from the City of Pleasanton attended several meetings before installing an Internet workstation, with full Web access, in the main library for the City. Internet access at libraries offers citizens without home or work computers the possibility to share terminals as a community resource for the cost of a walk or drive to the nearest library. The number of Bay Area libraries offering patrons Internet access and their addresses, was provided in Appendix F.

ABAG also supported Smart Valley's Public Access Network (PAN) project. The PAN project seeks to install public access terminals to the Intent in community centers, libraries, stores and other gathering places. ABAG and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission(MTC) installed a dedicated PAN terminal, with special user friendly software, in the MetroCenter library adjacent to the ABAG offices. The PAN terminal may be used at no charge by any person coming to the library.

The major mechanism for giving the disadvantaged access to the Internet is not a program of abagOnline but rather a development of commercial television cable companies. While many American households do not yet have a computer, most households, even disadvantaged, do have televisions sets. By providing Internet access through cable television wiring networks, using existing television monitors , and adding a controlling keyboard with a price near that of a video game, cable companies can greatly expand the potential number of citizens reaching the Internet. In the San Francisco Bay Area, TCI, a nationwide cable company, has been installing a test Internet access system in thousands of homes in Sunnyvale and plans soon to expand the test to the City of Fremont. This type of Internet access, when fully tested and developed, promises to open the World Wide Web to millions of new families.

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