Future Forward! >
Portal Committee Home > About the Portal Committee
The Portal Committee (or working group) was formed after the initial
Future Forward! Green County kick-off event in 2007 which featured an
inspirational speech and community discussion lead by Rebecca Ryan of
Madison's Next Generation Consulting. In 2008, the Portal Committee moved forward in a number of areas such
as defining the overall objective of the group and outlining the
features desired in a new community web portal for the Green County
area.
It was decided that the web portal should
- Provide current news and event information for Green
County area residents, prospective residents and visitors to the county
-
Provide any prospective resident with information about the assets in
the county and assist people with the transition of moving to Green
County
-
Serve as a platform for dialog about matters relevant to the community
Initially, the website
www.futureforwardgc.com
was developed to help spread the word about the Future Forward! Green
County initiative. Some also believed that this might wind up being the
portal as well. As developments unfolded thought, it became clear that
there was a need to have both a site to promote the initiative as well
as another site to promote the Green County area. The site at
www.futureforwardgc.com
(this site) is now dedicated specifically to promoting the Future
Forward! Green County initiative and another site is playing the role
of the portal.
Late in 2008 the Portal Committee decided to join forces with the developer of an existing community website
www.greencountyspotlight.com
and take on that website as the official Portal Project. This move
dramatically advanced the group's goals in a number of ways as the
existing site already contained many of the features planned for the
portal and it had already established a grass-roots following in the
community as well. The goals of the developer (Green County Spotlight
LLC) and those of the Future Forward! Portal Committee were in very
close alignment from the very start so getting together was as simple
as a couple of conversations.
As of January 2009, the portal offers a growing variety of completely
free services for local residents, businesses and organizations as well
as provides information about local communities to people around the
world. It has become a collaborative community project with over 100
local business, organization and farm members as well as many more individual
members from around the area. Participation is free at all levels and
all local individuals, businesses, organizations and farms are invited
to join in and take advantage of the benefits provided through the
site. Examples of benefits provided by the site already include such
things as free classified ads, free custom web pages for local
businesses, farms, and organizations, coupons posted for free by local
businesses, community discussion forums, and lots more including
thousands of pages of handy information about the Green County area
organized into a community directory or "Guide." For a better idea of
what we're talking about, please visit the Future Forward! Portal
Project at
www.greencountyspotlight.com.
The Portal Committee is now focused on working in conjunction with the
other Future Forward! committees to help advance each committee's
individual missions and technology-related projects and more exciting
development is either on the drawing board or in the works already. If
you are interested in joining the efforts of this committee or have
comments or suggestions regarding committee projects, please don't
hesitate to
contact us here.