by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
There’s a new feature on the City’s Web site, www.coj.net.
Tuesday, Mayor John Peyton launched his new, “Great Ideas Grow Great Cities” button on the home page.
When citizens go the site and click on the “Great Ideas” icon, they will be linked to the mayor’s page and a form that can be completed to submit an idea. Suggestions will be forwarded to administrators and planners.
In order to be considered, an idea has to conform to several guidelines:
• It should focus on the future of Jacksonville and ways to make the city better.
• It should affect the entire community, not just a specific neighborhood.
• It should support existing functions and not expand the role of government.
• Ideas must also follow one or more of Peyton’s guiding principles of increasing economic opportunity, early literacy, public safety or infill housing, enhancing quality of life or streamlining government.
“This is another way for citizens to communicate their hopes, desires and wishes and a way for us to respond to them,” said Web Content Manager Dennis Frobish.
A team of about a dozen Web editors from a variety of City departments worked for more than a month to develop the new link and its animated graphics, including one that depicts the city’s skyline growing out of the ground.
”Information is critical to running a democracy. The mayor believes the people have great ideas, but they need a conduit for those ideas,” said Frobish.
“We want to tap into the collective consciousness of the community and we don’t want to lose any great ideas.”
Idea submitters must provide their e-mail and postal mailing addresses and they will receive a personal response.
“Within a couple of days, they will get an e-mail telling them which department their idea was forwarded to for evaluation. It doesn’t just go into cyberspace. A division chief or department head will take a look at every idea. After a couple of weeks, they (the person who submitted the idea) will get a specific follow-up response to their idea via regular mail from the staff person who evaluated it,” said Frobish.
He also said the City’s web site is currently visited an average of 250,000 times a month. He added that number will probably increase and, “I’ll be surprised if we don’t get some new great ideas that will change Jacksonville for the better.”