Announcing Daily Departures

Like most of you, we at civic.com are working to take advantage of the speed, versatility and popularity of the World Wide Web to improve the services we provide. Of course, we also must keep a foot in the print medium, in which most of our business still is conducted.

Most of you probably are planning or are being affected by some shift of resources related to the Internet.This process is akin to taking off from one coast in a 727, re-assembling the airplane in midflight as a Concorde and landing it without upsetting-not to mention losing-any passengers. In our effort to attempt just that, let me make an important announcement about our menu.

For the past month, civic.com's Web site (www.civic.com) has been providing original, staff-reported daily news about the state and local government IT market. Every business morning, we provide readers with a fresh news update, covering such items as important technology breakthroughs in other jurisdictions, key court decisions and policy developments, significant deals and contracts, and professional moves by your peers.

In many ways, the Internet is the perfect medium for covering the far-flung yet tightly knit community of state and local IT professionals, who are encountering many common policy, technology and service delivery challenges. We are focusing our daily coverage to give you the news and information that will keep you up to speed with your peers in this complicated market. We hope you profit by it.

On the print side, this issue of civic.com contains analytical coverage of agency Web transformation. Our special report, "Web-Enabled Government," shows how a host of public-sector agencies are putting together their online operations. We've taken a close look at agency Web development by analyzing network infrastructure, intranets, public access and architectures in the public sector. We hope this package will stimulate your thinking as you map your Web strategy.

In this issue, we also show how Santa Monica is using the Web to support participatory budget-making. Using the Internet is one of many ways the city is inviting the public into this often contentious process. And it is yet another example of how the Internet is fast becoming the best way to ensure that the public gets what it asked for at election time.

Likewise, we hope the Internet helps us improve our service to you. Please use it to drop us a line and let us know how you like our new daily news service. l

Paul McCloskey

Editor

civic.com