The most interesting development in KDOT’s ongoing exploration of social media is our plan to launch an internal online community later this spring. Unlike K-TOC, which is open to all and is used by the agency as a public-outreach tool, the new community will be strictly limited to KDOT employees and is intended for internalRead… Read more »
Our project selection pilot outreach is (at last) up on K-TOC. It took about three weeks to get everything posted, so there’s no Ta-Da! moment, but October community traffic is up about 65 percent over August traffic. We might reach 2,000 unique visitors this month, which would be a record for us. A more detailedRead… Read more »
Like a social media tsunami, I’m live-tweeting the meeting, blogging at K-TOC and blogging here. (I can afford to do so because our meeting has split into small breakout sessions, and plopping into those sessions with my laptop–“Hi! I’m here to transmit your words to the whole world!”–strikes me as being a bit of aRead… Read more »
and the early results are mixed but encouraging. KDOT has undertaken a new approach to project selection. This summer the agency completed the Comprehensive Transportation Program, a long-range transportation plan that controlled KDOT’s construction and spending priorities for a decade. The CTP iwas a successor to the Comprehensive Highway program, also a 10-year transportation plan,Read… Read more »
Our open-to-the-public online community, K-TOC, now has almost 700 members, most of them transportation professionals. Seven hundred members is considerably more than we anticipated when we launched in January, but in the past month enrollment rate has dropped substantially. I think we’re approaching the natural membership limit for a community devoted to transportation in Kansas.Read… Read more »
Kansas Transportation Secretary Deb Miller used her first blog post on K-TOC to explain her no-earmarks policy. I’m not competent to assess how innovative this is; maybe these days there are all sorts of state cabinet officials out there blogging the whys and wherefores of their policy thinking. But I’m thinking probably not. There’s beenRead… Read more »
I’ve been thinking about Dennis McDonald‘s thoughts about K-TOC. He wrote: “I guess I see an advantage to being able to easily differentiate between a web site that serves as an official portal, and a web service that facilitates a mix of formal and informal communication. The question is, how realistic is it to combineRead… Read more »
A public online community can’t be hosted on KDOT’s servers, which operate behind a dense firewall. Thus we found ourselves in the world of software-as-a-service. We had to partner up with a community provider. Finding one took longer than we anticipated. Software-as-a-service is a bit like an automobile lease. The customer leases community software andRead… Read more »
Wednesday was K-TOC’s one-month anniversary. Community activity increases a little bit every day. An engineer wants to kick off a discussion group for practicing engineers. One of our environmental science people is starting a blog. The Traffic Safety people opened a group. (That Traffic Safety wasn’t one of our launch groups was a foolish errorRead… Read more »
The Kansas Transportation Online Community launched January 14, 2009. K-TOC is a project of the Kansas Department of Transportation, and is a major element in the Department’s exploration of social media and new technology as instruments of public outreach. By the standards of conventional government, KDOT is an early-adopter agency; in addition to K-TOC, theRead… Read more »