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And here it is, folks: vancouver.ca

August 8th, 2012 · 69 Comments

How do you feel about living in your newly named neighbourhood?

What’s new and welcome? What’s missing. Some of you have already commented under the previous post, especially about meeting minutes being missed for the Development Permit Board and the Downtown Eastside Local Area Planning Process.

www.vancouver.ca

 

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  • InsiderDoug

    To former excellent planner Ms. French:

    A failing grade if the purpose/intent is to provide easy information about city affairs, help with city business, and so on. Passing grade if the purpose/intent is to look cool, and make the Mayor look good. Haven’t you heard? Politics is the purpose now at City Hall. Staffers all know that now. We got the memo.

  • Silly Season

    @Gman. Thanks. I have now had my 5 seconds of fame!

    As to comments in general, mine were about “form’. Trish French made far more important comments about “function”—and access.

    Madame French, I salute you!

  • Morry

    Trish #48

    An intelligent and informed critique. And 100% correct! They should have hired you as Chair for the re-design committee.

    In Making it New, they eliminated Worthy but Old Materials. History re-written. Memory wiped clean. Start Fresh. Head out for new Web Territories. blah blah …yada yada.

    oh… and look what they undid at http://data.vancouver.ca/

    sad.

  • Rolston

    Apparently I live in a new neighbourhood now. I *love* that.

    Rumour has it that the names of the ‘hoods were changed in cases where they were too long to fit the columns in the map at the bottom. No shit. I don’t think they designed for content and users first after all.

    If Laurie Best is accurate about the cost of systems and hardware, the City was blindfolded and sodomized. There are extremely powerful systems running government websites like http://www.whitehouse.gov that are Open Source, and even the most expensive dedicated cloud hosting plans would take 1,000 years to add up to a million dollars.

    The site wasn’t a total miscarriage, but more like a thalidomide kid with club feet, cerebral palsy, and a cleft palette.

  • Glissando Remmy

    Thought of The Night

    “Last night I was on Global TV with Heather! No big Deal, though, it was an old B&W Silent movie… Democracy Cubed! ”

    gman #50
    Thanks, for the shout out.
    That was funny!
    Where could we possibly go from here, to the Talkies?
    🙂

    We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

  • Everyman

    $3 million, just a year after the Parks Board was forced to shave $800k from its budget? Talk about misplaced priorities.

  • Frances Bula

    @public interest. I’m actually not away (though will be soon) and the website story, while of interest to us passionate urban wonks, hasn’t got to the point where it’s deemed of huge interest by editors. (Though the Province is running stories, they’re not prominent.) It’s getting about the same attention, possibly a little more, than the huge kerfuffle over the city’s $15-million, or whatever it ended up being, 311 system that was brought in a few years ago.

  • Julia

    had an interesting chat with a city staffer yesterday that was complaining that all the information he used to access in the course of his work day was no longer there. When they complained about it, the answer was that the website was designed for the ‘public’.

    So, I guess if we want anything more complex than a garbage schedule, we are hooped.

  • brilliant

    Well at least 3 mil got us a nice big photo of Mayor Prettypants on the opening page. It could have been worse, they might have gone with one of Frau Ballem!

  • Paul T.

    Thanks for the response Bill… But that really didn’t answer anything. We now know that work was done (which was blatantly obvious, seeing as there is a new website). My question (along with others) is who did what for how much?

    $3-mil is a lot of coin, giving vague descriptions doesn’t quite cut it for me.

  • Dan Cooper

    Bill Lee comments and inquires, “And I see Mole Hill is a district. Mole Hill!! Is this a new “Monaco” to fight with the tiny Granville Island of Guernsey?”

    In the same vein, I see Cambie Village is listed in one location on the site as being in both Shaughnessy (huh?) and Fairview (well, kinda…partly…almost), though in the detailed descriptions it seems to be ascribed to Shaughnessy only, with Fairview consisting of Granville Island and the waterfront areas. Still, this can clearly only lead to warfare, partition, and future weasely international designations a la the Balkans, as different neighbourhood powers dispute their claims to the name!

  • Bill Lee

    In the same way the B.C. map of First Nations bands [ http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/abed/map.htm ] has fuzzy boundaries (though B.C. don’t dare show overlaps) maybe that is one solution to the new internecine district wars before it is solved by Vision creating definite wards by fiat.

    Then like Surrey’s Ward 7 in 1957, secession. And we get the equivalent of the Republic of Westmount on the Vancouver peninsula.
    http://www.surreyhistory.ca/images/wrward7.jpg (from surreyhistory.ca/whiterock.html )

    Passport to Pimlico (1949) anyone?

  • Michelle

    gman, Silly Season, Glissy…
    #FAMOUS, for 5 sec each!

    http://www.globaltvbc.com/video/pricey+website/video.html?v=2265678725&p=1&s=dd&searchQuery=city#video/search/city

    Best reportage I’ve seen on Global so far this year!
    🙂

  • public interest

    Ummmm….i see multiple city department districts, electoral districts, widely promoted real estate and business marketing districts, historic districts, and a few self-identified community districts generally indicated on one interactive and obviously stylized interactive map. No surprise there.

    But what’s this??? What are all these names that seem to belong to the same areas??? Yes, dear commenters, that fact does surprise and obstruct millions who visit the city hall web with a task in mind.

    It simply reflects and communicates graphically the confusing melange of names and sub-jurisdictions asserting their “unique” identities in what millions of website users simply think of as “my city” or maybe “city hall.” It’s a data-navigation tool, not a decision document. Take a breath, folks.

    Nobody will confuse it with a planning department map, or an engineering department map, or any of the other detailed and overlapping maps and names bureaucracies and business interests apply to Vancouver areas.

    Now everybody (not just us info-druids who knew our way around the former Web 1.0 datapile that was the city site) can find those detailed and specific maps CoV has always provided by following the paths they expect to navigate in 2012….not 1999…just sayin.

  • David

    “Oh no, the page you are looking for does not exist!”

    Sigh… Gordon Campbell and Mike Harcourt never misplaced web pages…

  • westygrrl

    The planning/dvlpmt reports & name/area confusion – things that were accessible in the past but are now hard to find – is of definite concern.

    But wait until the general public tries to register their children for Community Centre programming!! I could not find – or more importantly, the new site couldn’t find – the City’s own pre-existing link to a Park Board summer camp program. The link no longer exists.

    Then I think, ‘call 311’ for help! But THEY couldn’t find ANY link or ANY information about registering for this particular summer camp either. They kindly gave me a phone number to call, and the staff member in turn gave me another phone number to call, and so on, and so on. But I wanted to register online, it being 2012 and all.

    This frustrating process took over 15 minutes. It’s unacceptable, and it gets a failing grade.

    I think there may be many very frustrated, upset parents/voters when community centre programming registration takes place later this month and in early September. Not sure if they have the time to work out those kinks, or missing links.

  • public interest

    Point well-taken, westygrrl.

    That should not happen.
    Sounds like one of those dozens of 1990s-era departmental databases CoV’s been limping by on is unable to speak Web 2.0

  • Bill Lee

    Multi-city comparison of web-sites and their approximate costs.
    http://www.dave.ca/2012/08/10/why-pay-260k-or-even-700k-for-a-website-when-you-can-pay-3m-like-the-city-of-vancouver/

    A half-dozen links and a thousand words. Looks at Coquitlam, Surrey in comparison.

    And also encourages my suspicion that it was a payday for several Vision supporters.

    Know Paul Strong, or Paul Bellows, or Dave Bellous of the YellowPencil.com group?

  • Norman

    The search function is not good. I tried in vain to find bylaws. I think someone at city hall must have the “if it isn’t broken, break it” philosophy. Another waste of public money so far.

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