The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project

Spring is budding out beautifully in New Orleans, but that is unfortunately one of the few signs of progress right now.  For better or worse, the December holidays here tend to slide into Carnival season, and getting much done during that time is always a bit of an uphill climb.  Far worse was the fact that the City of New Orleans computer system got seriously compromised by ransomwear near the end of last year, effectively shutting down most of city government with substantial impacts on our work.

In particular, we were down to our final punch list for the latest update to our Residents Guide to City Government, hoping to go to press in early January, when the ransomwear attack occurred.  This put a full stop to our fact-checking, and the reality is that only in the last week of February were we able to resume work on it.  Our objective now is to go to press by mid-March.  This is such a valuable tool for enabling those who live and work in New Orleans to access the many programs and services of all branches of city government, and we really regret the delay in releasing the new version.  But accuracy is paramount, and we think it will be worth the wait.

With most of city hall in something between crisis mode and shutdown, we have simply not been able to continue any work on the neighborhood boundary mapping or any other aspect of the Citizen Participation Project.  However, we have a meeting with City Planning scheduled for the first week of March, and expect to be able to regroup and restart this vital work.

On top of all this, our Big Easy Budget Game website reached the point of having its code be so outdated as to need a major update.  Technology can be wonderful, but it changes so rapidly and requires constant management, which is challenging given the technical and financial resources of a smaller nonprofit.  We are currently working on both the immediate updating and a strategy/partnership to do a better job of keeping the coding current going forward.  We are cautiously optimistic that this process can be completed by mid-April, which would only put us a few weeks behind our usual launch date for the new year of Budget Gaming.

So, it has not been the best of times in New Orleans, or for our work.  Frustrating is a good way to describe it.  But in these last few weeks, progress seems to be happening on these external impediments to our objectives, and we are hopeful that this in turn will translate into progress on achieving these critically important goals.  We appreciate greatly that our supporters have stuck with us during these challenges, and been so supportive even when the frustration has been greatest.  We look forward to having much better news to report in our next edition.  Until then, our heartfelt thanks from the NOLA CPP team!