In This Issue:

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May 10 PA PowerPort Stakeholders Meeting

Media Link Sites

Average Web User Info

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May 10 PA PowerPort Stakeholders Meeting

After attending the state's Stakeholder Meeting in Harrisburg in May 10th, it appears that the PowerPort proposal is about as publicly defined today as it was three months ago when proposed. The state's "demonstration" amounted to 5 or 6 powerpoint slides. In general, the information available in the meeting was no more than has been reported in the news media prior, and uncomfortably vague, with a few exceptions.

There was a group of between 30 and 40 people, representing business and probably close to 10 state government officials.

The State deserves some credit for holding these Stakeholder Meetings, and offering them as a forum for discussion of the PowerPort proposal. Some.

But... it was clear that there needs to be a LOT more public and accessible information provided by the State on this proposal on a very regular basis. There wasn't a whole lot of new information available. Again - why isn't there an official state web site with information about the State Portal? Why not provide online meetings? Why are the meetings that are held by invitation?

The state STILL does not have a web site or developed communications plan for this whole project. It's VERY odd that a plan that is supposed to provide e-government does not have a substantive web presence for informing the public. The state should make this a first priority, since the lack of official information is a disservice to all of us in the industry - and completely contrary to the stated goal of "e-government". There are too many people too deeply invested in their businesses to take a leap of faith that the state's going to do well without providing regular - maybe even daily - updates on their activity.

Another interesting statement was that the first stakeholders meeting on PA PowerPort was held in early 1999. Who knew about that?

There will be two more Stakeholder Meetings, tentatively planned for Pittsburgh and Lehigh Valley in early June - the dates mentioned were June 7th and 8th. For further information, or possible inclusion, we suggest you e-mail either

Megan Neuhard
Megan_Neuhard@DCED.STATE.PA.US

or

George White
gwhite@state.pa.us

for details of when and where. They may not be thrilled that we've given out their e-mail addresses, but they are the folks responsible for these meetings.

Some other pieces of news from the meeting:

It looks the PowerPort "commercial" components may be delayed until September. Hard to say what parts will be delayed at this point, but that was the general drift of the discussion on release plans. Again, somewhat vague.

How e-mail, web site construction, stocks, news, etc., will work from the PA PowerPort is still pretty much unknown.

Near the end of the meeting, the question of the web site development directory came up. Very sketchy, vague information about how that's going to work at this time. However, the State mentioned that there may have to be a "sanitizing process" of the Web Developers listed for inclusion on the portal's directory. This sanitizing process would probably be done by a third party - such as a state university - to determine the abilities, financial sturdiness, and experience of the web developers to be listed. Someone in the audience actually suggested that the state charge a fee for inclusion.

Standards? Sanitizing? Fees? Starting to sound like a regulatory process?

There appears to be a lot of pressure on the state to do the PowerPort, mostly from large technology companies that want to sell services to the state (and others). There were typical cyberhype nuggets, such as "Texas and Singapore are doing this, Pennsylvania needs to be first," from some high technology companies in attendance. How being first is better for Pennsylvanians, rather than watching other governments' mistakes and learning from them, wasn't explained.

In fact, not much was explained.

It's not all Microsoft pushing for PowerPort. But... it is all big business. There's a lot of budget money for development of e-government processes for 2000-2001, and any delay of the PowerPort could delay some paydays.

It sure looks like it's time for the State to consider a do-over on the e-commerce plan of PA PowerPort. They probably could go forward with e-government as publicly defined. Be a leader among governments, and make it a public process. Don't just talk about e-government - practice e-government. The technology is there for the state to be open about this - let's use it.

And then the State can take a look at the e-commerce part. Make it an open process from the beginning - which means, have public industry and policy discussions to determine the goals. Put it online. Encourage involvement. And don't be surprised if more Pennsylvanians suggest that the open marketplace, rather than the state, should be the catalyst for how Pennsylvania's e-commerce industry develops - and that the state's assistance isn't necessary.

One final note: We should all realize that e-government will require us to reconsider our definition of the proper role of government in the future. E-government is more than just providing technology to deliver what people once did manually; it's the use of technology to open barriers of space and time to allow for participation by the maximum number of citizens possible. This will be a growing expectation by the Internet-literate, and the sooner politicians understand this, the better they will be able to steer through Internet-related policy issues in the future. The Internet's here - use it.

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Media Link Sites

For those of you looking to peruse Pennsylvania newspapers online, we suggest a few sites to ease your review:

AJR Newslink http://ajr.newslink.org/panews.html

Links to most of the online newspapers in the state, from American Journalism Review

PA-Today http://www.pa-today.com/

A synopsis of the big story for over two dozen online newspapers around the state.

1st Headlines http://www.1stheadlines.com/cgi/news_search.pl?PA&&SourceURL

You can click to the headlines of at least 5 state newspapers to read further detail.

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Average Web User Info

The Nielsen Net Ratings released information on the "average web user" for April 2000. We thought it was interesting, and decided to include it this month:

Number of Sessions in April: 19 at home, 38 at work
Number of Unique Sites visited: 11 at home, 27 at work
Time Spent Per Month: Nearly 9.5 hours at home, over 20 hours at work
Average Click Rate on Top Banners: 0.4% at home, 0.29% at work

The Number 1 Web Property for At Home users was AOL (not surprising), closely followed by Yahoo!. At work users reversed the order, with Yahoo! being number 1, and AOL number 2. MSN was third in both groups.

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