I am Andy Bulfer and I am chair of the Borough Web Committee.  Other members of the Committee are Clive Knowles, Mark Watrous, and Nilesh Shringapure.  Our Council liaison is Peter Holmburg.  With the exception of Peter, we all have technology backgrounds and have been doing this for quite a while so we know what we're doing.

You asked us to discuss with you three things:

• How the website has evolved
• How we expect it to evolve in the next 3-5 years,
• What resources and support will be required in that interval.

Predicting the future is really hard, especially in the realm of technology.  But we're going to give it a try.

The website was started in November 1999 at the request of the Borough Council.  Since then it has grown into a very large complex site.  There are over 4400 files on it now and we deliver an average of over 1500 pages per day or about 47 thousand per month.  We actually deliver more like 2700 pages a day but 1200 per day are search engine bots from Google, Bing, Yahoo and many others that are used to index the web.  The Web Committee excludes them from our overall statistics.

The community Notice Board on the front page is one or our most popular features.  We started it in 2005 and it has really grown.  We now average about 20 community notices per month.  At one point earlier this year there were 33 notices on the board.

We started putting Borough legal notices on in 2007.  One reason was the expectation of saving the Borough some money if the legislature permitted using the web exclusively for notices.  That hasn't happened yet but it still might in the future.

The central image on the front page usually features scenes from Mountain Lakes, both old and new.  We change it every few weeks.  We have also used that section occasionally for important community announcements like a significant death, returning hero servicemen, or a request for volunteers.  Right now there's a slide show of photos of the stonework in ML.  Many appeared in the history book but only in black and white.

We've had Borough Council agendas and minutes since 2005 and minutes for many commissions and committees too.

The broadcast e-mail system was initially proposed by the Web Committee to the Borough Council on June 11, 2007 and the first message was sent on August 12, 2009.  A large percentage of the town has subscribed.  Borough Hall sends out about one message a month.  It is currently used only for important Borough Hall news which we on the Web Committee feel is unfortunate.  We think it should have wider scope such as community events.  It wouldn't cost much, just bits and bytes.

The History section has been very popular and we think a big part of the reason that awareness of the town's history is so high.  The oral histories make fascinating reading.

The Web Committee recently installed an audio walking tour of the town developed by the HPC.  If you download the files to your audio device, you can walk around the route and listen to descriptions of key landmarks just like in museums.  We have arranged for the walking tour to be carried by the Apple iTunes store so if you own an iPod, iPhone, or iPad, you can easily download the walking tour from Apple just like you download music.  Interestingly if you go to iTunes there are a number of walking tours on there including New York City, Greenwich Village , Santa Barbara, historic Charleston, historic Savannah, and historic Mountain Lakes...  There are others too.

Initially the Web Committee created and hosted pages for most organizations and churches in town.  Now most do their own although we still do the Garden Club, the League of Women Voters, the Swimming Association and UN weekend.  We also host the Town Club although they have a password and manage it themselves.

Trying to figure out direction for the next 5 years is tough.  The Committee decided to approach it from 3 directions.  First we tried to look at the direction from the state government.  Next we looked at a sample of other town websites to identify features that we don't have.  Finally, we obtained a copy of the Borough Council's own priorities and objectives and brainstormed on how the website could help with them.

First, Trenton.  We identified 5 bills which we considered directionally important. 

The first is S2765 and its identical companion A3898; they're also known as the Beck/Buono bill.  It doesn't apply to municipalities, only to authorities and commissions which reduces the unfunded mandate objections.

There are something like 566 municipalities in New Jersey ranging from Newark with a population of 278,000 to Tavistock, in Camden County with a population 5.  There are 160 smaller than Mountain Lakes so you can imagine how well unfunded website mandates will ever go over.  Nevertheless, it may be only a matter of time before the legislature applies at least some of the S2765 requirements to municipalities.

You can see here that our website has most of what is required.

We have the adopted budget for only the last 2 years but by next spring, we'll have 3.  We don't have the actual audits but we have summaries written by the Borough Clerk for the last 2 years and by next year we'll have 3 for them as well.

We don't have anything like a comprehensive financial report and don't even know what the equivalent is for municipalities if any other than the full audit.

We're not lawyers and don't know what they mean by "Committees".  The website has agendas and minutes for the planning board and zoning boards and minutes for many but not all of the remaining commissions.  If they mean Borough Council committees such as Personnel or Finance, we don't have them.

Finally the website doesn't have a full list of employees but that would be easy enough to do if we got the data from Borough Hall and they commit to keeping it up to date.  We do have a list of the police dept.

Two other bills that you should know are S2072 and A3529.  We don't know if they are going anywhere, probably not.  But like Beck/Buono, they are directional.

We don't know how many of the 566 have websites but the Web Committee picked out a sample of small and medium size relatively high-end towns and looked at their websites.  This is a list of some of the features we found that our site doesn't have.

Our site does have "pay your tax bill on line" but we wonder how well it's used because when we looked at it, we found the description on our website to be really terrible, inaccurate and incomplete.  It makes it sound very expensive.  The description has been there a long time.  As soon as we get the go-ahead from Dana Mooney, we're going to fix it and hopefully get more usage.

Another interesting one is video of Borough Council meetings.  Several websites we surveyed have it.  On the one hand it's REALLY, REALLY bad television and really boring too -- they usually just put a video camera in the back of the room and turn it on -- the council members are distant, there is no zooming or panning, it's hard to tell who's talking, and people presenting to the council have their backs turned to the camera.  On the other hand, you get to see all the discussion and everything that went on, not just what's in the minutes which is a legal document that serves a different purpose.  So, in the interest of communication and transparency, it might be worthwhile.

Also regarding video, Denville has a committee of video enthusiasts who go around taking videos of town events and putting it on YouTube.  They also have a weekly time slot on Cablevision's public access channel where they show their video.  There are 425 videos about Mountain Lakes NJ on YouTube, mainly sports footage, stuff about Lionel trains, and videos from realtors about properties for sale.  Just having an index of them on the website might be useful, although I'm not sure how we'd implement it and keep it up to date.

We also took the Borough Council's priorities and objectives for 2011 and tried to come up with ways the website could help.

We already have "pay your taxes on-line".  We should think about extending it to paying your water bills/sewer bills on line too.  If Munitrax, our vendor, can't do it, Cit-e-net which the other sites use apparently can.

We have a couple of items here under Administrative.  We already have some features that users can update themselves: uploading agendas and minutes, inputting Notice Board items, a headline message on the Rec page.  We possibly could do more with a Content Management System, such as permitting the Rec director to administer the entire Rec page herself.

There are several items under Communication.  As I mentioned, we think Broadcast News should be expanded to include Community Events.  We don't know why it doesn't now.  It would only cost more bits and bytes.

Establishing a Twitter feed was such a no-brainer we just went ahead and did it.  For those of you who don't know, Twitter is like broadcast e-mail for text messages.  You put in a text message and everyone on your list gets it.  The messages are called "tweets" and they must be short, no more than 140 characters.  The people on your list are called "followers" and they have to add themselves, you can't do it for them.  Our id is @mtnlakesnj.  It's simple to subscribe: you just send a text message to 40404 saying follow mtnlakesnj.  You can also do it on the Twitter website.  We tweet every Notice Board notice and have been doing so since mid-July.  Twitter doesn't really give us a way to tell how many followers we have; there's a number,4 on our page but that doesn't include everyone.  We haven't advertised it much yet and few people know about it.

A corollary is we could also give Borough Hall the password and let them send Broadcast News messages, splitting each one into items and editing each down to 140 characters.

Another thing we could do, possibly in combination with the above is have multiple Broadcast News feeds by topic, say one for sports, one for community organizations, events, borough news, and so on.

The final one is a potential game-changer.  We're proposing to set up blog for the Borough Council.  It would have a periodic posting like the mayor's letter in the Home and School Bulletin describing things going on and plans and issues.  Then people in the community could comment.  Everyone could see the original posting and the comments and the comments on the comments.  Many news sites have this feature.  The postings wouldn't be restricted to once a month, it could be anytime.  Like maybe after every council meeting.  And it wouldn't be restricted to the mayor: any councilman could post and the Borough Manager too.  They could also post rebuttals or comments on the comments.

In his most recent letter, the mayor said "We welcome input from the community regarding the department and your level of service satisfaction." But there is no real way for the community to do it.  This would be the way.

If it's done right, you could begin to have a real conversation with the community.  Of course, like the news sites, there will be plenty of gadflies and plenty of idiots, I'm afraid we'll just have to put up with them.

This is a slide that shows in qualitative terms how hard each of these things will be for the Web Committee and for Borough Council and Borough Hall.  And qualitatively how much funding will be required.

These are just informed guesses.  None of the items have been studied in depth.  Most of the items we're pretty sure aren't hard for the Web Committee.  We marked the blog and CMS as dark because although they're very doable, we haven't studied them and aren't sure exactly how we'd implement them or what's involved.  They might not be as much work as we think.

Notice there is a LOT of black under Borough Hall.  Borough Hall runs lean and this could be a deal-breaker.  If we try to undertake these items, a serious commitment from Borough Hall will be required.

Only a few have cost implications.  A video camera and tripod.  Possibly additional cost at Munitrax.

In summary, we have a long list of possibilities.  Some require more study.  Most will require more effort from Borough Hall which could be a problem.  From our vantage point, Borough Hall simply doesn't appear to be staffed to undertake them.

We'd recommend picking some from the list and encapsulating them into a long-term website plan.  We shouldn't try to do them all at once.  The plan MUST include the resource impact at Borough Hall.

That's all I have.

Thank you.