First some good news: the City of Champaign has decided to place an advisory referendum on their November ballot requiring all contracts and itemized expenses to be posted on the web. In Urbana, they were not so lucky. Both stories are at INDYMEDIA along with the original post of:

The Secret Website of The Orpheum

(Galesburg, 04-19-08)

The Orpheum Theater in Galesburg, a locally funded non-profit, has secretly contracted to have their website redesigned by an expensive firm in Kansas City

Galesburg is poverty stricken, and for what little money it admits to have, there is an ever-increasing budget for economic development.

Burnishing the image of The Orpheum supposedly is helpful to this losing cause. The Orpheum is funded by the City of Galesburg, Knox County, and many individual donors who have helped restore and maintain it over the last 30 years. It has, in a natural homegrown way, attained "Brand recognition" and this is what the new director intends to purchase by sending donated money out of town.

There are web designers in this town, who like the rest of the town, could use the work. But this project is none of their business, and won't be as newly hired marketing director Bret Cornish implied last Thursday when he relunctantly let me in on this: "the process is already too far along".

You can decide for yourself how far along the process is, because I found the development of this expensive new wonder tucked away in the public directory of the existing website.A website that was built with donated labor. It has been maintained and updated that way. I was told several times by Kate Francis, the new director, that it would be like that for the foreseeable future. Well, in February the board of directors discussed web design but the details didn't make it to the record, and the March minutes were not published. This is a gross violation of their charter, and a violation of the trust of the people of Galesburg, Illinois. I can tell you quite a few things about the amatuerish nature of this overblown outsourced script-kiddie effort, because it was set up on my server, with no notice, and created several gross security violations, but I will spare you for now. This is what the process looks like:

http://theorpheum.org/dev/

See for yourself. In case if they somehow remove it, I have saved a complete mirror (completely working code and database) elsewhere. It is a Drupal installation, that could have been installed with a mouse click from the cpanel/fantastico hosting I had set up for these people at less than market rates.

Meanwhile, their online ticket sales remain unsecured: your identity (and your money) is at risk if you purchase tickets there.

They could have used my server certificate for their ticket sales, but do not, even though this was recommended to them before I started to host the site.

The fellow who used to host their site for free offered them a security certificate, but they were not interested and he gave up trying. So their online ticket sales remain unsecured, but rather than fix that problem, it is more important for them to send money to a state where Kate had a previous short-term professional fund-rasing job - one of many.

As for the people of Galesburg, let them eat cake. The people who can afford to go to shows are completely oblivious to those who have been impoverished and disenfranchised.

One final note. A change in the home page of their site would be a good idea if only to correct the spelling of THEATER. The Orpheum is a Theater venue. Not the art of theatre, as their site proclaims in red.

"The word theater can refer to a theater building, the art of theater, or even a home theater system.
The word theatre should always refer to the art form and only the art form. " from:
http://theaterhelper.com/content/view/61/9/
where the author has references that agree with mine.

Welcome to Galesburg, Illinois where the one-eyed man is a little king.

David Roknich

DOGSPOT