The Country' s First City to Publicize Information with the Use of the Web
Alleviating Updating Tasks through the Installation of CMS[1]Komae City, Tokyo Metropolis

Hold-ups with Web Production Generated Many Complaints from Residents and Council

Komae City's Freedom of Information Ordinance was enacted in April 2004. Amidst a tendency for many local authorities to restrict requests for revealing documents to local residents alone, we accept a great many requests from people who are not resident in the city. We set up the city's first official web site in October of the same year. At the beginning this site provided details on the mayor's official itinerary and the titles, dates, affiliated sections and other details on public documentation and information. After this we began an active campaign to reveal additional public information.

Mayor Yutaka Yano, who was elected mayor in 1996 to replace the previous mayor who retired, was very active is publicizing his daily movements through the medium of an official duty diary and exacted the Freedom of Information Ordinance as promised in his election manifesto. Having established our web site in 2000, we began to publicize the official duty diary and information on public documentation in order to provide more transparency with regard to city administration. The reasons why we were able to publicize archive information so smoothly on our web site was because of the leadership displayed by the mayor and because we went ahead with this task after having created a database of public documentation as part of a governmental grant-aided project.

However, all we had posted at this stage was information on documentation. It was not possible to transmit city information over a widespread area with this web site, which was specialized for publicizing information. Having seen the list of documents on the site, neither local residents nor members of the council would understand it had been posted and also complained that updating tasks took too long. Of course, complains about a web site that had no search function or function to request public records are to be expected.

As the main objective was to publicize information, the section in charge of the web site operation was the Archives Section of the General Administration Division (later changed to the Information Section.) We had no choice other than sub-contracting the development of the site to an outside company, as we had no staff members who had any experience in coding HTML or any of the other technical experience required to produce a web site. With the exception of a small part of the mayor's official duty itinerary, the site was updated four times per year as a basic policy.

The cost of sub-contracting the work outside was expensive, and there was no system in place to determine what should be publicized in what order it should be publicized. Motoaki Shiratori, the person in charge of setting up the web site in the Archives Section (currently a supervisor in the Tax Collection Section of the Citizens' Division,) admits that they had come up against a brick wall; "Just preparing for an update was an enormous task, and we were overstretched right from the start." Simply making the preparations for four annual updates took the entire time, and it was impossible to even think of expanding the contents or increasing the number of updates at that time.

It was during this period of hold-ups that they first learned of the web Contents Management System (CMS). This is a useful piece of software that allows a web site to be updated simply by adding the text and images to templates that had been previously prepared. This was an age in which the keywords that are now widely used by local authorities had yet to become generalized, such as "accessibility" that provides a web environment to enable anybody, even elderly people and disabled people, to easily obtain information, and "usability" that provides an environment in which targeted contents can be easily obtained without relying on a web browser.

The element that triggered this off was the Uchida Yoko Co., Ltd., which is a company involved in office furniture and information systems. Well-versed in the fields of local governance and education, a representative from this company suggested that we regenerate our official web site with a CMS product the company dealt in known as AssetNow. As AssetNow is ready-made packaged software that is available on the open market, the total costs involved in license fees, data migration and training, etc., were not that expensive.

CMS allowed the people in charge of all divisions in the City Hall to upload information to the web site directly. This eradicated the conventional drawn out process of the people in the City Hall creating the data and then delivering to the person in charge of site updates in the Archives Section, who then sent it out to the person in charge of web site production in the outside company, who then uploaded it to the site. We had finally discovered a method of not only reducing the workload of people in the Archives Section, but also of solving the problem of delayed updates and insufficient information about which local residents were complaining. This provided us with a huge advantage.