Online - And Sleepless - in Seattle

Right now, the society of the World Wide Web seems to thrive on the notion that Web sites must be more and more graphical and use the latest technology to be considered worthwhile. This is not the case with government-related sites, however. While great graphics and hot technology can make the site more fun, it is the content of the site and the contribution it makes toward improving government that really denotes excellence. The Seattle City Clerk's Office site achieves this.

On the surface, the site is simple -- just a home page and a few search engines. What is hidden behind the simple exterior, however, is extraordinary.

ACCESSIBILITY
The City Clerk's Office provides citizens and other city agencies with municipal codes, legislative actions, building codes and other important city legislative information. In 1995, in an effort to better control this information, the office started asking anyone who filed legislative materials with the office to file both a paper and an electronic copy. They received a favorable response, and in 1996, made electronic submission of documents a requirement. "We've been fairly successful in this," said Ernie Dornfeld, legislative records supervisor at the City Clerk's Office. "About 95 percent of them come in to us with no problems, and the other five percent come in with only a little prodding."

In April 1996, the office loaded all the information it had received into a database and presented it to city agencies on the Web, the most practical and available cross-platform solution. "We looked at interfaces other than the Web," Dornfeld explained, "but many required installing special software on all the users' computers." To help put Seattle's legislative databases online, Dornfeld chose the NetAnswer information management, query and retrieval system from Dataware Technologies. Using NetAnswer, up to 100GB of data, text and multimedia content can be available via the Internet. Realizing its value to the general public, the information was made available to the citizens of Seattle and beyond in July 1996.

Currently, the City Clerk's Web site offers three types of information comprising more than 65,000 records -- the Seattle municipal code, a database of current legislation, and historical documents. Dornfeld's group is in the process of launching an online archive of 1.5 million historical photos. "We're very excited about putting the photo archives online," Dornfeld said. "This really gives folks an opportunity to see the history of the area in pictures." The photo database will offer users the option to search by subject and category.



A WIDE RANGE OF USERS
Since the site was primarily designed to be used within city agencies, it's no surprise that many of the users are government-related. "Our government users are primarily staff who write legislation, those who audit and implement, internal lawyers and policy staff researching the history of issues," Dornfeld said. When the office proposed putting the databases on the Web, they knew they could justify the cost by promoting it to city users alone; but they realized the site offered valuable information to public users as well.

Dornfeld said the primary public users include small business owners, librarians searching for information for customers, lawyers and "people who got a ticket and want to find out more about the article of the vehicle code they were cited under." These users tend to focus on legal issues, land use and the criminal code. The site is also visited by researchers examining the laws and codes from outside the Seattle area. "Because of the Web interface with the full text of the documents, these people can download the information to their computers and then use it as necessary," Dornfeld said. In April 1997, the site received more than 10,000 hits -- 6,000 of which were direct document accesses.

WORKING FOR THE FUTURE
In the future, Dornfeld sees the site offering a wider range of databases -- administrative rules, rules for interpreting the business tax code, the Seattle building code and other administrative codes -- in conjunction with other city departments. The City Clerk's Office is also partnering with more agencies and other organizations to provide realtime live links of pending legislation on other Web sites. "Instead of having a customer in another agency writing a new piece of HTML code to present a document they're sponsoring or are concerned with, they can imbed the code for the query right in their page to return the live, current copy from our database," Dornfeld explained. "We are very careful to make sure that our information is up to date, and this is an effective way for them to maintain the currency of the information on their site as well."

What makes this site a Best of the Web is its ability to make government work better for individual agencies and the public. Through use of this site, Seattle's public agencies can drastically cut down on the amount of paper traveling between offices. Also, it ensures that agencies receive the updated version of a document as it changes -- allowing them to track those changes and use them within their organizations. Since the site has been available, the number of phone calls to the Clerk's Office and the number of paper copies the office makes has dropped dramatically, according to Dornfeld. "People don't need to come in here and get a hard copy anymore," he said. "They just go to the site and download it from there."

This site allows citizens to keep up with what is going on in the City Council -- what legislation is being discussed and its status. It also allows them to retrieve information electronically, without generating paper or taking time to travel down to the City Clerk's office to request more information.

Christine Dykhouse is Government Technology's Web Editor.

If you have an interesting
or innovative site you would like us to consider for a future Best of the Web column, send the URL and contact information to .

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