Web-based Comment Management System Emposers Public Involvement Professionals

It’s 8 p.m. and the public meeting on a new transportation project is winding down. Everyone wants to know what the public said about the alternatives presented. “How long will it take to get the comments?” the project manager asks. “We have an elected official briefing tomorrow morning and want to be able to tell them what the public said!” For several transit planning projects underway in Denver, Colorado, USA, the answer is “right now!”

Recognizing that in today’s public involvement environment, immediacy is critical to the success of public involvement professionals, OV Consulting partnered with Trackvia, a Golden, Colorado-based technology firm. Together, we have developed a Web-based comment management system that allows input to a public comment database in real time from computer comment stations at public meetings. This technology provides public involvement professionals with the immediate information they need to surpass their client’s expectations. We are utilizing this system on three important projects in the Regional transportation District’s (RTD’s) FasTracks program – The West Corridor light rail transit design project, the Gold Line Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and the North Metro EIS. RTD is the public transit provider for the Denver metropolitan area.

OV provides computer comment stations with Web-based comment forms that the public can use to directly enter comments into the comment database at each public meeting for these projects. At these meetings, 65 to 80 percent of the comments received are self-entered via the computer comment stations.

This represents a huge reduction in the time required for post-processing comments and allows immediate reporting on the comments received. Another benefit is that immediate access to comments allows the public involvement staff to perform more value-added analysis of the comments in the same amount of time that it used to take to simply capture the comments.

The OV/Trackvia Web-based comment management system performs many other critical functions such as:

• Enabling secure, up-to-the-minute access to public comments from anywhere in the world with an internet connection for any number of users at the same time
• Recording the history of each comment including notes, attachments, responses, changes, and any decisions made, to meet any legal requirements for tracking and responding to public comments
• Allowing other “feeds” into the comment database like Web form submissions from the project Web site and e-mail capturing

The technology and approach developed by OV and Trackvia has been extremely successful in integrating public comments into the project decision process and reinforcing the relationship between public comments and project decisions. If you are considering implementing live comment capturing and a more complete comment management system, consider the following:

• Think about your entire comment data life cycle when developing your comment database. What you capture about comments will determine what you can do with that data in the future.
• Consider projected meeting attendance, queuing, and service times in determining the number of live computer comment stations. A long comment form will take more time to fill out and will require more computer comment stations.
• Locate the computer comment stations strategically. When computer comment stations are in an inviting part of the public meeting room, such as close to the entrance where people can enter comments at any point during the meeting without being disruptive, self-entering of comments approaches 80 percent.
• Provide alternate methods to accommodate all participants. Not everyone is comfortable with computers. It is important to provide someone to type for those who cannot or do not want to and paper comment forms that duplicate the Web form to ensure everyone can comfortably provide input.