At least Peter the Great didn't have to deal with blog envy
In the first decades of the 18th century, Tsar Peter the Great dragged Russia against its will into what was then the modem age.
In the 21st, Springfield Township Commissioner Doug Heller is trying to do the same thing in Springfield.
Forgive the hyperbole. Heller's plans don't include anything nearly as grandiose as building a new capital city in a frozen swamp and naming it after himself. All he wants to do is update the Springfield Township Web site, but that is proving daunting enough.
The first step in what would seem to be a simple process is to hire a Web site designer which requires issuing of a request for proposals. Any designers who are interested will answer the ad, and the township commissioners will invite them in to show off what they can do.
When the commissioners brought up the RFP for discussion at their workshop meeting Monday, a quick review of a simple, pro forma procedure turned into a rambling discussion about just what the web site was for, who could post to it and who would maintain it, and for how much.
Heller has an advantage. He designs and maintains Web sites for a living, but some of his fellow commissioners, like many of us in middle age, suffer from acute tech anxiety. "None of us knows what we're talking about," Commissioner Bob Gullies said at one point. He was joking, but the joke revealed the difficulty of grasping something as intangible as the Net.
The problem begins with basic modes of thinking. Gillies works in construction, and he is accustomed to solid objects that occupy three-dimensional space. This mindset makes a valuable member of the board of commissioners in calculating the costs and benefits of the things townships ordinarily do, like pave roads or levy taxes.
Going over Heller's description, in the RFP, of the features the new Web design should have, Gillies asked — reasonably, given his reality — if the township could save money by cutting out a few.
In the material world of country clubs and housing developments, if you ask for something extra, like landscaping or a driveway, you know you will have to pay extra for it. In a Web design, Heller said, the features listed in the RFP are standard, and the price does not change with the number of them.
"This isn't one of those things where you get what you pay for, necessarily," Heller said. "It's a whole new world."
That was the first surprise. The second, which drew a whistle from the solid-object members of the board, was Heller's statement that different designers charge anywhere from a couple thousand dollars to a quarter of a million for the same work. The profession is so new that the pricing has not stabilized yet, Heller said, and many tech-geeks undervalue their own work.
The discussion bogged down on the topic of blogs, one of the features Gillies suggested could be excised from the RFP. Giving each commissioner a blog on the township Web site, he said, would be tantamount to creating seven partisan forums with taxpayers' money.
Commissioner James Dailey worried about the township's liability if members of the public should post libelous or obscene comments, whereas Commissioners Glen Schaum and Baird Standish wondered about the repercussions if a commissioner decides not to keep a blog at all.
If some commissioners do blog — yes, it's a verb — and some don't, the public may regard those who don't as somehow failing to fulfill their duties. Standish said he had neither the time nor the interest to become a blogger, and Schaum said he is not a good enough writer to post regularly.
He coined a term to describe the psychological condition of commissioners with less proficient Web skills — "blog envy."
Heller read a statistic from the Pew Research Center stating that 29 percent of Americans visit their municipal governments online, but only 16 percent of those are satisfied with the information they find there.
He sees a new Springfield site as a two-way public forum, but the combination of tech anxiety and blog envy could create a collective mental block on the board of commissioners, delaying the fulfillment of that vision indefinitely.