NASCIO Awards

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

2010 Awards: Open Government Initiatives

RECIPIENT:
Minnesota - "What's in My Neighborhood?" Website Redesign Project

View Video

In 2009, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) launched a redesigned and vastly expanded “What’s in My Neighborhood” (WIMN) website, a portal to all to the regulatory environmental activity in the state. The WIMN site represents a huge advance in transparency about the environment in Minnesota, putting environmental information into the hands of local people so they can learn and act locally. This project significantly advances the MPCA toward achieving its strategic objective of providing access to usable data. This project also freed up resources at the MPCA to do other work.

Citizens, businesses, environmental organizations, local governments, and others are able to directly access information about air, water and waste permits on more than 150,000 facilities all over the state of Minnesota. Users can search using an easy-to-use map interface or a text-based interface and find out information about all of the permits, projects, and registrations at a site, along with inspections, enforcement activities, MPCA contacts, and links to related information. If a user doesn’t know what environmental issues are in the neighborhood, he/she can do a radius search just to see what sites might be nearby and the environmental status for those sites. Users also have multiple ways to download raw data.

The WIMN site also enables input from anyone. A feedback form allows users to suggest changes to the location of a site on the map, or provide other information about a site. This helps the MPCA achieve even greater data quality. Training videos for the website are posted on YouTube and embedded into MPCA’s help page. The site may be accessed at www.pca.state.mn.us/wimn.

“Governments are facing a tremendous, growing demand from citizens for transparency and easier access to government services. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s cutting edge work has not only met those demands, but it has also raised the bar on how we can use technology to engage with citizens.”
Gopal Khanna, Chief Information Officer, State of Minnesota

FINALISTS:
Click on the title to download program submission.

Colorado
Colorado Online Transparency Initiatives

Kentucky
Kentucky Open Door Website

North Carolina
North Carolina State Board of Elections Voter Portal

OTHER NOMINATIONS:
Click on the title to download program submission.

Alabama
Open.Alabama.Gov

Arkansas
Arkansas ARRA Recipient Reporting

California
California American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Accountability and Transparency Web Site recovery.ca.gov

Idaho
Idaho Legislature Live

Illinois
Transportation Accountability Project

Maine
Maine.gov DataShare

Michigan
MiHIN Open Governance Process and Collaborative Workgroup Structure