To "articulate why maintaining the website is a "need" for the Domain Name is incorrect reasoning. The Domain Name has goodwill value that goes far beyond the actual yearly renewal cost, and provides name brand recognition for the City. It has been used in billboard outreach, television adds, it is more than just a website, it is Bike Morgantown! Please take a look at http://bikemorgantowncontent.blogspot.com/2010/09/same-roads-same-rights-same-rules_30.html and http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NgCYRah9kDg/VT-wF_HjI2I/AAAAAAAAAQY/Tol9aWxKPNg/s1600/RecruitmentLetter_size-page-001.jpg andhttp://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rIiiqSfmess/TwpLkpfwM_I/AAAAAAAAADY/zn1-U35RCkA/s1600/IMG_0302.JPG and there are many other examples out there, too.

The cost of renewal is not a major burden for the City, the average yearly renewal cost for Domain Names these days is about $10. If the City is paying a lot more, they should consider a different registrar. It goes without saying, that this email list uses the bikemorgantown.com as a MX.  As far as the website, finding someone to keep content current is always a challenge, especially if you rely on volunteers. I do like the discussion to move that responsibility to City Staff; the alternative is to have a website with static content, that doesn't require constant updates, or that is a mashup of other sites that are being updated. In the past, that was the function of blogspot, and the mapping application which is updated independently of the website.

I agree with continuing to use Rackspotter, https://www.rackspotter.com/greateBr-morgantown , for our purposes it works well, and those comments can be added. For identification, maybe a shared doc? I can put the BB in contact with the developer, if necessary.  

Yay, for the new people who want to become BB members, let's have a virtual meeting on a day/time that works for them!

-Jonathan

On 2020-10-05 16:49, Drew Gatlin wrote:

Hello BikeMorgantown!
 
A few things:
 
First, I need the help of your expert minds! We need to perform a comprehensive assessment of the bike parking along the Morgantown Riverfront. A decent amount of inventorying has already been performed using RackSpotter.com. However, this did not include the following, which we need:
  1. Comments on each of the existing bicycle parking locations
    1. Is it enough?
    2. Is the rack design satisfactory?
    3. It necessary, or is it chronically underutilized?
  2. Identification of areas that lack any current bike parking and need installation of new parking
Please let me know if you would like to be part of this project, and if so, how you would like to be involved. Final expected product would be: a map and/or document ID'ing all existing locations and needed locations with the above information. You could probably do this entirely in RackSpotter, but we don't have easy access to the database to manipulate the presentation of the data.
 
Second, www.bikemorgantown.com is up for renewal. You have a few options:
  1. Ask the city to pay to renew the domain
  2. Abandon the domain and incorporate the content onto the morgantownwv.gov website
  3. Allow the domain to lapse entirely
  4. Request that the city transfer the domain to some separate entity (would need to be a nonprofit, I think)
Some considerations for the website: 
  1. If you wish to have the city pay to renew the domain, you need to articulate why maintaining the website is a "need" - we continue to be in a spending freeze
  2. In 2018, the board drafted a new website for BikeMorgantown but never pulled the trigger: https://bikemorgantown.wixsite.com/home
  3. During that time, they unpublished most existing content from www.bikemorgantown.com
  4. If we kept the existing domain, we would need to map the new content to it.
  5. If transferred to pages within morgantownwv.gov, it's likely that we will need to build several sub-pages.
Third, we have a few people interested in joining the bike board. We should meet. Can someone throw out a day/time as a suggestion? I would prefer by the end of next week.
 
Hope you're all well!
Drew
 

J. Drew Gatlin

Staff Engineer

389 Spruce St., Rm. 24

Morgantown, WV 26505 

Office: (304) 284-7411

Cell: (304) 719-7900

Fax: (304) 284-7409



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