Carroll + Hillsville = Chillsnet
If community Web sites are all about “branding,” Chillsnet.org may get the prize.

Chillsnet is a “community portal” that gets its name from a Carroll County/Hillsville partnership.

Andy Cohill, developer of the Blacksburg Electronic Village, recently praised the Chillsnet site, saying Internet users who can’t find a good community portal will go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo to get the information they are looking for.

When that happens, he said, a locality risks getting lost in Internet informational clutter.

Some of the best ideas for community portals have come from the poorest localities, Cohill said.

Don’t let money issues get in the way of using technology for better outreach. Money issues, Cogill said, are really just an excuse to not do anything.
http://www.chillsnet.com/

Restaurant ‘report cards’ draw 10,000 hits a month
On-line restaurant inspections are drawing at least 10,000 users each month, the Virginia Department of Health reports. The Web site, created a year ago, features official evaluations of sanitation and food preparation practices in restaurants, schools, day care facilities and the kitchens of hospitals, jails and nursing homes.

Inspectors like having violators exposed online. Few residents ever asked to see reports when they were available only in paper form, accumulating by the thousands in health department file cabinets. Now, scores of people are calling up the latest reports electronically.

Restaurants seldom pass inspection without a violation being found. Typically, the inspector finds what are called non-critical violations, such as a torn floor tile that catches dirt or a dirty refrigerator handle. These restaurants are still safe to eat in and can legally operate. Restaurant inspectors trust owners to correct the problems promptly and will be back in a few months for the next inspection.

Critical violations are those that pose a direct or immediate threat to the safety of the food being served. An example is the failure to keep hot food hot enough or cold food cold enough to inhibit microorganism activity. Inspectors demand on-the-spot correction of critical violations. If that’s not possible, inspectors can suspend a restaurant’s permit to operate until safety is restored. Inspectors can put a chronically unsafe restaurant out of business. Restaurant owners have some appeal rights.

The restaurant association, while praising the health department’s food-safety efforts, still has a concern with the site’s design. Spokesman Steve Grover said the inspection report summaries that are now routinely posted leave too much to consumer interpretation and that it would be simpler to indicate whether restaurants passed or failed.
http://www.vdh.state.va.us

– Information provided by The Roanoke Times

Records used to track county auto accidents
Students at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and Mountain Empire Community College used public data to track a full year of Wise County auto accidents.

Nearly 1,200 accidents occurred on highways and parking lots in 2003, according to the mapping survey.

The project represents hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal property damages along with personal injuries to drivers and passengers.

Project organizers hope that the data will be used to make Wise County streets and highways safer in the years ahead.
http://www.mywisecounty.com/news/021904-2.htm

Subscription-based alerts track disciplinary actions
The Virginia Department of Health Professions recently unveiled an online licensure and disciplinary notification service to employers, insurance companies, and others associated with Virginia’s 260,000 licensed, certified and registered health care professionals.

The notification service, the first of its kind, makes “tracking license renewal and disciplinary information related to health care providers as easy as reading an email,” Gov. Mark Warner said.

“With the use of commonly available technology, users are able to receive electronic notification of such changes via any apparatus that receives email: PC, pager, cell phone or PDA.”

The subscription-based service allows users to create a profile of the licenses and the information they wish to track, such as license expiration and renewal, notice of proceeding and/or board action. The profile is compared daily to the DHP public database; if there are status changes in a profile, an alert is sent to the appropriate email address(s).

“Public safety is critical,” said Robert Nebiker, director of the Department of Health Professions. “Currently, it can be like looking for a needle in a haystack when employers are attempting to stay abreast of the most recent information related to licensees.”

As in the past, any citizen can conduct an individual search through the Online License Lookup to verify that health care providers are in good standing.
http://www.dhp.state.va.us

VCOG Web site II
OpenGovVa.Org had 3,500 unique visitors in May, up 19 percent over May 2003.

Page views totaled 10,637, an increase of 28 percent over the same month a year earlier.