Stakeholder Report:
Progress and Performance at mycommunityinfo.ca,
July 2001 - October 2006
Stephen Cummings, Project Manager
Mycommunityinfo.ca (MCI) was developed by municipal
and senior governments to provide one-stop access to
government and public sector community information. The
City of London and County of Middlesex provide continuing
support on behalf of the founding
group.
Services
MCI provides search engine services to the public using
Google technology. The community process aggregates information
published by the community to the Internet, providing keyword
searching of that knowledge base. There is also dedicated site
search for select municipal organizations. MCI also publishes Life Events Bundles,
bringing together diverse sources of information that bear on
singular events such as Moving to London-Middlesex
and Having a Baby.
A third service is the database capture of query strings sent
to the Search Engine. These query strings are valuable data
for analyses of what people look for and what language they
use in searching.
Scope of Knowledge Base
MCI serves two communities, Middlesex-London and the Region
of Waterloo, comprising a population of about 750,000 people. MCI
currently indexes 165,252 municipal and community web pages in
Middlesex-London and the Region of Waterloo. The pages are
published by 198 public sector organizations in Middlesex-London
and 25 in the Region of Waterloo
(see list).
The community search function also provides one click access to
all Provincial (approximately 421,000) and all
Federal web pages (approximately 9,050,000). MCI has solved a Google technical problem that allows MCI to
index the contents of certain databases, including the Business
Directory of the London Economic Development Corporation, the
event calendar of London Arts Council and the Service Directories
of the SW Ontario regional health information service,
TheHealthLine.ca.
Access to Services
MCI has a stand alone web site with a search function, the
Life Events Bundles and information about MCI.
Most traffic comes to the MCI search engine from remote access
points. These remote access points are configured as a Searchbar
displayed on the web sites of participating organizations. The
Searchbar provides easy access to either site search or community
search, and is provided at no cost to select municipal
organizations.
Full search service sites
(includes site and community searching):
Site search only is available at:
The number of web sites including either links or clickable MCI
logos that take users to the MCI search page is unknown, but does
include instances from both the public and private sectors.
The query database currently contains 1,893,197
privacy-protected query strings. Access to the MCI database
is restricted
to research purposes such as the doctoral analysis currently
underway by a University of Western Ontario student in the Faculty
of Information & Media Studies or to Searchbar participants who
wish to analyze traffic to their own web sites.
Performance Measures
Traffic to the MCI web site derives primarily from people
searching for information contained in MCI's Life Events Bundles,
and arrives most often from the search engines of MSN, Yahoo! and
the generally available public Google. Monthly average individual
user hits on the MCI web site from November 2005 to October 2006
is 84,774.
Queries sent to the MCI search engine from MCI's web site and
all remote access points for the same period average monthly
69,340.
Aggregate annual traffic to MCI services (hits plus queries)
based on the 12 month period is 1,849,368.
Capacity for Growth
The current license for the Google Search Appliance allows
for 500,000 web pages. MCI is now indexing a total of 165,252 web
pages. The margin of capacity to usage suggests that MCI can
sustain an expansion of service to 3 - 5 county-sized service
populations without license adjustment. There are technical and
administrative service support costs that accompany expansion.
However, with license adjustments the Search Appliance can support
indexing for up to 3,000,000 web pages, or enough to support
localized, customized government and public sector indexing for
all of SW Ontario.
Sustainability and Cost-Benefits
At the current level of performance and financial
contributions involving Middlesex-London plus the Region of
Waterloo, MCI is sustainable indefinitely.
Total cost of the project since July 2001 has been roughly
$800,000. Current annual cost is approximately $0.04 per capita
for the 750,000 population service base.
Because the process of citizen inquiry is automated through
search engine technology, the on-going costs to government for
social policy implementation are minimalized, and because the
publishing efforts of public sector organizations and government
are optimized, the citizen benefits.
An informed citizenry
is MCI's most important product.
|
