The New Orleans City Council unveiled its new website a few weeks ago, with little fanfare. The site overall is clean and easy to navigate, if looking a little dated. It's got standard drop down lists for "Meet the Council" and "Calendars". There is nothing new there. It works in IE and Firefox and stays true in Chrome, likely due to the simple design written in mainly HTML and CSS with some light JavaScript. This, also, is probably the reason the site is manageable in a Blackberry browser.

NOCC Homepage

The most noticeable change is the addition of the live stream feeds. Visitors to the site will be able to watch live and archived NOLA City Council meetings and special emergency coverage within the site.  District C Council Member James Carter offers: "The Council proposed adopting a video streaming system so that displaced residents would have better access to information about the city’s rebuilding process. But it has become clear that this state-of-the-art technology has additional benefits for the citizens of New Orleans. Video streaming council meetings and web-based management of legislative documents have profound implications for encouraging citizen activism in the governmental process and increasing government transparency and accountability. Government will not be able to meet the many challenges facing post-Katrina New Orleans alone…it will take all of us working together, and this technology facilitates a democratic participatory process.”

Upon first look, the page set up is awkwardly asymmetrical, with the Windows Media Player stream set up in the upper left hand corner, the top part of column that covers 1/4 of the left side of the page. However, once, you start clicking around the archives or watching the live stream, the column beneath the streamed media and the larger right hand side both populate with information. The right hand side has a full-page agenda that is navigable and printable, with links to.

According to the site, visitors will be able to:

• View the agenda and minutes in the same browser while watching the meeting.
• Click on the highlighted items in the agenda / minutes to jump to that topic in the video content. (Archived meetings only)
• Click on “All Items” to navigate the meeting using “Jump-to Points.” (Archived meetings only)
• Click on an item to jump to that point in the meeting. (Archived meetings only)
• Click on “Current Item” to access text related to the item currently being discussed in the video. (Archived meetings only)

There is a third option available to the NOLA GOV online streaming video, the Mayor's Office Executive Branch, but it gets somewhat confusing as the link takes you outside the site to www.cityofno.com and not directly to a streaming site.

The city council has been criticized for not using social media tools internally, but the site does incorporate share links that you can use to send video via email, Facebook or Twitter.

The site is built without bells and whistles and is remarkably easy to use, but could possibly use a design overhaul in the future. It's somewhat bland compared to our flamboyant city website, but highly navigable and completely utilitarian and will hopefully encourage citizens who can't take part in Council meetings in person to continue to participate in city government at their own convenience.