Fall 2001
Center for Rural Studies and Vermont League of Cities and Towns
The following questions were asked of Municipal conference participants in the fall of 2001. The conferences were Vermont League of Cities and Towns’ Town Fair in Killington, VT, and the five regional Town Officer Educational Conferences, providing broad access to municipal officials from across the state. All responses were tabulated from written survey forms. A total of 284 respondents contributed to the survey. The survey is not representative, and so only reflects the opinions of those that chose to respond.
The following questions were asked:
1. Are you interested in learning more about using the internet and website resources in your job?
Yes_____ No_____
2. Are you interested in learning how to provide your local government services on-line?
Yes_____ No_____
3. Would you be interested in attending a conference to learn more about these topics?
Yes_____ No_____
4. If the answer to Question 3 was "Yes":
Would you be willing to travel to the conference if it were in a central Vermont location? Yes_____ No_____
How much would you be willing to pay for a day-long conference if the price includes registration, lunch and handouts?
$0 to $50_____ $50 to $100_____
5. Suggestions for topics:
Question 1: 88% or 250 individuals indicated they were interested in learning more about using the Internet in their job.
Question 2: 76.1% or 216 individuals indicated they wished to learn to put their local government services online. 21.8% were not interested and 3.9% or 6 individuals did not respond to Question 2.
Question 3: 82.4% or 234 individuals indicated they were interested in attending a conference on using the internet or providing local govt. services online. 16.2% were not interested, and 2.1% did not respond.
Question 4a: 79.6% or 226 individuals would be interested in traveling to the conference if it were in Central Vermont. 13.7% were not interested in traveling. 6.7% did not respond.
Question 4b: 81.7% would be willing to pay between $0-50 to attend the conference. $10.9 would be willing to pay $50-100. 7.4% chose not to respond.
The final question was a suggestion line regarding topics, and these are listed and aggregated on the following page.
There was strong interest in learning about the Internet and online local govt. services, as well as a conference on these topics, with affirmative responses in the 80% range among most questions. There was slightly less interest in learning to put local govt. resources online at 76.1%, but this is still a significant percentage of the respondents.
The respondents may have self-selected to complete the survey because of interest in the topic, so it is not possible to suggest that these figures represent those of all municipal officials.
Still, the general interest suggest that additional education and outreach in this area, as well as the production of a conference dedicated to the topics suggested would be beneficial and would likely be well-attended.
List of Suggested topics at a future E-Gov Conference. Data collected at Municipal Officer conferences in September and October 2001 by the Center for Rural Studies and VLCT.
The topics suggested for a conference fell into the following categories. The grouping was done subjectively. Each item is a separate suggested topic.
Online Documents:
Total topics: 19
Web Site Development:
Total topics: 13
Transaction/Security:
Total topics: 7
Software skills:
Total topics: 4
General
Total topics: 5
Applications/Tools
Total topics: 6
For more information about this document, contact Center for Rural Studies, 207 Morrill Hall, Burlington, VT 05401,
crs@uvm.edu, 802-656-0150.