The SPC Website
The SPC Shareholder portal is awful. But don't take my word for it - log in and see how long it takes to find our bylaws.
[If you're reading this sentence before trying to find our bylaws, I seriously recommend that log in and see how long it takes to find our bylaws first.]
Quite simply, finding information on our website shouldn't be a mystery or an adventure, and once information is found, it should be organized, meaningful and complete. And lest you think that the having substantive website content is just tangential to our greater digitial operations as a co-op — submitting maintenance requests, scheduling service, sending targeted notifications, and various account-management functions — consider that we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for these tools in recent decades — reportedly over $20k per year — and at a recent meeting, our Board disclosed that the new system will cost approximately $100k per year going forward! With such an outlay, we should certainly expect to get the Shareholder-facing side of this project right.
Just a quick review will show some of the more glaring errors of our portal. At the bottom of this page is a list of all the documents available on our portal. If it is not listed, it is not there! Of particular note:
- There is no hierarchy, and Items are shown in alphabetical order, so that the top of the list is the 2023 election, followed by the 2024 election, and so on. Precisely the least useful information is at the top!
- There should certainly be a master folder for our Elections, and other groupings as well.
- Within the election folders, election details are incomplete - most notably, they don't include results! But in any case, they include just a subset of election-related information. Also on the subject of elections, even though an announcement was made for 2026 elections, there is no folder on the portal that contains that announcement. And regardless of their utility, prior election years are not available.
- There is no folder for the Lobby & Grounds project! Despite the animation in our community about this project, there is no information on the website about it... In this case, I believe that such information should properly live on the SPCampus website that our Board established for this purpose... but there should certainly be an entry on the list for this project, and a link for people to follow.
- Aside from document names, no document dates or other details are posted. This is important in order to discern if a particular document is current or authoritative, especially since so much of the site is outdated! How am I to know if the "Schedule of Fees" document (dated January 2023) is correct?
- The contents of many folders are incomplete — for example, the "Personal Income Tax Information" folder only contains files for 2017 through 2020, Boardroom Reports are included through 2022, and Financial Statements through 2018.
- Other than just links to documents, the display should allow customization, information and links - for example, the "Air Rights" folder should display a link to the project website. And while it's fair to say that there might not have been a need to publish all the Air Rights FAQ documents to our portal in the first place, if doing so, they should have reproduced ALL of them — the portal includes only FAQ1, FAQ2, and FAQ4.
- Many folders are empty!
- No information at all is available about the Gas outages that have impacted Buildings 1, 2, and 4.
- Aside from this strictly necessary information, there is no other info on the site... Though there might be reasons not to publish some information, for the most part, I think our neighbors would be interested in the number of apartments in our Co-op, the number of breakthroughs, the number of residents, the number of commercial properties, the names of our stores, our total developed square feet and Air Rights, past designs that were considered for various projects (ie, the 2007 Lobbies Prject). and a short-list of major projects under consideration.
Maintaining a portal includes more than just publishing information. We need an architecture and strategy that will faciliate sharing information, and policies and a process that will allow the streamlined and comprehensive publication of data.
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