Emily Thompson is a program manager at the Michigan Suburbs Alliance. Recently, she helped the alliance launch On Board, a new information tool made possible by a grant from Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund.

New technologies are critical to advancing good and open government and encouraging citizen participation, but many local governments have yet to take advantage of even the most basic tools.

Citizen boards and commissions provide a good example. Local governments rely on appointed volunteer bodies for advice, ideas and assistance in achieving public goals. Unfortunately, many residents aren’t aware of or don’t understand how to engage with these bodies. As a result, local governments receive a limited number of applications and certain demographic groups are underrepresented. One of the reasons is that most local governments don’t provide information about them online.

We hope to change this with OnBoardMI.org. For local officials, On Board is a secure database designed to help them manage information about local boards and commissions. For residents, it’s a website designed to help them find information and volunteer.

That’s not as simple as it sounds, but that was our goal: to create a simple tool local governments would want to use. We knew we needed to make On Board useful and usable to earn the buy-in of local clerks, mayors and managers, and we knew we’d need their buy-in to make On Board successful; that’s why we engaged them early and often throughout the project’s development.

It’s worth noting the project had some local government buy-in from the start; it was their idea. Mayors and managers who participate in our Millennial Mayors Congress program wanted to see local governments do more to engage young people, so they created a set of best practices designed to help communities provide more information on their own websites. The group envisioned On Board as a tool to support the implementation of these best practices as well as a one-stop shop for information.

We launched the prototype version of On Board last week. The cities of Ferndale and Ypsilanti and Washtenaw County are already taking advantage of it, centralizing information such as board descriptions, memberships, meeting times and term expirations. We are so grateful to the clerks in these communities for signing on to the prototype, and the feeling appears mutual.

“The City of Ferndale is very excited to be selected to participate in the OnBoardMI.org pilot program,” Marne McGrath, deputy city clerk of Ferndale told us. “We have found the program very intuitive and easy to use. We hope the project will be expanded as this is a great tool to increase transparency and promote more participation in our city boards and commissions.”

In the coming months, we hope to open the site to more communities, continuing to centralize this type of data and establishing standards that could be replicated statewide or even nationally. We would also like to add features and functionality that will make On Board even more useful, such as an API that will help cities automatically update their websites. By going beyond just creating the database to make it accessible and appealing, we can help residents meaningfully participate in shaping their own communities.

If you’re interested in learning more about On Board, the Michigan Suburbs Alliance or the Millennial Mayors Congress, contact Emily Thompson at 313-444-4830 or [email protected].

The Knight Prototype Fund helps innovators test early-stage media and information ideas with grants of $35,000. The next deadline for applications is May 1.