My buddy Ian has a great post about his experience trying to find out if he had to move his car. Seems the DOT updates this info on Twitter rather than putting it out on their own website.
Now that’s just crazy, but I know why. Sam used to work for the city and I’ve heard some stories about trying to get things done there. Â The municipal IT department is paid below average wages, there are no negative incentives like being let go, and they are given no positive incentives like promotions or bonuses. Â IT at the city seems to be a job that you take and show up for until you collect your pension.
So it isn’t that this is a bad strategy, it’s just that the city is so completely incompetent at IT that they can’t even put in a CMS. Therefore, private sources have built really good communication tools that are actually working. It sucks that the city can’t do IT, but it is good that they are doing what it takes to help people know. Twitter is a single point of failure, it falls over all the time, but at least it has RSS feeds and it’s open for anyone to read. I think the city should do better, I just don’t know that they can.
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Sad to hear that about the city's IT, though I guess not unexpected given the results I was looking at; they didn't even have a link to the twitter page from the official calendar page so people would know here to look for the updated information.
I agree it is good that the city is getting this information out there, I just wish the city weren't relinquishing all its responsibilities for communication with citizens into the hands of a third party.
When I wanted to send an announcement it'd take me plus my boss, Communications, Legal and IT (to just send it) and everyone had changes to be made, of course. It'd take about a week to send anything out. I'm actually really amazed anyone managed to get through the red tape to get a twitter account.