Update: City of Austin Website Redesign
We’ve known for some time now that the aggrieved local taxpayer and Austin web professional community’s outcry over reported plans to outsource the City of Austin website redesign to a Californian firm did not fall on deaf ears. Kudos to Austin officials for listening to concerned locals and resetting the project.
Austin Chronicle reporter Wells Dunbar delivers a thorough rundown of the project’s history, priorities, and current trajectory in this week’s issue. It’s a good read, and the stuff about “crowdsourcing” is just plain cool. Who knows? Maybe there’s a scenario where we’d do work on the project, if stars align.
Whatever final form the website redesign takes, it will certainly be an improvement not only over the existing portal but also over what the city was mulling just a few months ago. The balance the city faces is in designing a site that can satisfy not only the tech-savvy crowds of OpenAustin, who have vastly invigorated public discussion of the site, but also the average visitor looking to contact her council member. (As Web tools like social networking, blogging, and the like become more ubiquitous, this gap is already shrinking.) Another component that shouldn’t be overlooked is the original impetus behind the redesign, the push for greater transparency and accountability; the city could get the slickest website in Cyberspace, resplendent with Web 2.0 doodads, but if it isn’t fed more information on permitting, development, and budgeting, it would still be an epic failure.
Tags: open source, website redesign
