San Mateo County, located on the San Francisco Peninsula, is home to San Francisco International Airport and approximately 20 cities. Nevada County, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, is home to three cities. Yet both counties recently unveiled Web sites based on a common information architecture.
San Mateo, Nevada County and the California State Library have worked in partnership since early 2001 on the California Counties Information Architecture (CCIA) Project. What began as an effort to create information standards the two counties could use to redesign their respective Web sites has flourished. In a little more than two years, 12 counties have joined the CCIA.
Unlike initiatives that follow the classic top-down model -- the federal government's Geospatial One-Stop portal, for example -- the CCIA grew from the ground up as participants discovered a practical way to address their common requirements. It's just one example of the innovative grassroots partnerships springing up in localities throughout the nation.
Bottom Up
The CCIA began when San Mateo County, looking to redesign its Web site, approached California's erstwhile e-government team, led by then-director of e-government Arun Baheti, for advice on building an information architecture. Baheti put the relevant people from San Mateo in touch with Nevada County, which also was redesigning its Web site. Baheti also introduced both counties to the State Library staff, who -- having plenty of experience with data architecture -- helped California design its portal.
"It would be very beneficial for us because our citizens usually interact with one, two maybe three or four counties, depending on where they live," he said. "To have a common navigation to find services would be very useful for citizens."
The CCIA's goal is to get as many counties as possible to adopt the architecture in their Web sites, and so far, many counties have joined the CCIA as observers -- they follow, comment on and review the CCIA, but haven't adopted the information architecture.
"Most of the counties haven't redone their Web sites yet," he said. "They've been participating in the CCIA to learn about the information architecture process and lessons learned by San Mateo County and us. They're providing feedback and input into what we've already done to help make that a better architecture."
No one county calls the shots in the CCIA, and that's partly why more and more counties have joined the project, Monaghan said, adding another reason -- they're pretty much in the same boat financially (i.e., they're hurting), and it makes economic sense to share expenses of creating a new information architecture.
Six or seven of the CCIA's counties are in the "political process" of exposing the architecture to their agencies and trying to convince them that using the information architecture is a good thing, he said, something that took San Mateo County four months.
Both San Mateo and Nevada counties have gone live with newly redesigned Web sites -- both based on the common information architecture -- and Nevada County is developing a generic, prebuilt Web site that could give other small counties or cities an inexpensive way to buy a Web site already built on the architecture, without having to create it themselves.
Alternatively Nevada County could use that prebuilt site to quickly develop and host Web sites for other jurisdictions, Monaghan said, and three counties are talking to Nevada County about doing just that.
"We're building a site for the Plumas County health agency on our infrastructure," he said. "We'll be charging them a hosting and design fee, and because of the infrastructure we've already got, we should be able to do it very efficiently."
Nevada County also will design and host a Web site for Nevada City.
"We are essentially Nevada City's IS department," he said. "It's a very small city, actually smaller than most of my departments. They're using my e-mail infrastructure and my network infrastructure, and I provide them Internet access. It doesn't make any sense for them to duplicate the infrastructure for hosting their own Web site."
In addition, Nevada County will host the California County Information Services Directors Association's Web site, he said, and is in hosting discussions with one other city in Nevada County, though no memorandum of understanding has been signed.
Sharing GIS Data
In Virginia, a loose coalition of GIS managers from cities and counties in the Northern Virginia region has met over the last several years to refine standards for sharing GIS data. One reason the coalition has succeeded in a number of joint projects is its informality tends to inhibit politics that sometimes snarl the collaborative process.
The meetings rotate from county to county, and are opportunities to share ideas, information, management strategies and data, said Larry Stipek, director of the Office of Mapping and Geographic Information in Loudoun County, Va.
"It evolved because several counties in Northern Virginia were more or less in the same place in terms of technology and the development of their GIS," Stipek said. "It made sense to collaborate and share ideas. We were periodically sharing data back and forth for projects that crossed county boundaries."
Though the coalition has evolved, it's still informal in nature and has added members from other interested organizations, including the Virginia Geographic Information Network (VGIN) and the northern office of the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT).
"There is no rigid structure to it," Stipek said. "There's no chairman. Everyone is in charge, I guess you could say."
Efforts to improve coordination of street centerline data among jurisdictions in the region got a jolt of urgency after 9/11, since the Pentagon is located in Northern Virginia's Arlington County. The coalition subsequently developed a data standard for centerlines, and Fairfax County and VDOT simultaneously standardized and improved their centerline data.
At almost the same time, Stipek said, another major GIS change happened in the state. The Wireless E-911 Services Board funded development of a digital ortho image for Virginia, he said. "It was flown last spring and is now becoming available. The ortho is giving us a shared geography, allowing us to cooperatively decide where roads cross boundaries, so we can create continuous centerlines."
VGIN works at a higher level to promote statewide consensus on GIS strategies, Stipek said, and when VGIN developed specifications for the ortho image, representatives from the private and public sectors were invited to a number of work groups. The result? An ortho image that covers the entire state, which is large scale but also useful at the local level for GIS.
"What we have done informally, so far, has worked extremely well," he said. "But having that outside contribution from VGIN and the ability to have the dialog with them and our counterparts across the state is really valuable to us. It's a combination of both having the informal network that can really accomplish things fairly rapidly and share ideas, share data and make things happen for our users internally, and having the partner at the state level who can create a pure geography for all of us and who can facilitate discussions on data dictionaries and things like that for us."
But creating a standard for centerline data didn't solve the entire issue. Determining how to make the data-sharing simple was a different dilemma.
"One issue we have had concerning data sharing was the exact process for facilitating the transfer," Stipek said. "Not long ago our counterparts in Prince William County discovered they could easily access an ArcIMS service from ArcGIS. We have demonstrated the capability using services from both Loudoun and Prince William a few times, and I think we now have a mechanism for sharing centerline and other data."
Loudoun County is now integrating a computer-aided dispatch system with its GIS, he said, which will allow the county to display call locations for emergency dispatchers regardless of which county they are in, using real-time data from each jurisdiction.
"That last point about timely data is important," he said. "This is a very dynamic area. Loudoun County maintains its parcels, streets and addresses every day. We add roughly 1.5 streets and 28 addresses daily, and the same is true in some of the other counties. We can't do a data dump once a year and expect to provide effective public safety and other services."
Though there's no dedicated server or set of servers hosting an enterprise-wide GIS for Northern Virginia, the work of the Northern Virginia GIS managers has created a virtual enterprise GIS for the region that's maintained in many different places by many different people and shared using common rules, Stipek said.
Responsibility Rules
Now comes the hard part: maintaining what they've created.
Stipek said coalition members realize their success translates into added responsibility, and he's advised his county administrator that the county will have to spend more time and resources on the regional effort.
"Until this point, it's been low budget and operating in the background, but when we start talking about maintaining these data sets collaboratively, it begins to involve some work," he said.
This added layer of responsibility confronts nearly all collaborative projects once they hit a certain point, said Sharon Dawes, director of the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University of Albany in New York.
"When agencies or governments work together, you tend to get more and different kinds of intelligence working on a project, so the potential for doing better work is always there," Dawes said. "But the costs of management and coordination go up. This is the hardest problem in all of governmental administration -- learning how to work across organizational boundaries effectively."
Working across boundaries is difficult because it means learning to understand and manage complexity, she said, citing several types of issues.
Each jurisdiction has its own elected leaders. They are not part of the same organization, and they don't report to the same leader.
Different agencies have different programmatic missions that determine their priorities, funding streams and key professional domains. Each domain has its own way of looking at the world.
Local governments vary tremendously in size, economic conditions, technical sophistication, political outlook and urbanization. There is no one size fits all.
Geographic dispersion makes it difficult to understand or have representation from a reasonably wide variety of local jurisdictions.
There are virtually no standard, workable mechanisms to share state and local funding for a joint purpose, or funding from multiple agencies in the same jurisdiction.
"These are decades-old, even centuries-old conditions, so we are not likely to see any major changes soon, although some pressures of recent years, like homeland security, add stronger pressure to deal with them in new ways," Dawes said.
Through its research, she said, CTG has found that certain kinds of working relationships are much more effective than others, though no one particular structure always works best.
"Participants who treat one another as experts in their respective domains, who understand in detail how they share operational responsibility for some program or service, who share decision-making, who communicate regularly, who identify and solve problems jointly do better than those who adopt a command and control approach or assume that one player -- usually the one at the higher level of government -- knows what needs to be done, and the rest just implement it," she said.
One caveat is that this approach isn't necessarily faster, she added, because it takes a lot of time to build and sustain these relationships. But they seem to produce better results.
