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Ask Slashdot: What Web Platform For a Small Municipality?

Posted by timothy on from the right-here-in-river-city dept.

First time accepted submitter r3dR0v3r writes "I have the opportunity to help improve / replace the website of my small U.S. town (~6000 people). The town leaders are open to most any suggestions, and are open to the idea of having the website facilitate a more open government — by being a place at which town documents, meeting agendas, meeting minutes, legal forms, ordinances, etc. can be found in an organized way and downloaded. And of course the site should provide general info about the town, it's services, recreation opportunities, etc.. Now, we have no budget, so we'll be looking at free/open software. I've considered options such as Drupal, but I'm doing this as volunteer work so I don't want to start from scratch and spend overly much time. Thus, I'm looking for advice about any existing platforms made specifically for municipalities as a great way to get a jump start. I'm guessing there are other slashdotters that have helped their communities in this way. Your suggestions please?"

4 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. CMS by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Use a CMS like Joomla, Drupal (or any other similar)

    Or, if you're a glutton for punishment, Sharepoint. (yes, that is a joke)

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  2. Easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Drupal with CiviCRM. Perfect for what you've described.

  3. whatever you choose by wbr1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Make sure to have a clear support contract, paid or otherwise. This could become an unpaid time sink unless you set clear time and other boundiaries NOW. You may not notice if you do,but you will pay if you don't.

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  4. Software Suggestion, Pointers by llin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For the type of things you're looking for, I'd recommend LocalWiki. While so far it's been used mostly by communities vs municipalities, it includes robust permissions, is under active development, and is built w/ some nice geo-extensions for where that's applicable. It's very easy to get up and running and you could run a micro EC2 instance to test out for (practically) free.

    I'd also suggest that you try to connect w/ others that are doing similar things. There's a large community of civic hackers. For those working directly w/ municipal govt, check out the Code for America Brigade, a community that's all about that and can provide help/support for exactly this sort of thing. You may want to check out their deployable app list, and maybe also check out CfA's github repository which has a lot of projects that may be useful, and their Civic Commons project which gathers the sw/infrastructure that cities are using.