Lexington has a new website.
I won't complain about the design, because I'm not a designer, and only vaguely know good design from a hole in the ground. Designer friends and acquaintances assure me it's terrible. What do I know?
I could, I suppose, complain that the calendar has RSS, but no ICal, so it's not actually useful. But I suppose that not everybody likes for calendars to be actually useful.
However, what I will complain about is that the website was produced by a company not only outside of Lexington, not only outside of Kentucky, but in California. I've mentioned before, I know. how much it bugs me that the Lexington City Council routinely makes business decisions that harm central Kentucky and assist folks outside of our local economy, so this shouldn't be a surprise to me. But it still irritates me. Enormously.
Our city council is a bunch of rich folks who never had to manage a budget bigger than their grocery money, and are now running the show for a small city. I admit, it's a tiny city, and really probably not very important in the grand scheme of things. But it's MY city, and it's MY home, and it's where MY kids go to school, and it's where I pay taxes. And, darn it, I want to support LOCAL businesses, LOCAL farmers, LOCAL schools, and LOCAL artists. It infuriates me when our city council *consistently* sends work out of state, when there are DOZENS of local web firms that could have done the job cheaper and better, and kept the money in the local economy.
I'd have voted for someone else in the city council race, but my district's seat was uncontested.
Maybe I should run.
I would like to know what you think is so terrible about the design.
I see the ical issue, which is extremely minor and outside of by far the majority of the Lexington area. The calendar is clickable, it is accessable, and it has RSS feeds. They can certainly do more (like the iCal issue you mentioned), but that doesn't qualify the design as horrible.
I don't have a problem with your complaint about it beging outsourced to California instead of local. I don't know what their process was, but I agree with you that there is enough local talent that it *should* have gone to a local company. However, this particular company does a LOT of City web sites - see
http://www.visioninternet.com/home/index.asp?page=56 for a partial list.
As I said, I don't, personally, have a complaint about the design. I merely note that several designer friends of mine think that the design is atrocious. I do find it difficult to navigate. I also watched the Mayor's introduction to the site, and couldn't find any of the sections that he highlighted in that video. But since I haven't had any particular need to actually find anything on the site (yet) I don't have any personal usability remarks.
I really don't care if this company has done a lot of city websites. I care that the Lexington City Council supports local businesses. That's what they exist for. Contracts like this should only go to out-of-state bidders when there's nobody local willing to do the job. Lexington is far too willing to send local money out of state. Kentucky, in general, is far too willing to support out-of-state businesses rather than Kentucky businesses.
FYI,
There is a discussion going on on one of the linkedin groups I am in "LinkedLexington" where a local laywer posed the following:
"What suggestions do you have for encouraging entrepreneurship and the creation of small businesses that I can pass on to Mayor Newberry and Anthony Wright?"
My suspicion is that he is going to have a meeting with these folks, and it looking to sound like he knows what he is talking about.
I echoed some of the sentiments you shared and that I agreed with and I used your link as well. Here is what I said as it relates to this blog posting:
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I just saw the new web site for http://www.lexingtonky.gov . There are dozens ( http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en?
This is just another in the LONG line of business that Lexington outsources to companies OUTSIDE of Lexington.
You want to improve the Lexington economy... then use LOCAL companies. Basha Roberts (above) and other local businesses should be overwhelmed with work (I have no clue whether she is or not, but I suspect she is not and has not gotten the opportunity to bid on THIS project).
YOU want to ENCOURAGE business in Kentucky and in Lexington... then USE the businesses that are IN Lexington and Kentucky. Encourage organizations working with Lexington to USE businesses IN Lexington and Kentucky. Self-perpetuate the local economy and quit funnelling MY tax money to other states and other countries.
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So, maybe at least a couple others are hearing something that you and I agree on. :)
--Moose
Hm, I used to live in Lexington, I went to high school @ henry clay and graduated from UK. But I live in Silicon Valley because in 1990 it seemed there was approximately zero capability for a software engineer to make a living in Lexington. Okay that's not quite right but to me the kind of work I wanted to do wasn't available in Lexington. The only exposure I have to Lexington now is christmas trips but it doesn't seem there's very much in the way of tech industry in the area. Ergo it may be that even if the city were to establish a policy to have used a local web design company for their website, that there simply might not have been one available. But that's my perspective of having had to move away from Lexington to pursue a tech career.
My other thought is to extrapolate from this example to globalization in general. This argument that funneling a website development contract to a distant company is just like all the other aspects of globalization. Again with my silicon valley perspective, globalization has meant that the software industry in Bangalore and St. Petersburg Russia and other places is going gangbusters, while the software industry in Silicon Valley was in the doldrums for several years starting in 2000. You could apply the same argument to all forms of globalization. For instance how much of the stuff you buy in the stores is made locally? I noticed one time at Cracker Barrel that their marketing image is Americana but all the doodads for sale in the lobby have labels showing those products were made in China or Chile or anywhere but America.
David,
As it happens, you're misinformed. There are, as I said in my article, dozens of web design firms in Lexington. Of those dozens, there are many that are greatly talented. Obviously, there weren't any web companies in 1990, because the web was invented in 1991.
David,
In 1990 there were a number of tech jobs in the area. However your sentiment was probably correct and moving to the Mecca of Technology was certainly a move toward a location with more tech jobs.
I would suggest that you and the City of Lexington read how Silicon Valley started. Specifically, I would suggest that you read the 10-year plans they did and how they intentionally built Silicon Valley out of an empty valley. A shorter start might be http://www.netvalley.com/svhistory.html. They passed laws which promoted this type of business. They invested in local organizations to promote business. They purchased locally to promote business. It all started because of one University - Stanford and the study of a Supernova in the early 1900's.
Lexington can do it. They have a University. They have people with money. They have ideas and are excitable. I think the goal of being a top 20 research University by 2020 is a good start. This would put them comparable to Stanford in the 1930's. Hewlett and Packard started in 1937. Remember, Silicon Valley was first called such in 1971. I don't know if Lexington has the patience and long-term commitment to put toward technology - they are too interested in the Horse and Gambling industry.
Your argument, David, that globalization hurts local economies as well as the example you gave about the software industry in the late 1990's and early 2000's is an excellent example that just proves my point. If you want local economies to grow, you have to invest in the local economies. Of course, Silicon Valley produces way too much technology to be supported locally, which is why the global shift to India and China affected them more than most. However for cities and regions wishing to enter the twentieth century, technologically speaking, it is the local governments and Universities that must spend money locally, fund locally, and make rules and laws that protects and expands local businesses.
"built Silicon Valley out of an empty valley" Uh, it was hardly empty. There was wall-to-wall fruit orchards and other agricultural stuff just like it is in the Central Valley today. The name back then was The Valley of Hearts Delight. I'm not convinced it was a good idea for that to be bulldozed in favor of wall-to-wall housing and office parks. And the analogy for Central Kentucky is the horse farms, and "progress" there is threatening the existence of the horse farms and has caused several to be bulldozed in favor of shopping malls, housing, etc.
The question there is quality of life ... which is better quality of life, a rural agrarian paradise like is implied by 'The Valley of Hearts Delight' or the anywhereness that 'Silicon Valley' is today.
Not that Lexington is a rural agrarian paradise, it's a bustling middle-sized city. But the trend I've seen on my visits is towards bulldozing the remaining bits of rural agrarian paradise in the all-holy name of progress.
Obviously conditions in Lexington have changed and that there are more local tech firms. That's a good thing.
Part of the reason I left Kentucky was that Kentuckians do not value higher education and higher learning ..etc.. Your thought to inspire a Silicon Valley in Central Kentucky just makes me laugh. UK as a top tier university? What a joke! Do you really think Kentuckians are interested in this? As you say they're more interested in the Horse and Tobacco industry. That is their history after all, Horses, Tobacco, Whisky. Those industries are the stereotype of Central Kentucky so much that there's a joke about it that you've no doubt heard. Converting Central Kentucky into another instantiation of Silicon Valley seems to me a slim chance long shot and would also entail destroying the unique things about makes Central Kentucky destroying its character. It would turn Central Kentucky into just another anywhere with the only hint of its past being the names of subdivisions.
But of course that isn't a reason to avoid creating local companies that can do tech jobs for local people etc. UK is a perfectly competent University and can train people for a large number of things. And there is an issue of 'brain drain' where people like me take a look around after University training, decide there's nothing for me in the area, and leave. To combat the brain drain there needs to be local industry that's attractive enough to want to stay. I just am having a hard time imagining UK as a top tier university and the rest of the dream you outlined relies on that bit of development.
You're absolutely correct. I think it's very unlikely that central Kentucky will ever be a tech hub, no matter how many well-meaning politicians and businessmen say that they want to make it one.
I love this area, and I cringe every time I see another farm turned into a shopping center full of empty shops and Starbucks. There are so many half-abandoned shopping centers in Lexington, but we keep building new ones.
And perhaps they're a scapegoat, but I pin this on the City Council, too. They think that if they zone more and more places as commercial, there will *necessarily* be more commerce. This, of course, is ludicrous, and you only have to have a few years' of memory to realize that. Unfortunately, our City Council seems only to see a couple years into the future, and zero years into the past.
So we continue to kill our existing farm industry, while not providing anything with which to replace it. It's heartbreaking.