F or Local Government
Community Directory A common resource maintained by Councils is a directory of community organisations in their area. Typically this is an Access database on someone's hard drive, or a part of the main customer service/rating database. Often neither of these solutions is transferable to the website, and they often seem to have issues being made accessible, and kept up to date. We have solved these issues in the past, and can offer you a directory with the following features:
- Keeps details about community organisations in a simple database
- Information can be imported into it from other systems (From CVS file for example)
- Simply download your data as an Excel file (or other format if preferred)
- Allows community organisations to easily add and update their information without needing a password or to login (can be disabled)
- Your events co-ordinator checks all public entries before they are added to the website
- Your events co-ordinator is e-mailed when a new submission comes in from the public
- We set up Word macros to generate your printed community directory ready for proofreading or printing with just one click.
- E-mail all the contact addresses in the directory to remind them to update their details
- We can setup Word templates so that you can use your database for mail-outs, letters and envelopes etc, or you can set that up yourself
- Automatically makes links for web addresses and e-mail addresses
- Search by keyword, category, or any other field
This system can be used for any sort of directory, including sports and business directories.
Council Meetings Minutes and Agendas Although not often the first thing that people think to put on the website, the Council and committee meetings are the cornerstone of the democratic process. Making meeting information available to the public via a website is often not the highest priority, but increasingly, it is expected to be there.
Features include
- Committee secretaries (or other democratic services staff), adding, deleting and modifying committee meeting dates, agendas, minutes, resolutions and reports, whether they be HTML, PDF's or Word documents, or a mixture.
- Meetings are organised by committee, ordered by date
- Documents/meetings are archived on a timeframe of your choosing, from monthly to yearly
- Meetings can be "back dated" to back fill for this term, or even previous years.
Media Releases, Public Notices One of the most common modules people use is the news filing system. It does the following:
- Enables you to have news "snippets" on your front page which update automatically when new items are added
- Takes advantage of Kea's built in approval system, so that news submissions can be taken from a range of sources (including the public if appropriate), and a moderator/communications expert can approve them before they are published
- Cut and paste from Word or other documents into the text areas.
- Upload PDFs
- Link to press releases on other sites
- Archive monthly, quarterly or yearly as suits your volume
- Categorise by subject (for example the Wellington City Council separates out the Mayor's press releases to be listed in the Mayor section as well.)
- Edit press releases, headings, description, content, date and have these changes reflected on all appropriate pages
- Can choose to have only selected news items appear on the front page.
- Automatically fills in metadata tags
- Items have permanent links
The same system can be duplicated for publications, newsletters, and links to other websites and so on.
Jobs and Tenders Working in much the same way as the news module, jobs and tenders have the following unique characteristics
- Human Resources or purchasing staff can upload the notices/job descriptions, either cutting and pasting text, uploading PDF's or linking to notices on other websites
- If appropriate the public can submit listings as well (so you could have a community service as well as listing your own jobs)
- If others are submitting jobs, the submitter is sent an e-mail when a decision has been made whether to accept the listing
- Jobs are removed from the index when the closing date has passed
- Jobs are formatted into your style, with links made to contact e-mail addresses, and logos or pictures can be added if desired
An application form could be tied in with the system if it was useful. That will depend on whether you have a standard form in use within the council.
Events Calendar A great hub element for a section about the region, an events calendar is a great way to promote Council activities, provide some information of interest to youth and families, and help local event organisers in their planning.
Events calendars tend to be quite "personalised" but we support any of these features
- Events listed by category
- Calendar display - with either events showing on the calendar, or days with events highlighted
- Public able to submit events for listing
- Events co-ordinator approves events before they are made public
- Itinerary builder, enabling the visitor to make their own list of events (like a shopping cart)
- Send to a friend - e-mail an event to a friend
- Booking form, added at events co-ordinators discretion to particular events if bookings are available and an e-mail has been provided
- If you wish to charge for listings additional billing fields can be made available
- Notify subscribers about what's on this week/month
- Different look and feel to the rest of the website if wanted
Subscriptions and Mailing Lists These enable you to push information out to interested visitors, and are particularly useful for news, jobs and council meetings areas to let people know when new content has been added. We use Mailman mailing list software to manage subscriptions and set up different sorts of lists, from one way "announce" lists, to fully archived discussion lists. Kea has a field where you can enter a list address, and it will send a notice to the mailing list when a specified page (typically an index page) has been changed.
You can set up the lists to either allow that message to go through directly, or to have the webmaster or list administrator approve the message first, to prevent a couple of quick changes to a page generating numerous messages.
Community Web Services (Kea Starter Kit) An area of concern to many local Councils is how to help their communities up-skill, and how to facilitate "closing the gaps" so that a wide range of organisations can take advantage of the web. The Kea Starter Kit is used to run community web services, providing small, easy to set up and maintain webspaces for community groups and small businesses. It is intended as a "first step" website for people, so is deliberately simplistic, however it's anticipated that as the base level of skills improves, the other Kea modules could be made available here too.
Kea Starter Kit
- Sets up the edit webspace, and depending on your live server setup, may set up the live space also, or may just integrate with your server management system
- Allows you to either supply the groups with branded templates to choose from, or vanilla templates that they can adjust themselves.
- You can determine how much space on the server they are allowed, how many pages and so on
- Lets them add more pages, upload images, add and change text, and edit styles to adjust the look and feel of their pages.
- Some style editing can be disabled if a branded template has been selected (so you can dictate some base styles if you want to).
- The site owner is reminded that they need to keep the site up to date on a regular basis
Search We use both HtDig and Swish to index and search sites, although we are happy to recommend others to suit your budget. HtDig and Swish are both open source software, and HtDig will index word documents and PDFs as well as HTML files. We use Swish when we want to do some customisation of results, for example when we wish to rank based on specific criteria.
Corporate or Public Library It's not part of Kea, but you would be welcome to use the Koha library system if you would like to make your corporate library available (even as an intranet), or if you're considering changing your public library systems. For information on Koha visit www.koha.org
Digital Library If you're looking at putting archival material on line, we have worked with the Greenstone Digital Library produced by Waikato University and found it very easy to install. For more information on Greenstone visit www.nzdl.org
|
