AGENDA #8
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TO: |
Roger L. Stancil, Town Manager |
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FROM: |
Bob Avery, Information Technology Department Director |
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SUBJECT: |
Intern Or Temporary Salary For Website Development |
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DATE: |
April 18, 2007 |
The purpose of this report is to request funding in the FY 2007-2008 Budget for intern or temporary employee salary to support website development.
The Town of Chapel Hill has several web resources that represent the Town’s web presence. The Town’s principal web site is hosted by CivicPlus, Inc. This site acts as a portal to information hosted on CivicPlus servers and to other information resources which include Town Hall servers and two separate web sites for the Library and Parks and Recreation services.
The CivicPlus-based web site was developed in 2005 and has enabled the Town to consolidate many departmental web sites into one. Although this has been an effective transformation for most of the Town’s web resources, there are a number of initiatives that require internal document and information management controls that cannot be achieved through the CivicPlus process.
One of the resources that has been very useful to both public and staff is the access to all of the documents and attachments associated with Council agenda items. This repository of information is extensive and is not easily converted to a manageable resource using the web tools available in commercially hosted applications.
There are new web site features and capabilities the Town would like to introduce including credit card payments for such items as Parks and Recreation activities, interaction with citizens, and searching all Town web-related information in a single query. These require major changes to our web architecture.
The initial steps to retool the Town’s web presence are aimed at the internal software processes needed to accomplish the changes. There are other steps needed to convert all hosting to an internally controlled process. For example, commercially hosted resources do provide certain benefits that are not easily duplicated by the Town. Commercial operations provide round-the-clock staff to maintain Internet services, web servers, and security management. Thus the changes to the Town’s web presence will be developed and implemented in phases. Phase one is to develop the software tools and procedures internal to the Town and to train Town staff to be proficient in web document publishing and related document management standards.
To begin this process, the Information Technology Department is seeking support for interns and, if needed, temporary workers to develop the software tools needed. The goal is to develop the tools using open source software and standards based document formatting.
We have discussed our objectives with the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and have gained their approval to use graduate students as interns in a manner that would allow the students to use the work time to meet some of their academic course requirements. We are currently advertising within the School for interns to work through the summer to begin this program. The funding being sought for this project ($21,500) will enable the program to continue through the 2007-2008 school year.
That the Council include $21,500 in the FY 2007-2008 budget to support intern and temporary personnel salary for web development.