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Feature Article June 12

Feature Article June 12, 2002

LAND O' LAKES NewsWeb Home

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Municipal IT Working Group holds inaugural meetingby Jeff GreenSeveral months ago, Jim Macpherson of the Land' O Lakes Communications Network (LOLCN) received a request from councillor David Hahn, the deputy mayor of South Frontenac, to set up a meeting where various rural municipal officials could discuss the various technological developments that may provide opportunities for the municipalities in the region to improve their operations.On May 30th, a meeting was held in Sharbot Lake that was attended by representatives from South Central, and North Frontenac councils. Other adjacent township councils to the west were invited, and sent their regrets. The meeting was preliminary in nature, but it was an opportunity for the various councils to discuss what they were doing with internet service and what they were planning to do in the future. Half of the meeting was taken up by a presentation from Jim Peden and Jeff Dean from Central Geographic Information Systems (CGIS), of Perth, who have been contracted by Central Frontenac to help implement the 911 service, and to aide the municipality in using the information gathered in setting up the 911 system for all sorts of municipal operations, from tax collection, to processing building permit applications, to making zoning decisions. Peden pointed out, to sympathetic ears, that virtually all the information you (municipalities) handle, is local data. Your staff is asked for thousands of pieces of information, and if that information is accurate, complete, and correct it is undoubtedly maintained locally. Virtually nothing that you use on a day to day basis comes from the Province of the Federal Government." Peden also pointed out that technological solutions only work when a good system is already in place. "If you have a good paper system, you can have a good computer system. Bad paper, bad computer, it's as simple as that." (We will have further information about CGIS in a future issue of the News). The meeting continued with a presentation by Jim MacPherson concerning a Community Portal project that is underway. A community portal is a kind of a regional search engine. The idea is to give people a web site entry point where they can begin to search for all the available information emanating from a region, such as Frontenac County or the Land O'Lakes region, or eastern Ontario as a whole. It would include all municipal websites, provincial parks, information about regional artisans, bed and breakfasts, etc. MacPherson said "potential tourists would like to find out about all the restaurants within a 20 km radius of a Provincial Park, regardless of what township they fall in". The community portal would point to all the other local websites, including municipal sites, that contain information people want. Jim MacPherson also presented some of the municipal websites the various townships were running, and discussed some of the increased uses that were possible, such as downloadable forms, the possibility of having various permits being purchasable online, and other potential developments. At the end of the meeting, the participants agreed to meet again on June 20th to further discuss the possibility of setting up a working group between the municipalities to work on these common issues into the future.

With the participation of the Government of Canada