How good is your County Website?
What did we do before the Internet?
No really, what did we do before the Internet?
I am speaking specifically about local government attempting to keep citizens informed.
Now, practically every unit of government has a website and if they don’t they should.
But, how good are those websites? Do they have the information on the websites that the public wants and needs?
Sunshine Online to the rescue!
The My Government Website project evaluates the information governments post on their websites at the statewide, county, city and school districtlevel. We evaluate websites based on Sunshine Review’s transparency checklist, which checks for basic information such as meeting minutes, budgets, audits, and how to contact elected officials.
This project was recently completed evaluations for all 3,140 counties in the U.S.. Below are the 10 states with most transparent county governments; Arizona ranks highest at 65 percent. The scores reveal that all our communities need more transparency.
This website rates every county in the country as to how informational their website is for their citizens.
Look your county up. See how they are doing.
Happy reading!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 4:41 am and is filed under Electioneering 101, Government Meetings 101, Local Politics 101. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
2 Responses to “How good is your County Website?”
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Kristinpedia Says:
LZ, I have to say that why I don’t agree with you on it not being valuable at all, I do see that there needs to be accountability for the information and an investigation on the web usability for the websites. Sunshine Review is just trying to take the first step towards disclosing information on the website instead of in a file at city hall.
If you’d like to become involved and monitor your county on how the site is doing on SR, I’d love to chat with you.
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July 12th, 2009 at 8:19 am
For those of us who attend many meetings and get involved in local government, I suspect that we know this survey doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t tell you whether the website information is accurate nor do minutes tell you what really goes on in these meetings. Last summer, attorneys identified over 60 discrepancies between Sawyer County’s website version of its zoning ordinance and the official ordinance. Most government websites have a CYA disclaimer that the information may not be accurate. This doesn’t matter much in Sawyer County, where county officals and supervisors dosn’t follow the rules and only selectively enforce them on the public. Anyone who uses websites for other local governments in NW WI can likely come up with numerous examples of areas where websites need to be improved to be meaningful. Huge amounts of taxpapyer dollars are invested in IT systems that don’t work. Or is that just an excuse for not providing the info?