RichmondWorks: a few friendly suggestions
by Ross Catrow
The little ballyhooed RichmondWorks website launched yesterday. You probably haven’t heard about it unless you read either Jon or John. Based on a program used in Baltimore (CitiStat), RichmondWorks hopes to provide “action, access, and accountability” by collecting and analyzing performance data. Sounds like a great idea — as they say: what has two thumbs and loves government transparency and accountability? THIS GUY!! This is an excellent idea.
Unfortunately, the idea is poorly executed and hardly usable and the data is anemic.
Because I love Richmond more than anyone I’m going to offer some free advice for the RichmondWorks website in a convenient bulleted list format:
- First and most important, open up the database to the public! PLEASE! Give the citizens a way to access the data directly. Let us draw our own conclusions. If it is about transparency you shouldn’t have anything to hide. Plus we could always FoIA it anyway.
- Read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I promise, 2d bars display just as much information as 3d bars.
- Get your own domain. It is easy and costs 8$. You could even do “richmondgov.com/richmondworks.” Whatever you decide make it easy to remember and spell.
- Did I mention you should open up the data? Information wants to be free you know.
- I have yet to see a GIS system that doesn’t suck. Maybe it is good for cave dwelling nerds, but for the rest of us the output is usually unusable. The pothole map is WAY too small to be of any use to a human being.
- Speaking of way too small, when I click on the map to get a “larger view” I get a pdf that isn’t high enough resolution to zoom in. That is worthless and frustrating. (PDF’s usually suck too).
- The meetings are the best part of RichmondWorks. Forcing department heads to answer for their decisions in front of a panel is fantastic. Putting video of these meetings up on the web is even more fantastic. However, people using Firefox can’t open your videos. Supremely annoying.
Hey guys, I realize this is your first go at things, and you also don’t have all the data yet. It’s cool. I’m just saying you could fix a few things and have a much better product.
Actually if you wanted to you could pay me some bucks and we could get together and make a really great website for the citizens of Richmond. Seriously though: shoot me an email.
Yeah, I agree with your bullets. The videos do work if you copy the link, pull out the url and put it into a video player(VLC works on macs). The videos are also high quality, showing the name and title of each person talking and showing the handouts as they talk about them.
Step in the right direction, but I agree, there’s SO much more they could be doing with this and your points are right on the money.
As an aside — Interesting looking reference (the book). Thanks for sharing the tip.
Brenda: you have no idea. That book blew my mind.
Go Ross–one day I may be 1/2 as good in law as you are with the web and presentation. I’ll try to get our firm to hire you to overhaul our website–