Schedule

Online Engagement for Rural Oklahoma: A Hands-On Build

Innovation in Focus · Garden D

Tapio Kymäläinen (Senf)

Public meetings hear from whoever can make a Tuesday night, and in rural Oklahoma that leaves out shift workers and anyone an hour's drive from town hall. Online engagement reaches more of them when the questions sit on a map of places people know, and the site works on a phone and in the languages residents speak. Rural projects still raise fair objections: patchy broadband, older residents, a one-person planning staff, a county too big for one meeting. This workshop starts from them. The session opens with 20 minutes on what recent projects show about who takes part online, including a 2026 park survey in Frederick, Maryland, where 1,436 of the 2,201 residents who started finished it and participants came from every age band, about 140 of them over 75. It also covers how printed questionnaires from the library or the county fair can land in the same dataset as the online answers. It closes with what the ADA Title II web rule means for engagement sites before the April 2028 compliance date most Oklahoma towns and counties face (April 2027 for places over 50,000). Then the room builds an online engagement project. Working in pairs on a current project or an Oklahoma scenario we provide, such as a main street plan or a county safety action plan, attendees can set up a project page, a map for place-based comments, a short survey and a printable paper version, then test each other's sites on their phones. Bring a laptop; no GIS experience needed.