Project Goals

The City of Decatur is pursuing three major goals with this project:

1. Community Networking
One of the three overall principles of the City’s Strategic Plan is to ‘Encourage Community Interaction’. Virtual Decatur should provide numerous community networking tools for people to connect online and offline.

Key components of this goal:
• Encouraging social interaction around common interests within Virtual Decatur, which may be associated with actual City of Decatur events. 

2. Civic Engagement
Online mediums, such as MMOs, provide a new channel of communication that people can relate to, participate in, and help shape.  This offers governments a potential method of encouraging more frequent and constructive interaction between citizens and their government, as well as amongst citizens themselves. 

Key components of this goal:
• Gather citizen input on policies, topics of interest, city services, and prospective developments.
• Provide a Virtual City Hall Tour with multimedia capabilities.
• Streaming video of public meetings, ideally with a chat room feature that allows viewers to comment.

3. Economic Development
The City of Decatur’s economic development strategy promotes balanced growth and encourages business diversity while enhancing the existing character of the commercial districts.  Virtual Decatur should complement the existing efforts to support and promote Decatur businesses.  Marketing downtown as a center of social and economic activity is a main objective. 

Key components of this goal:
• Simulate proposed commercial development.
• Promote existing businesses.
• Market Decatur to prospective businesses.
• Provide visitor information.
• Promote city events.
• Develop opportunities to earn coupons in Virtual Decatur that can be redeemed in actual stores and restaurants.