PloneGov: City of Newport News shares its software

Open eGov is an award winning project launched by the City of Newport News, Virginia - USA. The intent is to create a collaborative software ecosystem, where government organizations, non-profits and the private sector work together to share the cost of enhanced capabilities. The software and related documentation is available today for free download.

An article by Zea Partners, based on content kindly provided by Open eGov.

The City of Newport News, an active member of the PloneGov initiative, is offering the software that runs its web site as well as the knowledge base it created through the implementation process to any organization or individual, free of charge. The intent is to create a collaborative software ecosystem, where government organizations, non-profits and the private sector work together to share the cost of enhanced capabilities.

Open eGov is the winner of the 2008 Havlick Award for Innovation in Local Government and also winner of the 2008 Digital Government Achievement Award in the Government-to-Government category.

• Open eGov intends to provide a low barrier to entry. It should be simple and inexpensive to assess the level of fit with an organization's needs. The same efficiency should apply through the entire product life-cycle: test period, deployment on Intranet and/or Internet, maintenance, support and enhancements.
• Open eGov used a leading Open Source web Content Management System "Plone" (based on Zope and Python) available on Windows, Linux and Mac.
• Open eGov added its own set of "Plone Products" - this is what it is licensing as Open Source (GPL). The City of Newport News also selected and integrated about 20% of the available off the shelf add-on Plone Products and other complimentary Open Source tools and utilities to create a scalable, full function, redundant and highly available operating environment. Organizations willing to participate in this ecosystem will benefit from the entire experience and complete knowledge base that goes beyond the software itself.  Open eGov in collaboration with PloneGov openly share our combined experiences, including:
  • Knowledge base and understanding of best practices
  • Documentation, standards, lessons learned
  • Organizational experience converting to a CMS
  • Training materials
  • Hardware configurations, software set-up and operations
  • Enhancements and maintenance releases
• Enhancements, regardless of the source of funding should benefit everyone. Participants may agree up front to split the cost of such enhancements, or one may fund it and enable others to benefit later
  • City of Newport News encourages participants to engage the private sector in delivering services such as consulting, support, hosting, and enhancements
  • It will promote an alternative "mutual assistance" mechanism for participants to provide the above services to each other
  • Members will have the option to develop their own skills and technical capabilities, or leverage one of the above, or a combination of in-house skills, mutual assistance and vendor services
    

To see the capabilities of Open eGov production environment, please visit http://www.nngov.com.

The City of Newport News offer the software and relevant documentation integrated with the PloneGov delivery channels. In the meanwhile, all relevant information, including the software in GPL format is available here: http://nngov.com/egov/open-egov/

More information

More information about Open eGov is available on the project site and a detailed list of Collaborative eGovernment open source projects is provided on PloneGov.org