Some Thoughts on Placing Documents and Information on-line...

The Elk Rapids Marina.

By: Howard Yamaguchi

Over the past year or two, I have had the opportunity to assist the Planning Commission and the Parks & Recreation Commission in the Village of Elk Rapids to create on-line sites and tools for disseminating some specific information to the community.

In the case of the Planning Commission, the mission was to process the results of their 2005 Master Plan Opinion Survey and to present the results in a "Results" website. The Village of Elk Rapids had just started their 5-yearly Master Plan Update process. The 199-question Opinion Survey had a 51.4% return rate, indicating an extraordinarily high interest by Village residents in the process.

Data input and data processing of the survey returns were performed by an army of community volunteers and Elk Rapids High School students who spent countless hours before several PCs in the Village Office. The results were then compiled in a series of data compilation publications available for download, and an on-line results site. The download site also includes the survey form, Power Point presentations, and a survey results summary publication.

The Public Opinion Survey results are available on-line (just click on the cover).

For the Village Parks & Recreation Commission (of which I am a member), the task was to provide a website through which members of the public could view and download the on-going revisions of the various drafts of the Community Recreation Plan, which was also in the process of a 5-yearly update. The newly-adopted Recreation Plan is available at the Plan's download/viewing site, as are related documents from the public input session and the Opinion Survey.

There were many reasons for placing such information on-line. The hope was that by doing so, many more people would have access to public-domain information than previously possible by relying solely on paper media. We also hoped that, in the case of the opinion survey, placing the raw survey result data to the public would encourage more questions, comments, debate, and informed decision-making by all parties. Finally, we assumed that this would ultimately save the Village time and reproduction costs, in that the taxpayers would be able to access and print their own copies of the on-line documents.

Whenever a public notice appeared announcing some meeting or comment period, the notice included a statement that additional information was available for download and printing at such-and-such an URL. We also sent additional information (such as a user guide to accessing and using these web pages) to the local newspapers, hoping for column-inches that would educate the folks wishing to use on-line information.

The result of all this was somewhat gratifying in that we received very positive feedback from those people who took availed themselves of the information on these sites. However, the general response was not as great as we had hoped. The use of the web as a source of information for local decision-making in planning issues was not as widespread as we had hoped or assumed.

The Village of Elk Rapids is changing.

I think there are several reasons for this. One is demographic. Our communities here are growing older. The median age in Antrim County was 41.1 in 2000, and in the Village of Elk Rapids, it was 43.4. As the number of retirees continue to flood into our area, the median age of area residents will continue to grow as the years go on.

While many older area residents are starting to take advantage of the Internet for the first time to maintain communications with their younger relatives elsewhere, many simply are not in the habit of using the Web as an information source. Several times, from older residents, I have received the response, "I don't do Internet!"

One danger, then, is that we might ultimately end up marginalizing the predominantly older, non-Internet using residents of our area if our local units of government use the Internet as a reason to cut back on the more traditional methods of informing the public: pamphlets, newspaper articles public meetings, and so on. Our "electronic village" may be on the way, but it sure won't be here for a while longer!

Another reason is that web-based information dissemination for local units of government is still relatively new. Most people are simply not in the habit of turning to the Web to get information about their village or township. Even the most computer-savvy residents may not think to look. Given that residents of most age groups still read the local papers diligently, it now seems to me that we need to provide feature articles and illustrated tutorials in such papers that would inform and teach the all taxpayers how to take advantage of local information on the Web. "Build it and they will come" definitely does not apply here!

Finally, I suspect that the type of information placed on the web impacts usage rates. In the case of the Opinion Survey results, the specialized compilations (by subject matter) were used by the various Planning Commission and Village Council sub-committees to gauge public opinion on such timely topics as recycling, short-term rentals, and harbor planning. But those were all essentially compilations of raw data. While they were processed somewhat to make them easy to visualize, the public was left to draw their own conclusions after viewing great masses of numbers and comments.

To many members of the public, this was fine --- the opportunity to view the raw data and draw conclusions was apparently a welcome change.  But for most members of the public, more interpretive documents that summarize and present the bulky, massive datasets in a more understandable manner would have been more appropriate.  In other words, the various folks who commissioned the studies need to spend more effort and digest the information for presentation to the public.

For the time being, then, a forward-looking local unit of government should be willing to spend some time and resources deploying information on both the traditional media and on the Web.  In the meantime, we need to expand the web-using clientele by educating the public on the availabilityof web-based info, and how to access such information.

More and more townships and villages are deploying their own websites with ever more information easily available to the public.  I believe that the public good is being served by all this, and that we need to encourage this trend.  But let us not forget the still-substantial fraction of our population that does not use the web, and take care to service those folks equally well!

Howard Yamaguchi is a civil engineer by training, most of his past work has been in water resources engineering and planning. Recently, Howard has worked locally was as an associate planner in Antrim County.  He is currently re-tooling myself by working towards an on-line certificate, hopefully followed by a Master's degree, in GIS --- both from Penn State University.  He serves local communities (Elk Rapids and now Acme Township) by serving on some of their commissions/committees.