Imagine that you are a fisherman who has to get a fishing license from your government, and after planning your day around the four-hour round-trip drive into town and back to fill out the paperwork, you discover that the office is closed today... which you had no way of knowing because the phone number for the office on the government web site was wrong and had not been updated for months, because it required web editing skills to update the site, and nobody in the office knew how to edit web pages. Up until last month, that was the situation in the island nation of Saint Lucia, who recently unveiled the 1.0 release of ‘Our Government,’ an updated web site that enables residents and visitors to read up-to-date news, learn about government services, download various forms, and get current information on the several hundred offices and agencies run by the Government of Saint Lucia. Unlike the old government web site, the new site is completely database driven, and updatable by the appropriate government employees with no knowledge of HTML or web authoring required. In addition to the main site for the government in general, the system also hosts separate sites for the dozen or so ministries, as well as their Prime Minister and Governor General. All of the content and other data published to the site can be tagged to appear on any combination of the sites, based on its relevance. While the 1.0 release is targeted for larger devices like web browsers, future releases will likely add interfaces optimized for mobile devices (the smart phone penetration is over 90%) and features like online form data entry and transaction processing. I am posting this because I was the sole architect and programmer of the system, and for me, this represents the latest (and most likely to be used on an ongoing basis) incarnation of a simple idea that I have been trying to realize for almost 20 years – the use of online technology to help improve the quality of life / information / services for populations historically left out of major advances in society. This was the idea behind the online communities I launched way before folks knew how to use them in 1996 and 2002 for the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan (yes I still own the domains and no I have no plans to sell them), and frankly, I am pretty psyched to have built something that I can reasonably expect to help improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of Saint Lucians who today are just a few clicks away from getting information they need which might have taken them a day or more to get just a couple of months ago. The ‘Our Government’ portal is located at govt.lc.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 17:10:38 +0000
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