I landed in Newark, NJ early this month to meet with cities and county folks. It was one of those trips that just ended way to quickly. Morris County, New Jersey has been a part of the DotGov family since the beginning. Carol Spencer, the webmaster there at the county, was a beta tester and has always been one of those people we could rely on for insightful feedback and useful suggestions. She is always trying to bend technology to make it do what she needs done.
Carol has been using DotGov’s free YouTown application for a variety of purposes like publishing services, maps and news. What is also really remarkable is how she has been using the application in emergencies. When Hurricane Irene came knocking on their door earlier this year, Carol needed a way she could push information, especially spatial information, out to the public and to agency personnel. She launched a revolutionary program in Morris County called McUrgant. McUrgant is Shared Emergency Information Network that is set up managed by the county but is available for all the dozens of municipal and local agencies in the county. Talk about shared services! The county conducts training for the cities –which is why I was there.
Carol asked me to speak briefly after one of her training meetings about YouTown. It was great to share our company story with so many folks who had already heard about or were using YouTown, but had never met any of us from the team. As always, the feedback, the questions, and yes, the feature suggestions were all great and I can’t wait to get back already.
As if the first meeting wasn’t productive enough, Carol had me meet with members from the Morris County GIS team. Steve and Janice helped me understand even better, how critical it is for us as a company to focus on creating technology that fits the role of the professional, and not just strictly the data format. So context really matters and we want to translate that lesson into better tools for our users.
My final day was spent with an unruly bunch of webmasters from around the region. I say unruly because Carol was quick to let me know that they were pretty laid back. I found them to be a delightful bunch. She was right, they were pretty relaxed, but the questions, the discussions…they just kept coming. Thank goodness I took good notes! From this group, I was reminded of how true it can be that one agency not far from another, can be at two very different locations on the technology timeline but can still have exactly the same needs. For example, it doesn’t matter if you have a GIS department or if you don’t even own GIS software. Chances are you are trying to figure out how to do what Ushahidi does. Speaking of Ushahidi, I enjoyed taking off my DotGov hat and putting on my dusty Crisis Mapper hat (it is actually a grey fedora to be precise) and talking about the power of the Ushahidi and crowd-sourcing opportunities out there.
Thanks Carol and Jamie for the warm hospitality and seemingly unlimited supply of great discussions and laughs. It was a trip that ended too quickly and I can’t wait to return. Next stop on my Tour of The DotGovs – Texas!
[...] was a request we received through our support forum and it was something we put as a priority after visiting with some GIS folks recently. We understand that not everyone has access to web services but may in fact be able to [...]