• By far the best available online resource for Cambridge is http://www.rwinters.com, the Cambridge Civic Journal run by Robert Winters (a private citizen). It lists the voting records of City Councilors, election results, and attendance records of City Councilors. Winters has been running this website for years but so far the city has not been embarrassed into doing anything like it.
• The goals of the City Council are spelled out on the website. But there is no listing of whether any of the goals were met, or even if action was taken on any of the items listed as "Emphasized" in the Policy Guidelines. This would be an ideal place to list results, via comments from each Councilor.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/ccouncil2.cfm?article_id=12&tnltext=City%20Council%20Goals
• The "City Ordinances" website is pretty thorough, except that it's not in English. It's written in Legalese, with no English translation, although the "Search" button functions well with English terms.
  http://bpc.iserver.net/codes/cbridge/index.htm?tnltext=City%20Ordinances
• It's clear from the website that the unelected City Manager runs the show. He's listed first in the upper-left hotspot, gets his own webpage, publishes his comments on the budget (14 pages), lists his "Highlights and Accomplishments", and perhaps most tellingly, he is listed on the homepage while the mayor is not. The elected City Council members, on the other hand, have none of these, nor do the elected School Committee members.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/cmanager.cfm
• The School Committee DOES list their meeting minutes online, which the City Council does not.
  http://www.cpsd.us/schcomm/minutes.cfm
• The budget is available on the website. That's about all I can say that's positive about it. It's in a downloadable PDF format, which means, you can't look for individual items and you can't search it. Overall, this is an excellent way to hide the details of the budget from the general public while still claiming to publish it.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/CityOfCambridge_Content/documents/FY05_adopted_budget.pdf?tnltext=FY05%20Annual%20Budget%20%28PDF%29
• There is a "news" section, but it's pretty thin. It mostly includes self-congratulatory press releases. The news-of-the-month in March, one might be seeking, would be details of closing the public library -- no such information, not even a notice that it is closing. (That fact is mentioned on the library homepage, http://www.cambridgema.gov/CPL/ but there is no news release about it). A good solution here would be to list Cambridge Chronicle articles and the city's responses -- like a published Q-and-A.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/cnewsinfo.cfm
• There is a "publications" section, but it's pretty narrow. It only includes publications made by the city for the city, such as the Coty Annual Report. A more useful list would include items relevant to Cambridge that are published by OTHER agencies, such as the Charles River basin report, some MBTA reports, relevant MDC/DCR reports, ad infinitum. It would be nice to be able to use the city website as a resource to locate government agency reports, but this website doesn't do that.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/publications.cfm
• I'm trying hard to say something truly positive, so I worked hard to find a webpage that was actually good, that the rest of the city agencies should use as models. Here's one that has some useful information that would otherwise be difficult to find: the Community Development department lists the top 25 employers in Cambridge, with links to their private websites (the top two by far are Harvard then MIT, followed by the city government itself).
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/~CDD/data/labor/top25/top25_2004.html
• There are no centralized FAQs on the website, but there are numerous FAQs put out by individual agencies. This reflects that the Cambridge city website is maintained by each individual agency without central organization. I think a list of FAQs -- or actual questions posed by actual residents on a blog or discussion forum -- would say a lot about what residents ask, and the answers would be very illuminating too. An FAQ list is the basis for responsiveness to voters, and I would suggest the first improvement to the CambridgeMA.gov website should be to list the existing agency FAQs linked from the home page as follows:

- Affordable Housing FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/hsg/hsg_faq.html

- Census of voter counts: http://www.cambridgema.gov/~Election/eleccen-faq.html

- Community Development Block Grant FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/cdbg/cdbg_faq.html

- Community Development Services FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/faq.html

- Community Learning Center FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/DHSP2/clcfaq.cfm

- Concord-Alewife Planning Study FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/cp/zng/concalew/concale_faq.pdf

- Conduct of Elections FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/~Election/eleccon-faq.html

- Consumers' Council FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/Consumer/faq.html

- Demographics FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/data/datafaq.html

- Domestic Partnership Information: http://www.cambridgema.gov/CityClrk/domestic-partnership/index.html

- Election Commission FAQs: http://www.cambridgema.gov/~Election/eleccom-faq.html

- Historical Commission FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/Historic/faq.html

- Human Rights Commission FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/HRC/humanr_faq.html

- License Commission FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/License/faq.html

- Public Election Records Access FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/~Election/elecpub-faq.html

- Voter Registration FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/~Election/elecreg-faq.html

- Water Department FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/CWD/fpfaqs.cfm

- Water Protection Plan Maps: http://www.cambridgema.gov/cwd/depmaps.cfm

- Women's Commission FAQ: http://www.cambridgema.gov/Women/women-faq.html

• No City Council voting records exist on the website. No records of what any City Councilors think, or did, or accomplished, exists on the website. http://www.RWinters.com is the only source of such information.
• While the website is replete with information on when the Planning Board and other committees meet, there is no information on how one would get appointed to these boards. Or on what the political choices are about how the appointments are decided.
• The City Manager has his own web page, but the City Councilors do not. They are listed jointly with contract information only. They may list their private websites, but only Henrietta Davis does.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/ccouncil2.cfm?article_id=11&tnltext=City%20Council%20Members
• City Council Committees list only members, not the purpose of the committees. One can infer some insight by the committee names, of course, but there is no information for citizens who want to advocate for an issue by addressing the appropriate committee.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/special/citycouncil_committee.html?tnltext=Council%20Committees
• Like the City Council, the School Committee members have zero accountability online. They get bio blurbs but no email addresses (just webforms) on their website, but nothing about resolutions passed, issues of interest, or much else at all. Thank goodness for www.RWinters.com once again on this topic.
  http://www.cpsd.us/schcomm/committee_members.cfm
• The City Charter is not on the website. It's unclear what this is, but it is outlined at:
  http://bpc.iserver.net/codes/cbridge/_DATA/Title_99/01/index.html
• The Schools website does not list the three charter schools in Cambridge, despite that they are officially public schools. They do list all the other public schools, but for example, no Banneker school. It would be convenient for parents looking for schools if contact information were provided for private and parochial schools too -- but certainly charter schools should be listed!
  http://www.cpsd.us/index.cfm
• The city website has numerous listings for job-seekers. This is a good example of where the city website fails to report the most basic useful information. There is a state-run agency with an office at Fresh Pond Mall, called the DETMA Career Center. It's an obvious destination for any job-seeker in Cambridge. But perhaps because it's state-run, it isn't listed.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/jobs2.cfm?message_id=5 and http://www.cambridgema.gov/jobs.cfm
  versus http://www.detma.org/WSCC.asp?ID=4
• Here is an example of applying the wrong philosophy to the city website. There's a page called "Useful Data Links" put out by CCD which purports to help you find materials you can't find on the city website. Sounds like just what is needed. But alas, all they do is link to very large websites, such as the homepage of the U.S. Census (linked 4 times), and the homepage of the I.R.S. This would actually be useful if the webpage included direct links to Cambridge-related information from economic and demographic analyses, but it does not. This results, I believe, from a philosophy that the city website should not actually provide any answers, but only provide tools for citizens to find their own answers. Since I often collect economic and demographic information for my professional reports, I know that this information is readily available -- yes, including the Census and IRS websites -- and that one can link directly to the relevant subsections and tables. The city chooses not to.
  http://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/data/datalinks.html
• The 2005 budget -- 524 pages of reading material -- requires a law degree and a finance degree to understand. I cannot follow it with my mere Masters in Public Policy degree. I tried to figure out how much money was spent on snow removal. It's there on page IV-169, listing $172,000 for 2004, but also on page IV-173 as $751,000. To find something more complicated, like how much revenue came from property taxes on 2-family homes, I gave up.