The objective of this team is to create ServiceLinc, a constituent services tracking system, for the city of Lincoln, Nebraska. This tool is designed to aide in the tracking of and response to concerns of constituents throughout the city. These concerns include everything from potholes and nonfunctional streetlights to public nuisances to health and safety concerns.

The project's primary client contact is Lin Quenzer, Ombudsman for the city of Lincoln. It is the role of the Ombudsman to coordinate constituent concerns, refer problems to the proper agencies, and ensure that everything is completed in a timely matter. This is a challenging job, to say the least, and the team hopes that the ServiceLinc software it is developing with make this process more smooth.
There are a number of important features of ServiceLinc which are projected to benefit the city and its members:

Constituent tracking

With this system, the city will be able to conveniently maintain contact information for constituents who wish to leave their name.
This will aid in concern follow-up, allowing the city to contact the citizen for more information or to let them know that their issue has been resolved.

Internal case tracking and prioritization

Oftentimes, several city departments are solved in pursuing a citizen concern. This can lead to confusion regarding what has already been accomplished.
ServiceLinc allows the city to prioritize concerns, helping to make sure that important matters are resolved as quickly as possible.

Long-term tracking

Currently, there is no way for the Ombudsman to review the history of a particular case. Tracking down the details of exactly what happened becomes increasingly difficult as more and more departments become involved.
ServiceLinc will also allow statistics such as average resolution time to be tracked. This can aid the Ombudsman in speeding up the process of addressing concerns and increasing the efficiency of the city government.

Data integrity

Constituent concerns often have many documents associated with them. Letters, emails, memos, and other correspondence accumulate and become difficult to manage.
ServiceLinc will include a database to manage this information. Officials will be able to add everything from reports to digital photographs to the system, and ServiceLinc will keep of track what the data is and where it belongs.

The ServiceLinc team is making use of a number of powerful technologies in order to aid in the creation of this tool. These include:

Visual Basic: The "hard core" programming of the project will be done in Visual Basic. This is what will allow the program to make sense of the data in its database.
Active Server Pages: This technology accepts data and formats it into something that is convenient for the user to look at. All of the processing is done by a server, meaning that users will not have to use any special software in order to work with ServiceLinc. In fact, it will seem to them that the project is created entirely with HTML, the language of common web pages!
JavaScript: JavaScript programming will help to ensure that users are inputting proper data. This will cut down on simple typos (such as forgetting the last digit of a telephone number), thus making the stored data that much more accurate.

Through close work with the Ombudsman and other city employees, the team is ensuring that their product will be used with great success upon completion. The advantages of such a system are enormous, and it is hoped that it will benefit both city employees and all of the residents of Lincoln.