Tinley Park Reaches Into Cyberspace
By MICHAEL J. GOEBIG, Economic Development Coordinator
Information pertaining to the Village of Tinley Park
is now accessible to over 40 million people! How is this
possible? The answer is easy. The answer is the Internet. Tinley Park is now on the World Wide Web.
The amount of information available on the Internet
is growing at a mindboggling pace. There is an average
of twelve new pages of information added to the Internet every second. At that rate it won't be long before
all information available to man will be accessible via
the information superhighway (provided the road can
handle the traffic!). The number of people accessing
this information is also growing like a wildfire. With the
increasing amount of information being made available
to us on the Internet, as well as the growing number of
people we could reach with our own information, it
seemed only a matter of time before municipalities
such as ours started getting online.
For the past six months the trustees and staff
members for the Village of Tinley Park have been
coordinating a plan to get onto the Internet. After much
toiling and information gathering, that plan has finally
become a realization. The current address for the Village of Tinley Park home page is: http: //www.ECNet.
Net/users/gtinpark/. This address may change if we
can get something a little bit shorter (and easier to
remember!), but for now that is our address. We are
proud to be one of the first Villages in the Chicago
Southland accessible to the world via the Internet.
The homepage has been created as a service to the
members of our community as well as an information
source for those outside our Village boundaries. As the
Internet evolves, we plan on having our home page
evolve with it. As that evolution occurs we look toward
having our home page mature from a one-way to a
two-way conduit between our constituents and the Village. We look at the Internet as a possible link where the
citizens of Tinley Park could connect to many of the
Villages services. They could register for building permits and consult our zoning and ordinance requirements without ever leaving the comforts of their home!
As more people get access, capabilities like those mentioned above make the Internet an attractive and cost
effective approach to local government in the next century. The Village of Tinley Park is looking proactively
at the possibilities that are coming as a result of the
information superhighway and trying to prepare for
them as best as we can.
Our home page is housed at Governors State University, an Internet hub for the south suburbs of Chicago. We are housed at GSU in part to a grant that was
passed for municipalities in the Chicago Southland.
According to the Executive summary of the project,
"the LINCOLN grant (Learning In Community On-
Line Network) will serve a broad-based, grassroots
coalition of citizens, non-profit organizations, governments, businesses and schools in a three county underserved rural and suburban region south of Chicago."
The main participants in the project are: 1) GSU; 2) The
Regional Action Project/2000; 3) The South Metropolitan Regional Higher Education Consortium; 4) The
Educational Computer Network; 5) The South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association, and 6) Argonne
National Laboratory. We would encourage other municipalities in the Chicago Southland to contact South
Suburban Mayors and Managers for more information
on getting your town on the Internet. The Internet is no
longer the wave of the future, but a reality of today, and
conducting business on it will become a prerequisite for
the next century. •
Page 18 / Illinois Municipal Review / March 1996