Jack indicated that the legacy system was still in place and available to access. Accela offers a far greater spectrum of features, but the legacy system was designed in-house and as a result, has many specific features unique to OKC that Accela doesn’t have. (One of those features that we use, for instance, was that the old system reports when inspections were originally requested by a contractor. Accela only shows that it *was* requested, and when it was passed/failed. It’s important for us to know when they were called in to be able to hold contractors accountable to schedules.)

Jack said they’re working with the Accela developers to implement the “OKC flavors” that are currently lacking in their first implementation here.

Jeff – that is great news about the cities automated permit and review system. I believe they have installed an Accela government software package across most of the city hall computer network (someone from the city can jump in and correct me if I am wrong). It is great that they are pushing the automated web technologies and I know it is a huge blessing to the home builder and developer communities.

I really do think the city is doing a great job at a lot of things; but citizen participation and information access could use some more resources and attention. Hopefully we can take a few steps in the right direction this year!

My office uses this system daily to monitor inspection requests and results, and now can monitor progress of permit applications as they make their way through the various stages of review. We can review correction-request notes made by an inspector on site before he’s even out of the area, thanks to instant-updating of their inspection notes.

Not many cities can say that…the big ones are sometimes too big to get under a comprehensive system, and the smaller cities often don’t have the means to even try.

I rarely attend meetings in person but I frequently check the agendas and minutes of the Council, the Planning Committee, and all of the the urban design boards for items of interest. There are a lot of tricks that you have to remember to navigate all of the agendas. For instance, they have the recently added system for some of the major departments, but that doesn’t include all of the committees, so you have to go back to home and then click the link that says “If you can’t find your committee under the meetings tab, click here” or something like that, and it brings you to a separate list of everything else. Easier navigation of all the meetings would be helpful.

That said, it’s really great that every document is available online for us to look at. The system just isn’t streamlined and hasn’t reached its maximum potential.

What if city officials had blogs? That would be really great.

in case someone doesn’t know what i’m talking about, this is the one i use (options are plentiful…)
http://www.netvibes.com

cheers.v.

I am going to cross my fingers and hope that the city can get excited about it. They would have the ability to make the information update automatically. Ultimately, whether they write the code themselves or some third-party does, it is going to take some commitment from the city. I guess I could give it a shot; I am sure some city would want this functionality.

I will definitely pledge to make a Google map of every agenda from this point forward in 2009 if the city will give me the information in a spreadsheet format I can use. That would at least be a start – though the personalized system is so much better!

I figure if we make it easy for people to be good citizens, then the people of OKC will step up and we will have a lot of good citizens.