
Newly Redesigned Boston.gov Just Went Open Source - rmason
http://www.routefifty.com/2016/10/boston-open-source-website/132720/?oref=RouteFiftyTCO
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rmason
It's not just the website, it's all the code behind the services. Plenty of
city websites here in Michigan don't offer translation or let you pay for (or
dispute) things like parking tickets.

I realize that they will have to hire someone to write the glue code to
integrate into the individual city's systems, but I'd be willing to bet it
might not be more than they paid a designer to build their existing site.

In fact someone might be able to build an entire consulting service around
this code base.

Spreading online serve yourself functionality for everyone, not just those in
larger cities might be Boston.gov's enduring legacy.

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amichal
Boston also worked with us to open source the system we've been building with
them to help house the homeless. [https://github.com/greenriver/boston-
cas](https://github.com/greenriver/boston-cas)

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toomuchtodo
As someone very interested in helping solve homelessness, this is relevant to
my interests!

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sbarre
In before the PHP hate..

But seriously, this is a great move, and hopefully the start of helping other
cities and municipalities provide more services to their citizens!

There was a startup discussed on here recently that was a SaaS platform for
city management, I wonder if they have APIs that could be integrated into
something like this.

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robalfonso
The project is built from drupal, the same CMS is used for whitehouse.gov. It
seems drupal is seeing a pretty good up take for these types of websites.

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sandGorgon
are you aware of why this is so? is it that the talent around this sector is
drupal based... or the CMS nature of the platform is something that
bureaucracy likes?

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snowwrestler
The security story for Drupal is quite good from the government perspective.
It is used by many serious organizations, so there are a lot people to find
bugs and problems. The Drupal community have a formalized standing security
committee who cover the core code and the most commonly used modules. They
issue security patches on a predictable, regular schedule. And many of the
core developers are employed by one company--Acquia--who sells enterprise
software support subscriptions.

That checks a lot of boxes for enterprises in general, and governments in
particular.

Plus it is a very powerful framework but is way cheaper than "traditional"
license-based enterprise solutions like Oracle CMS. And it's open source,
which is citizen-friendly and gives governments better long-term ownership of
their technology.

Finally, although Drupal developers are their own sort of special flower
(hopefully changing with Drupal 8), there are a lot of them and a lot of
companies that provide Drupal development. So if you have to fire a vendor,
you'll be able to find another one to step in without too much fuss.

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matthjensen
The article mentions that this comes three months after a redesign. I love it
that they are open sourcing the code, but at first I was wondering, why not do
it before the redesign so that contributors could really dig into the project
and be drawn into the project? Upon further reflection, though, I think the
right way to view this is that they are open sourcing the site before the
_next_ redesign. I can't want to watch this unfold, and maybe I'll even chip
in. It's great to know that I can!

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stefs
well, i'd say: this now is the minimum viable product, from here on people can
improve to make what it should be.

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cygned
> boston.gov

Interestingly broken on mobile. Open menu, swipe and the whole page looks
weird.

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iamben
It's a bug related to fixed positioning that loses its fixedness. I spent an
age trying to fix it on a site a while back. IIRC problem was worse on Android
than iOS.

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fungi
one of the really interesting things for me is that the boston.gov web/digital
team isn't just an arm of marketing/pr/it.

nice work! from a jellos public servant on the other side of the planet.

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eagsalazar2
That blue on blue when you open the sidebar! WTF people?

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zem
you know where the source is

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a13n
It feels above average compared to the typical government site, but still a
decade behind modern design. I wonder if open source will improve this? Props
to the team for open sourcing it.

~~~
sp0rk
You think that's what websites looked like in 2006?

