Recent Work

« Prev Next »

How to find the excitement in "local government efficiency"

I'll grant you the first time I heard the term local government efficiency, it mustered the same level of excitement as unsalted, steamed broccoli. Sure it sounds like it'd be good for me...I'll have the hot dog.

But whenever you have a client that is passionate about something, so much so that they devote their every resource to it, it's easy get to excited. Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress focuses on improving the our quality of life in our area. One of the ways they do that is by zeroing in on the efficiency of local governments. That's good for you, like broccoli.

In tackling this issue, Jonathan Drapkin, Pattern's President and CEO, and an avid scanner of the media for any coverage of anything that makes local governments work better, determined that a single a resource for the region that compiled and organized this information and presented best practices could be an invaluable resource to public servants and residents alike.

The Local Government Efficiency Tracker was born, and this is where it starts getting exciting. For us at least.

Taking an excellent foundation fostered by the firm Development Seed, we built a website that tracks specified subject matter in the media, automatically categorizing that information both by topic and geography. Those topics include shared services, schools, municipal finance and grants in the ten counties of the Mid and Lower Hudson Valley, with some examples from national and international media as well.

These stories can be browsed by topic. They can also be found on a geo-coded map. We imported regional geographical locations from the US National Geological Survey (17,000 in all), and the website scans articles it imports for geographic information and maps those stories appropriately. They then show as clickable hot spots.

So that Pattern can save stories it finds particularly important, we gave them the ability to archive them to a Best Practices category with a single click.

The Tracker is free to use. We also happen to think it's pretty easy.

And just to be clear, we realize that we're as wonky about website development as Pattern is about local government efficiency. Maybe that's why we like them.

You can visit this latest website here »