Internet portal for R.I. about to swing open

The development of Rhode Island’s Internet portal is on track for a fall launch and according to Brown University, the state has improved its online offerings.

With the launch of Rhode Island’s new e-government Internet portal, which Gov. Lincoln Almond announced in June would be operational this fall, Brown University has released its second annual analysis of e-government, and has found that the Web sites and Internet services of state and federal government agencies have improved significantly during the last year, providing better citizen access to online information and services.

Rhode Island was among the states showing improvement over last year, ranking 44th on the list. Last year, the Ocean State ranked 50th.

According to Howard Boksenbaum, chief technology officer for the state of Rhode Island, the idea for a centralized government portal to link the state’s government agencies with one another as well as to their citizens, has been discussed for several years. Detailed planning for the portal began in earnest last October.

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In June, the state announced it had chosen the National Information Consortium (NIC) to build and manage its Internet portal.

Rhode Island signed a five-year agreement on June 25 with New England Interactive, an NIC subsidiary that also operates the official government portal for the State of Maine. NIC will provide the infrastructure and staff expertise required to develop, maintain and host the e-government portal, while the state of Rhode Island will retain ownership of the content, data and statutory fees.

Boksenbaum said Rhode Island will benefit from New England Interactive’s experience in building other state portals.

“What we can do vis a vis the other 12 states the computer company has worked with is replicate the computer code,” he said. “It will not be cost-free, but it will be easier for us to put into place.”

But Boksenbaum said that while Rhode Island is looking to other states for models and ideas for the portal, “we’re making sure we have a unique Rhode Island look and feel.”

The focus, he said, is on the services needed by Rhode Islanders first. While the state may be new to the idea of a centralized portal for online information, it is not new to the need for comprehensive and content-rich Web sites. Many of Rhode Island’s government sites have been vastly improved or expanded in the past year, such as the state’s new search engine, Find-It! Rhode Island, which debuted last fall.

In the development of the portal, Boksenbaum said his development team has looked to some of the state’s existing Web sites to determine the most commonly used pages and the most frequently asked questions.

The goal for the new portal, Boksenbaum said, is to eventually provide Rhode Islanders with the capability of creating their own personalized Web pages, which could include bills or proposals they are interested in following and news items, as well as the capability to pay traffic tickets online and renew drivers’ licenses and fishing licenses, among many other services.

“Whatever interaction people are having with the state now, we hope we’ll be able to offer those services online,” said Boksenbaum.

Part of the mission of the new portal will be “improving quality of life. Whatever people’s relationship with the government, we want to make it easier for them to do that.”

The new portal will also mean that the state’s workers will be able to carry out their job functions with more ease, and cut out a significant amount of paperwork. For example, Boksenbaum said, the state requires 19 permits to obtain a business license in Rhode Island. The new system will route applications electronically directly to the individuals who need to review them, and enable them to respond to applicants via e-mail.

The URL for the site will be http://www.ri.gov.

The cost of the portal, Boksenbaum said, will be offset by nominal convenience fees and transaction fees for online services.

“No later than December 2001 – this is a vow – we will have access for driver records,” said Boksenbaum.

The records will be for use by insurance companies for policy applications, and will be followed by such services as professional licenses, vehicle registrations and voter registrations.

Darrell M. West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University, and a team of public policy students examined 1,680 sites and evaluated the variety and quality of the electronic services they offered. The team ranked those sites on a 100-point scale based on information and service availability, quality of citizen access, and amount of useful material that would help citizens hold leaders accountable.

Of the sites evaluated, 1,621 were state government sites (an average of 32 per state), 45 were federal legislative or executive sites, and 13 were federal court sites.

“It was surprising and encouraging to see how rapidly the e-government landscape is changing and how much an individual state or agency can improve in a relatively short time span,” West said. “In the space of a year, states like Indiana, Tennessee, Maine, Arkansas and Montana have risen past 20 or more other states in terms of the quality and variety of online services they provide. States that merely maintained their status quo often lost ground in the rankings. The bar is constantly moving higher.”

West and Taubman Center researchers released their first study – an analysis of 1,813 state and federal government Web sites – in September 2000. Financial support for both projects was provided by Brown University.

The top-ranking state site was Indiana, followed closely by Michigan, Texas, Tennessee and Washington. The states achieving the lowest rankings were New Hampshire, Alabama and Wyoming.

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