http://www.urbaninsight.com/articles/nc0709.html

By Chris Steins, Abhijeet Chavan, Kurt Rademaekers, Cate Miller
July 14, 2009

Summary

Can your community reach you through your website? You might be surprised. A recent survey shows that only half of City of Los Angeles neighborhood councils with websites offer information explaining how community residents can participate. This is just one of the findings of a white paper on the usability of neighborhood council websites in the City of Los Angeles prepared by Urban Insight, a professional technology consulting firm.

• Of the 89 neighborhood councils in the City of Los Angeles, 63 (75%) have a website.
• This article examines how the 63 Neighborhood Councils with websites are using web technologies for outreach and communication.
• The authors find that the majority of neighborhood council websites could be used more effectively to communicate with community stakeholders.
• The authors offer a series of recommendations for neighborhood council websites.
  

Background

The City of Los Angeles system of neighborhood councils was created by the city's new charter in 1999 to increase citizen participation in government and provide neighborhoods increased representation in local government decision-making.

Urban Insight is a technology consulting firm based in Los Angeles. In 2009, Urban Insight was hired by the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), one of the City's 89 neighborhood councils, to help this active neighborhood council develop its new website. Separately, Urban Insight was hired by the City of Los Angeles Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE), the Los Angeles city department that coordinates neighborhood councils, to rebuild its own website.

This study was funded solely by Urban Insight in order to understand the state of technology being used by neighborhood councils in the City of Los Angeles, we performed an evaluation of the websites for each of the City's neighborhood councils. We used the City of Los Angeles Department of Neighborhood Empowerment's (DONE) website to identify the website address of each neighborhood council website. We performed our evaluation between April, 2009 and May, 2009.

To collect data, we evaluated each neighborhood council website against 30 criteria that we understand from our work are important for neighborhood council community outreach and communication. Selected criteria we evaluated include existence of a mission statement, meeting agendas, meeting minutes, email notification lists, neighborhood boundary maps, and whether the website is accessible to people with disabilities. The full list of data criteria against which we evaluated neighborhood websites is included as appendix A.