News

Digital Update: Moving Mountains, We’re Here to Help, & More

Posted on July 21, 2021

How Do You Move a Mountain? Taking on San Rafael’s ERP Project   The City of San Rafael’s ERP system EDEN is the primary financial tool for budgeting, payroll, cashiering, purchasing, and human resource management and has been in use since 2002. While it  continues to support our City’s day-to-day financial needs, the software has reached...

Digital Update: New Project Management Software, ISP Accounts Reduced, and More

Posted on June 28, 2021

Digital Pilots New Project Management Software Digital Service has selected a new tool to centralize the management of inter-departmental projects, triage incoming requests, and measure progress against strategic goals and key performance indicators (KPIs).  Asana is a robust project management tool that allows for task tracking across projects and departments that we will begin rolling...

Digital Update: Digital’s Quarterly Roadmap, Spanish Snapshot, Permitting, & More

Posted on April 30, 2021

Digital Quarterly Roadmap  Following our one year mark from the start of the pandemic, Digital is actively working to help our city “build back better” by digitizing city services and digitally up-skilling our city workforce. This week, Digital met to discuss our quarterly roadmap and new sprint planning process. Our department roadmap defines the needs we're seeing across the city, theories on how to...

Digital Update: New Director, First Floor Construction Progress, & More

Posted on April 12, 2021

Welcome Jess! Last week, Digital welcomed our new director, Jessica MacLeod! Jess has been busy getting situated, meeting with members of our organization and learning about the tools, workflows, and group dynamics of our team. During Monday’s City Council meeting, Mayor Kate, councilmembers, and other city staff joined in welcoming Jess to the organization 😊....

Digital Update: Canal WiFi, Digital Marin, Wildand Map, & More

Posted on March 26, 2021

Canal WiFi Goes Live at Kerner Campus The Canal WiFi network expanded to a new location this month after Marin County and MarinIT installed 3 Access Points on the roofs of the Health and Human Services Campus located at 3301 Kerner Boulevard, further expanding the coverage of the network throughout the neighborhood. These access point locations were designed to serve the adjacent parking lot area, reaching much of the Cardenas...

Digital Update: A Year of Public Information in Review, Maps & Apps, Bookings, & More

Posted on March 5, 2021

Emergency operations public messaging has settled into a regular rhythm after a year of adapting to the changing landscape of COVID-19. Our team continues to collaborate with the County of Marin, community partners, and regional agencies to synchronize COVID-19 messaging to our community. The response to our community messaging has been positive. Our email newsletter read-rate remains strong, and we continue to see an increased amount of social media...

Digital Update: New Digital Director, Citywide Needs Assessment

Posted on February 22, 2021

Digital Welcomes New Director  We are thrilled to be welcoming Jessica Macleod as the new Director of our Digital Team! We’re looking forward to bringing Jessica into the fold as soon as she comes on board April 1st—we have some big and exciting projects queued up this year and Jessica is the perfect person to help our team ship them out! Fun fact: As you have probably heard, Jessica is one of the Co-Founders at U.S. Digital...

Digital Update: Cybersecurity, Events Permit Project, & GIS

Posted on February 8, 2021

Cybersecurity Awareness The next cybersecurity training module will be available Monday, February 8th. Employees will receive an email from do-not-reply@knowbe4.com with a brief description of the training and a link to your training session. The training takes about 45 minutes and should be completed by the end of the month. Why is this important? Security...

Digital Update: Digital Workshops, Multifactor Authentication, the PSC, & more

Posted on January 25, 2021

Digital Workshops - New Approach to Budget Planning for Distributed Teams  In preparation for budget planning our team has started forecasting projects for the next fiscal year. Strategic planning with remote, distributed teams can be a challenge, but there are a number of digital tools our team uses to make collaboration work seamlessly. To help foster team contributions and share ideas in this workshop we used Google Jamboard, a tool that uses digital...

Digital Update: Interim Operations, Canal Wi-Fi Usage, Digital Marin, & More

Posted on January 8, 2021

The Show Goes On: Digital Service Interim Operations   With the recent departure of our Digital Service Director, Rebecca Woodbury, the Digital team is moving forward with ongoing operations, supporting in-flight projects, and working to setup our next Director for success. In this interim period our Civic Design Manager, Sean Mooney, will be overseeing the Department’s operations and the team is...

Digital Update: Marin Academy students, City event permits, delay send, & more

Posted on December 14, 2020

Marin Academy Class takes on Civic Tech in San Rafael The Marin Academy Transdisciplinary Leadership program is an application-based program for senior students to explore the nuances and perspectives of a social issue and then respond to it in partnership with outside organizations. The students in this year’s program are examining how city governments are...

Digital Update: COVID Fatigue, Canal Wi-Fi, & More

Posted on November 20, 2020

COVID Fatigue—We're All Feelin’ it  Residents are tired of being cooped up, tired of being careful, tired of being scared. Our collective fatigue is making some people careless – one reason COVID-19 is rising sharply again in California and throughout the U.S. The analysis reveals a substantial drop in resident interest about CVOID-related issues over time across the board, suggesting...

Digital Update: Press coverage, the final PSC move, & more

Posted on November 7, 2020

Esri Spotlights Open Restaurant Map Last week Esri, the company that makes ArcGIS software and apps to combine mapping and data analytics, published an article highlighting our Open Restaurant Map., which we made using their technology. The article, “San Rafael Supports Minority-Owned Businesses with Open Restaurants”, highlights our effort to support minority owned businesses that...

Digital Update: Final Stages of PSC Move, Recreation Moves to City Website, Cybersecurity Training, & More

Posted on October 23, 2020

The Last Big Move into the Public Safety Center This Saturday marks the final push of moving equipment and services into the Public Safety Center as our team relocates Police servers from City Hall to their new home in the Public Safety Center. Services including the Police Department’s Computer Aided Dispatch system (RIMS) and the...

Digital Update: 1st floor updates, podcasts, Canal Wi-Fi, & more

Posted on October 9, 2020

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working with Public Works to make changes to the first floor of City Hall so Parking Services, the Sustainability / Volunteer program, and Digital can move into our new space. The move requires several technology related projects to move into the new space—a new network that separates...

Digital Update: Canal Wi-Fi, COVID Outreach, Community & Childcare gets upgraded, & more

Posted on September 25, 2020

Canal Wi-Fi The Canal Wi-Fi project keeps making serious headway. We added a new access point at the Kerner pump station to increase signal coverage in the area.  We are working on getting two more root access point locations online in the heart to the neighborhood; these will provide connectivity to twelve access points sprinkled along Canal, Larkspur, Novato, and Fairfax Streets.  Some heavy lifting is required before we can install these devices...

Digital Update: Wildfire Safety Webinar, Canal Wi-Fi, Solano Strong, & More

Posted on September 14, 2020

Virtual Wildfire Forum Last week, Christine helped the Fire Department put on a virtual wildfire forum that’s been streamed almost 400 times on YouTube. Over 60 questions were submitted ahead of time and Christine moderated a panel with Chief Darin White, Emergency Manager Quinn Gardner, and Sergeant Scott Eberle providing information about evacuation, preparedness, traffic...

Digital Update: Managing Multiple Emergencies, Canal Wi-Fi, PSC, & More

Posted on August 23, 2020

Managing Public Information in the Time of Multiple Emergencies With various emergencies now overlapping, we expanded our “San Rafael Resilient” email newsletter to include information about potential power outages, air quality, wildfire, and the coronavirus. Did you see our latest edition? On Wednesday of this week, we covered information about the lightning storm induced wildfires,...