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Nov
1 - Partner Meeting:
Thursday, Nov 1,
2001 @ St. Thomas City Hall
Present: Valerie
Clark, Andy Lester, Suzanne Edwards, Brian Hollywood, George Cleminshaw,
Richard Harding, Brad Hammond, Kim Eitel, Cathy Ooms, Cathy Bishop,
Bobbi Irwin, Cathy Grondin, Carolyn Kneeshaw, Tom Willis, Ed Dunn, Sean
Southern
AGENDA 0830
1 New people present
were: Cathy Grondin, Employment Services Elgin and Cathy Ooms who will
be replacing Kim Eitel, St. Thomas-Elgin Health Unit.
2 Tom Willis of
Bell Canada explained the role of Bell and its companies in the new
technology economy. Bell has won the provincial electronic service delivery
for the government and the federal infrastructure delivery. Bell has
developed a demo 'portal' to explain what a portal is and what it can
do. They would like to develop it with a community to prototype it.
Bell is evolving into partnerships with community and other vendors
to accomplish the 'smart community' formats.
3 Brian Hollywood
of St. Thomas Energy Services Inc reported on the Oct 11 Business seminar
at the Wharf. About 60 people were present and good feedback resulted.
Surveys and Interviews will now be conducted by Wm Dodds & Associates
of Cambridge for business input. A little confusion resulted for some
as to why STESI and elginconnects presented the Oct 11 seminar together
and why STESI would be worried about the County infrastructure. Brian
explained that because both entities wanted to do market analysis for
businesses and both were comfortable with Wm Dodds we would not duplicate
the process and work together.
4 Update - Donna
- MEST had requested
the communities to complete a Gantt chart for activities and timelines.
She presented a copy to everyone present.
- The homepage
is up and a few wrinkles are to be worked out. Anyone wanting to share
their notes of their meetings please email to Donna until we work
out how each can upload their own.
- Donna is presenting
to City council Nov 13 to thank them for their contribution and share
a concise update with them. She will do the same for County council.
She has asked the Warden and the Mayor to be the Champions of this
effort and they have accepted. This should help us with our profile.
- The business
workshop went well. Wondering if we should follow similar formats
for some other sectors, specifically the municipal sector. Donna is
wanting to bring together all the governments - City, County and Lower
Tiers; elected and staff - for a workshop to illustrate the desired
applications for e-government. We need to get to the crux of the business
plan which is to determine priorities of applications and how we are
going to achieve them. Bell will do their portal demo. Bell was wondering
if Amtelecom and STESI would also be there to present their involvement
and partnership. Questions were asked to determine if we should open
the session up for community education. Although that is extremely
important our task at hand is to concretely outline the applications
desired, and particularly for the e-government sector at this workshop.
Donna will ask Debbie Millar from Lanark County to conduct the workshop
for municipal government. Donna to determine dates and locations.
The first part of December is preferred.
5. Donna stated
that we needed to clarify the status of our partners as we move along
in the process of governance. MEST recognizes the importance of having
Bell, Amtelecom and STESI as part of our community stakeholders and
recognizes the tension they feel over any conflict that may arise once
RFPs are undertaken. Some communities use the language of 'vendor-partners'
to differentiate. I suggest that during our process of our business
plan we utilize the jargon of partners as our community stakeholders,
vendor-partners to identify our infrastructure stakeholders, and construct
a conflict-of-interest document. As well, as our 'partnership' expands
(and we do want to be as inclusive as possible) it does create difficulty
of meeting availability and timely decision making. I propose that the
'steering committee' be comprised of the coordinator, the two chief
librarians and two IT technicians; also, either the Team Leaders or
one person representing the teams.
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