August 2009

When the word got out that the City of Austin was considering a 750K contract with an out of state firm to rebuild the city website, there was outrage, heated discussion, facebook groups, and subsequent news stories -- which ultimately caused the council to postpone it's decision.

Most people were angry that the city was using an out of state contractor. Yet, few people remarked that the city had not, in any broad public fashion, asked the citizens what they wanted in a website.

whurley, long-time open source advocate, used this as an opportunity to test his recent ideas on crowdsourcing and open collaboration, and quietly began work on a platform to bring the process out into the open.

Last Friday, Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOM let the cat out of the bag. However, she didn't say where the bag was. So, here it is:

http://openaustin.org/

From the title page:
OpenAustin is a community-based effort to crowdsource the requirements and development for the new City of Austin web site using local software developers, marketing experts, and graphic designers that have been displaced from their jobs due to the current economic downturn. This will produce a superior web site for the citizens of Austin at a fraction of the cost of the city's lowest bid.

Seems like a pretty clear mission statement.

Nevertheless, I suspected more was afoot, so I called whurley to get more details:

GeekAustin: Whurley, it's not like you gave the city any choice. You've given the folks a platform to discuss what they want in a city website, and how they want it implemented. How do you recommend that the city respond and participate in OpenAustin?

whurley: That's an excellent question. This isn't an anti-city government movement. It is a community movement based on some very simple principles. One of these is that it's simply not right to design web-based application services or content without involving the very people who are not only using it on a daily basis, but are also your source of funding. This doesn't mean that we intend on excluding the city or anyone else from the process. In fact it's quite the contrary. I'm hoping that this will if nothing else helped reduce the over $700,000 that was bid byas much as possible. In a perfect world the city would take full advantage of this to not only reduce their research and development costs but to reinvest in the local community at the same time; something I think we all can agree would be good for Austin overall.

GeekAustin: You and I have been in many meetings where the discussion goes on endlessly, and the the decision finally comes when someone with a strong arm says: "This is how we are going to do it." Is http://openaustin.org/ merely a massive RFP, or do you envision it as a place where decisions can be made.

whurley: The website will do wonders for collecting requirements. Still, we'll have to actually relevance rank each of the recommendations and then provide a simple analysis of time, scope, and cost for the overall feature set. This is something that many are questioning from a feasibility standpoint. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact when managed properly this type of community involvement can produce returns far in excess of what's invested while making both the city and the citizens happy at the same time.

In regard to decisions being made, that is something that is still to be foreseen. Again this is no affront to the city. This is a large group of people, talented people, who are stepping up to try to bring a resolution forward to a situation that has turned much of the tech community on its ear. This shouldn't be seen as something we're doing "for" the city, but rather something we're doing "with" the city. After all, what is a city that is not made up of its citizens?

GeekAustin: I'm surprised that you didn't use an open source solution, like Drupal, for OpenAustin. Why did you use IdeaScale?

whurley: Well, there was a small issue of timing and scale. Building a custom solution would've taken days or weeks, and not be the minutes and hours that openAustin.org was built in. For the actual website, I strongly recommend and support the city using an open-source solution. It is my understanding that they were looking at using Plone. While that's not a bad solution, I do think something like Drupal might be a little more well-suited to community-based effort because of the large existing base of Drupal developers we have in Austin. At the end of the day though, this is my choice. We all have a say in the investment the city is going to make in the website that will not only represent us, but provide us with basic access to city services.

GeekAustin: What will be the key to everyone being successful in this project?

whurley: That's simple, everyone involved from an individual citizen to the
city's leadership needs to understand a couple of key points:

1) There is a difference between control, and influence.
2) This is not about the me, it's about the we.
3) There is really no limit to what we can achieve if we truly are
open in working together on this effort.

GeekAustin: While I have you on the record, I have a few more questions. Assume that, unlike Stacy Higginbotham, I won't tell anyone. Which of your upcoming projects can you tell me about?

whurley: (laughs). First off I think Stacy did me a huge favor in not only publishing about the effort but bringing up some very legitimate questions; which by the way have been added for open discussion on our website.

GeekAustin: Although some of the folks downtown might think otherwise, OpenAustin doesn't seem like the kind of thing an evil genius would do. Are you thinking of taking a new moniker?

whurley: Absolutely not. Everything I do in my professional and personal life has always been very counter intuitive to most people. So I see no reason why should change of my style midstream.

GeekAustin: Can I tell people about that other project?

whurley: