City of Indianapolis Wins Prestigious Digital Governance Award
CITY OF INDIANAPOLIS WINS PRESTIGIOUS DIGITAL GOVERNANCE AWARD Honored for Leadership in Digital Access
(July 15/San Francisco) The City of Indianapolis has won the Second Place Digital Governance Award for Leadership in Digital Access. Indianapolis distinguished itself in this category with strong government transparency and public access improvements using Granicus webcasting solutions. The city displayed excellence in its ability to extend the reach and value of its cable programming using rich media, online archiving, and video indexing. The awards will be given at the Digital Governance Awards Banquet at the 2008 Granicus® User Conference to be held August 6-8 in San Francisco.
The 2008 Digital Governance Awards program is presented by Granicus, Inc. and sponsored by Microsoft. It celebrates government agencies for using digital technology in innovative ways to deliver organizational value by creating competitive advantage, reducing operating costs, optimizing legislative processes, or improving government-tocitizen relationships.
"We are pleased to be recognized as a national leader in digital access for public and internal accessibility to vital municipal content", said Rick Maultra, Director of the City's Telecom & Video Services Agency. "Our goals have been to model City TV as a local version of CSPAN and provide maximum transparency to local government. I want to recognize the City TV staff for providing the content and updating the archiving component as well as thank those from the Information Services Agency for working with our office to make this vision a reality."
Indianapolis was recognized nationally for its unique approach to the following challenges, all relatively within a year of its launch of its webstreaming and archival access of municipal meeting content:
Feedback for Indianapolis on how it tracked the video on demand web hits showed incredible interest.
The top visited programs viewed are the Pro Se video for constituents with 3,206 views, Jury Duty at 2,904 and the 12/17/07 Council meeting with 2,626 views.
The website interaction for just the video archiving reveals a great interest via the subsequent accessibility to local government proceedings. The results show having additional conduits outside of the mere cable casting of the local government programming. Additionally, the convenience of having the meetings logged by proposal numbers and similar, allow the 'customer' to immediately jump to just that part of the meeting that they are interested in.
Indianapolis evidenced that Its employees and administrators constantly rely upon the archiving feature to replay meetings, use them for taking minutes and by the press for reporting purposes.
The Clerk's Office relied heavily upon the solicitation and education of poll workers for the May 2008 elections after having had many problems the past November with an
inadequate and under educated polling work force. The election process that November suffered and the Telecom & Video Services Agency reached out to the Clerk's Office to better the situation. The result was a number of on-demand videos that were widely utilized by the Clerk's Office and precinct workers to close the gap on manpower and lack of knowledge by precinct officials working the polls. The results were a dramatically improved election process.
To that end, there have been 902 views on the Inspector training video, 428 views on the Judge training video and 327 views on the Clerk training video.
In working with the courts, Indianapolis developed videos on the public representing itself as Pro Se in court proceedings and the possible negative it would have upon a constituent in doing so; and a constituent's duties to serving on a jury.
Having such videos in place on their municipal court website allows the Courts to direct constituents to more detail answers with respect to these issues.
On the Mayor's website is a link to the Mayor's 2008 State of the City address. Mayor Greg Ballard's address is his vision for 2008 for goals and objectives. This VOD application has been popular with constituents as it has received 1,159 hits for viewing as of 7/15/08.
The highly competitive Digital Governance Awards seek to honor Granicus clients who display measurable outcomes with technological solutions that:
- Improve efficiency in government and public services.
- Enhance public communication.
- Improve community engagement.
- Facilitate government transparency.
A record number of applications were submitted. The competition was close.
The winning jurisdictions demonstrated the most compelling use of Granicus technology. And they accomplished measurable and impressive results.
About Granicus
Founded in 1999, San Francisco-based Granicus helps government and constituents communicate without barriers. Serving more than 400 governing bodies in 39 states and reaching more than 25% of the American population, Granicus solutions enable vital improvements to public access, civic engagement, government accountability, and efficiency. We manage the world's largest government webcasting network, supporting more than 85,000 public meetings and other government content, securely and reliably bringing vital government information closer to the people.
Contact
Lauren Alexander I Corporate Communications Manager I Granicus, Inc. w: 415.357.3618 x 1788 I c: 415.728.8624 I f: 415.618.0201
email: lauren@granicus.com I www.granicus.com
Rick Maultra I Director I Telecom &. Video Services Agency Email: rmaultra@indvgov.org I www.indygov.org/tvsa