New Jersey Plan - Concept

Project Description:

New Jersey's initial contribution to the Government Without Boundaries project
is an online demonstration application linking event information for local, state,
and federal parks in New Jersey. Once fully developed an individual will be able
to get information on park events in any government-owned park in New Jersey
regardless of the jurisdiction involved. The project will be expanded in the future
to cover other types of events, as well as other jurisdictions.

This project has leveraged one of the efforts of the New Jersey Office of
Information Technology (OIT). OIT has recently developed an online application
that integrates event information with the New Jersey GIS database. Users can
access event information, along with a map that routes them to the event. The
New Jersey CIO's Office focused on recreation because a recent e-government
survey found that citizens were most interested in recreational information
services.

The project has resulted in a multi-jurisdictional calendar of park events.
Jurisdictions participate by adding a link on their Web site to the shared
calendar. In order to create the impression that the calendar is merely an
application running off the Web site they originally accessed, two features were
created: When the application first appears, the calendar is displayed in a
half-sized window laid on top of the park Web site originally accessed; and
Second the event information displayed will correspond to the park's information
the user was just viewing (e.g., someone on the Monmouth County Park site
would see Monmouth County park events when the calendar first appears on
the screen). Once the calendar is up, the user can then access and see the
events of other jurisdictions and other localities.

Click to see the current calendar.

How Jurisdictions participate:

When a jurisdiction joins this project two things need to be accomplished: first
a link to the shared calendar is added to the jurisdiction's website; and second
any existing park event information from the jurisdiction is migrated to the
central database. Where there is an existing park information database, the
data is extracted, reformatted, and then appended to the master database.

As this project grows both within and hopefully outside of New Jersey the
capability of any one office to effectively manage the listing of events
diminishes. In order to make the calendar scalable, the administration of the
calendar (adding, deleting, and editing event information) has been
decentralized. The participating offices will use an online application to update
events listed for their jurisdiction.

Click to see the current administrative application.
Id: guest
Password: guest1

Next Steps:

- Expansion of the number of jurisdictions using this system in New Jersey.
- Migration of the system to a national level.
- Expansion to other states.