Happy Easter everyone! The metaphor of the Easter egg is apt, since the authors and the readership of this blog keep finding nuggets of information buried in the various tomes CHSRA has compiled over the years. To its credit, the Authority has published them on the web for anyone to download. In some cases, it has reformatted documents to make individual chapters easier to download, but there is always room for improvement.
In particular, we have moved beyond the campaign phase leading up to the November election to the project-level EIR/EIS process. This is the period during which the decisions regarding how the route will be implemented city-by-city, county-by-county will be made. The objective is to seek comments on what alternatives should be studied, but many members of the public are still bewildered by this legally required but bureaucratic process.
I'd like to focus the discussion on this particular thread narrowly on CHSRA's web site, i.e. on the scope and modalities of its online communications and their place in the planning process going forward. Please think of this as a brainstorming session with each comment a Post-It - or tweet, if you prefer - that only has room for one succinct idea or response to one contributed by someone else. This will help me summarize the thread so I can send your collective input/feedback to CHSRA in a format they can choose to utilize.
Here's a list of questions to get the ball rolling:
- Do you consider the web to be CHSRA's primary tool for communicating with the general public?
- Should the entire CHSRA web site be bilingual (English and Spanish)?
- Which resources on the web site have you found useful to date?
- Which do you consider gimmicks at this point?
- What were you able to find easily?
- What took a lot of digging?
- What were you not able to find?
- Does the web site need a dedicated search tool?
- What took too long to download for your liking?
- Should old versions of documents remain available forever?
- Were you able to obtain official information from CHSRA in another way?
- Was it easy to reference information you obtained in e.g. blog comments?
- Is the status of the project and its many components articulated clearly enough?
- Is the status of CHSRA's planning integration with other government agencies articulated clearly enough?
- Do you have specific requests for fresh text or multimedia content, including audio recordings?
- Do you have specific requests for additional resources and links to tools that would allow you to create sketches or other content yourself?
- Should CHSRA host a public discussion forum, blog or similar?
- Should CHSRA provide a means of uploading reader content or links to web resources that it may choose to publish after review?
- Should CHSRA maintain a list of or links to job openings, including those at consultants it has hired to work on the project?
- Where would you expect/want others to look for this fresh content on the CHSRA web site?
- When would you like CHSRA to publish it, relative to dates on its calendar?
- For how long should it be considered "fresh"?
- How would you like CHSRA to keep improving its web-based communications going forward?
- Would you consider it taxpayer money well spent if CHSRA hired a team dedicated to supporting its web site?
- Should CHSRA have a formal customer service desk with tracking etc. that would - within reason - ferret out or create specific project-related content (e.g. page references, excerpts, sketches, sound recordings, Google Sketchup 3D models)?
- What's missing from this list?
