Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Why won't Daily Bread just publish their area finder thing like they used to?

So: there is no way to get the Daily Bread website to tell you about the different catchment areas. There's no "find your nearest soup kitchen" link. They are doing every single one of these automatically.

As with a lot of these places, paradoxically, their quick responses over email and phone make up for the lack of info on their website. It's hard to tell whether they're just trying to control the information, or having a hard time with web publishing. Either would be understandable: even this website, Toronto Meal Programs, suffers from both those problems too. Daily Bread and these other agencies are responsible to their funders, the press and the community at large, but it's hard to see how those responsibilities would get in the way of just making this info easy to access. Maybe they think their actual soup kitchen users don't use the web to find soup kitchens. Even though half the soup kitchens have computer labs in them. Maybe it's because they can't seem to allow volunteers to run their websites, and their budget for web services is limited. So even if they do get volunteer help, it's sketchy because it's volunteer help, and if they get corporate help, they have to lock everyone else out of the website, and they still can't get their company to pay attention to the site because it's a back-burnered on-spec pro-bono project.

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