City reaches out
on the World Wide Web

Austin is on the cutting edge of U.S. cities providing reams of in-depth information on the World Wide Web, and plans are afoot to expand the Web connection to bill paying and service scheduling.

by Rick Brown

We doubt if there are many people desperate for a little more information on the City Council, but an easy way to check municipal job listings or ask a question about utility service is another matter entirely.

That information and more -- much more -- comes down line from Austin City Connection, the city's World Wide Web site, and its close to 300 web pages.

Useful as some of its facts are, we suspect the most important aspect of the connection, which went up in late February, is its promise for the future.

One of the first tangible outgrowths of the city's young Internet Task Force, Austin City Connection is also central in accomplishing the task force's mission.

That simply-stated mission, incidentally, is also up for all to peruse on Austin City Connection: To "Use the Internet to connect people to information, services and people."

Task Force co-chair Becky Gadell says the connection in the future will develop into a clearing house for services, helping residents with everything from re-checking their library books to paying their electric bills.

In fact, Becky foresees a time when utility customers will actually schedule their electric service through the connection, browning out their residences during the day to save money, for example, and bringing power back up when they come home at night.

An expanded, city-wide job bank that lists openings beyond the municipal work now on line is in the works.

Becky acknowledges that a lot of her predictions are dependent on the future direction of the Web, and in particular, establishment of a more secure means of sending credit card and bank account numbers and the like across data lines.

That problem remains punctuated by a huge question mark, as it involves such sticky questions as how intimately we want officialdom to see into our personal lives in the name of "security."

But Becky and a lot of other experts are confident an equitable solution will come to fruition in the next two years, so the groundwork laid now with Austin City Connection should ease the Austin's way into a great, big, beautiful tomorrow of high-tech convenience.

Dick Lillquist, director of the City-County Communication and Marketing Association (a.k.a. 3CMA), a Washington, D.C.-based association of local governments, says Austin is among a couple of dozen cities nationwide at the forefront of this emerging technology.

Dick is quick to warn cities against fostering an elitist society "where only people who have access to PCs have all the information," but he credits Austin's task force with making a good start toward a better end.

Sue Beckwith, in her newly-created role as city universal access project manager, is researching ways to bring terminals and Internet access to libraries, community centers, housing projects and other public spaces.

"The city has an obligation to see what we can do to make services equitably available," she says.

As Austin City Connection stands now, it's no waste of time and effort. Need a specific phone number and the blue pages are out of reach? They're all there. Got a question about the City Charter? All twelve articles and the Appendix A on the charter amendment procedure are at your fingertips.

Also on line are meeting schedules, including that of the important Council Committee for Telecommunications Infrastructure, plus guides to city-county health clinics, a tourist guide for out-of-towners, directions on curb-side recycling, etc., etc., etc.

Getting the Austin City Connection up and running took the intense efforts of about 25 city staffers from virtually all corners of city government. The group holed up for three weeks in Trask House, a hundred-year-old historic landmark now wired for fiber optics, to complete the work.

Trask House, which hosted two dozen or so municipal experts and consultants while they designed the city's massive web site, is a historic landmark wired for fiberoptics.

To get the project going, the city let a $10,000 bid to Texas Internet Consulting, which dealt with hardware and security issues, and Go Media, which designed the web page structure and provided graphics.

Rachel Matthews of says the company's graphic design work goes about two pages deep from each of the links on the site's main page.

Since programming a page in html language is a fairly easy trick, according to Rachel, the bulk of Go Media's time outside of graphic design was spent on developing the structure of links.

The resulting 300-odd-page "information infrastructure" is a trivia buff's delight.

Aside from the dozens of little known facts, we were happy to find one page devoted to City Manager Jesus Garcia, a man we know little about.

We can understand that Garcia might want to maintain a low profile after the heated and visible leaving-taking of his predecessor, Camille Barnett, more than a year ago in connection with management questions at Brackenridge Hospital.

But now that Garcia is unmasked, we're glad to know him better.