Glad to be included in there!  I'm working on some other projects over at www.openottawa.org along with other interested developers and designers. The stumbling block on our current project is now is the City's Dissemination Policy fee in order to obtain access to latitude and longitude data of the City's ward boundaries. This data should be freely accessible, if the City is to truly become "citizen-centric" as I've heard tossed around in this report at the last Council meeting.

Dave,Please note the sliding scale on the top of the flash viewer. This allows you to adjust the font size to anything you'd need.

311 was a great step in customer-centric service delivery, but the next great challenge will be integrating with and deferring to 211 in some cases.  The great problem with eGovernment and service delivery is that citizens must be constitutional experts, figuring out which level of government should deliver a service before even wrapping their heads around the city's internal organizational structure.Ottawa is the last large Ontario city to implement 211, a number that finds human services in all 3 levels of government as well as NGOs.  It's a great challenge and a great opportunity.  This is where businesses are no longer good models.

Also have a look at My Neighborhood Statistics, http://www.nyc.gov/html...

Governance in support of IT or IT in support of governance?  I don't think there is a one-size-fits all model.  But there are also some great examples where an IT/governance package changes everything.  The best one is Baltimore's CitiStat; It's a performance-based management method based on software that makes detailed performance measures visible to citizens, usually geocoded, and brings city managers to public meetings to explain performance differences.  It's free and it saves truckloads of money.For the relationship between IT and service delivery, I am not sure that "those who deliver city services" should necessarily be responsible for IT.  Everyone delivers city services.  When these services are being delivered directly to the public, I think that presenting friendly, helpful approach through existing 311 and Client Services organization is important.   That organization (I assume it's a single organization) interfaces with the public through several different levels of technology and seems to be the only one that can consistently speak both languages, besides perhaps councillors offices.  They should manage most outward-facing IT and enforce client-centred standards like language, accessibility, response time, privacy, etc.  Their information needs should also in part drive or strongly influence the inward-facing IT.  Say an internal department needs a GIS.  An internal IT manager should advocate to keep it cheap, this Client Services group should advocate to make it visible to the public, despite the cost.  The city manager can weigh these two different mandates, and with any luck will realize that openness creates savings, not just costs. 

The appendices are documented using a very tiny font (6 point?) that when combined with the Flash viewer used on the web page makes it almost illegible even on a a 21" CRT display that is operating at 1280 x 1024 and the Flash viewer zoom level at it maximum level. To avoid the expense and inconveniece of having all viewers print the report, it would be appreciated if either the font could be sized up or the Flash tool removed, allowing the use of Acrobat Reader to view the content directly.

I think this part of the report focuses on the right concept - the bureaucracy of technology implementation.Although there are some excellent, forward thinking ideas in the "contributing actions" section including using open source software, and leveraging local commercial software companies, what's the next step so that Ottawa can really find the "transformational change" mentioned in the first paragraph, and "get away from incrementalism, short-term thinking and cost-containment ideas"?

This looks like a good model, and makes a lot of sense.  It seems the action items are not tied very strongly to implementing this type of plan.  How does the city ensure that the citizen remains in the center of ALL services and has the same experience if there aren't more detailed plans for implementation?