Community Innovation Challenge Grant
The Town
was
awarded a $46,000 Community Innovation Challenge (CIC) Grant by the
Commonwealth of
Massachusetts in 2012 to increase efficiency in the DPW's centralized
maintenance efforts through the use of field technology, to encourage
public participation in the maintenance of Town assets through the use
of smart phone technology, and to educate the public through
informative web sites on the processes and costs involved in managing
town assets. This web page is dedicated to informing interest
parties of the ongoing efforts to meet the goals of the grant as well
as to describe for other communities the Town of Hanover's progress in
consolidating municipal maintenance services.
The development of the
Hanover DPW's website was a direct result of
this grant. Public works personnel applied for the grant six
months prior to the
Town's transition to centralized maintenance to enhance the Town's
efforts
in delivering high quality operation and maintenance
of all of the Town of Hanover's facilities and infrastructure
as efficiently and transparently as possible.
Through this grant we
hoped to show the work that is completed
each week, the work that is planned, and the cost of operation and
maintenance of each building in an easy to read format.. The
grant funded the expansion of the DPW's work order management system,
the pushing of IT hardware into the field for greater
efficiency, and the integration of the Town's facility and
infrastructure work management systems with the DPW's financial
management systems.
YourGov Smart
Phone Application
The YourGov smartphone
application that we implemented in 2013 as part of the CIC
grant is an an innovative
citizen request application that allows community members to
conveniently report non-emergency issues and
service requests using the web or a smartphone.
Unfortunately the initial implementation did not
meet our expectations due to technical issues on the
DPW's servers that limited the application's availability. The
second generation of the platform which we rolled out on April
1, 2014, is a hosted system that is much more reliable than the
intitial installation. We have reassigned
administrative staff to
handle YourGov requests with the hope of providing better servicing of
requests and better feedback to residents who submit requests.
While this project is in relative infancy, we invite users to
check this page for updates on how the app is progressing.
Lessons
Learned, Platform Updates, and Social Media
Through our work in
building this website we have learned what it takes
to build and maintain a website and have had some setbacks.
We are about to implement the second generation of our
software platform and expect that this will allow us to provide better
access to information for our staff and greater transparency for the
public. We are also working on changes to the format of our
facility pages to provide longer financial history for the public.
In addition, we realized through our initial efforts that we
needed to dedicate staff time to website updates in order to make the
website timely.
One lesson learned by
this project has been that many residents of
Hanover increasingly look to the internet as their primary source of
information. Social media services such as Twitter and
Facebook are often the go to source for information for many
individuals. The information available from these sources can
often be second hand and inaccurate. The Town of Hanover
recognizes this and has
recently reallocated staff time to support interaction with our
residents through such services in addition to delivering news through
traditional media channels. The What's Happening at the
DPW
link on the menu bar to the left is a direct result
of this effort. The link will bring up a page showing
interesting activities of the department. Our goal is to change this
page weekly to keep it interesting for users of this website.
The News,
Notices, and Projects
page will continue to provide a
longer view of activities of the department.
We invite you to watch this website as well as the Town's main website for further development of these activities.
Transparency in Local Government
One of the Hanover DPW's ongoing goals and a primary goal of the CIC grant was to educate the public on what they own, the challenges of operating and maintaining the Town of Hanover's infrastructure, and the cost of operating and maintaining the infrastructure. Government and the people we serve have to make choices every day. We believe that an informed citizenry will make better long-term choices about their community. We have recently added pages for Stormwater and Drinking Water Quality, two large, expensive issues that impact the quality of life in the community. We have also added a Budget and Capital Plan page where we intend to post detailed budget data, including long term history as well as a complete description of our equipment and long term capital needs. Finally, we are working on a DPW Open Data Project page where we will make data available in for people to download and use as they see fit. The work on these pages and these projects are on-going and we invite you to check back often to see our progress.
Developments in Centralized Maintenance
This section is currently under development
Statistics on transparency, the use of technology, and the use of this website
This section
is currently under development.
Please visit the following link for specific details on the
Community Innovation
Grant Program. Grant
Announcement