City of Austin Website: Ditch the hills, head for …California?

Despite the argument that twitter is little more than than a forum for people to shout what they had for lunch, it is a great tool for spreading new quickly.

And the news that spread like wild fire yesterday was the Austin Business Journal story that the Austin City Council is voting this week on whether to award a contract to a California company to redesign the city’s Web site. The value of this contract could be between 700K and 1.5M.

In the story, Austin City Chief of Staff Antony Snipes said that "while the city tries to contract with local companies whenever possible, it also has a responsibility to get the best deal for the money".

Most of the responses to the ABJ story were strongly in favor of contracting locally. Randall Baker, of PuraVida Ventures, made one of the more detailed arguments:

"This is an incredibly irresponsible move by the city staff. First, the taxpayers monies they speak of - 32% of it comes from technology related business, many of them web design firms. Second, of the 3000 technology companies based in the Austin/CenTex Region several hundred are web design firms, one international firm is located within 100 yards of city hall. Third, If no companies from the region either submitted responses or their responses did not meet the city staffs criteria then I would submit that either the city staffs criteria is wrong or the bidding process precludes firms not based upon their abilities but rather some irrelevant city bid criteria. For the city to have even been working on this project for over 15 months shows the inability of city staff to even understand the industry in which they are attempting to operate. In the period they have been "working" on the design, over 30,000 people have moved to our region the internet has doubled in users and over 4 extabytes of unique information has been generated."

Within hours of the story's appearance, a facebook group devoted to this issue appeared; and thanks to rapid dissemination through twitter, it passed 200 members in the first 24 hours. At this rate, the public hearings should be packed.

As of this morning, it appears that most of the discussion on the issue is going on in the facebook group.