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