Department Web Accountability Policy

Purpose

The purpose of this policy is to improve the coordination, accountability, and communication between staff supporting departmental web pages and the City's Central Web Team (CWT) by requiring departments to designate a person accountable for such coordination and communication.

The City's main public website (www.Seattle.Gov) is made up of over 80,000 individual web pages and growing. City departments develop and maintain their own departmental web pages while the CWT manages the overall look, feel and navigation of the site as a whole. Within departments, different groups may be responsible for the different aspects of a department's web pages including:

• writing and approving content
• layout, design, and graphical content
• standards compliance
• underlying supporting technology

Because of this distributed nature of web support it has become increasingly difficult to coordinate projects that involve all contributors to Seattle.Gov.

Affected Departments

This policy applies to all City departments.

Definitions

Seattle.Gov is the City's official presence on the publicly accessible World Wide Web. It does not include the City's intranet, known as the InWeb.

Standard

Departments shall designate a management person responsible for coordinating all aspects of the department's web pages as it relates to Seattle.Gov as a whole. This individual shall be the department's single point of contact on all issues relating to City standards and policy compliance and Citywide web projects. This individual will be responsible for communicating information gathered in their role as the department's web representative to the relevant persons within their department. The following diagram shows how web-related information will flow.

Implementation

This policy is effective with its adoption by the City's Business Management Council (BMC).

Upon adoption, departments will designate a department web representative.

The CWT is responsible for maintaining the list of department web representatives.

It is not anticipated that this policy will have a budgetary impact on affected departments. Rather, its intent is to formalize communication and accountability lines.

Exceptions

Exceptions to this policy shall be granted by the City's Chief Technology Officer.

Document Control

This policy is a product of the City's e-Government Steering Group of the BMC. It was adopted by the BMC on May 21, 2004 and shall be reviewed and modified as business needs require.