News:
New Open Austin Technology Blog at openaustin.posterous.com
About OpenAustin
Open Austin was formed by citizens interested in the City of Austin web strategy and approach. Working with the City through a variety of engagements, common ground was developed between the City and Open Austin to work together in a formal and recurring way. The goal is to develop new capacities for the City of Austin website while reducing or eliminating costs, and provide Austin citizens with new ways to make public contributions.
A strategic alliance was created by Open Austin and the City to capture the expectations and the basis for the working relationship. This document is a first in the nation relationship between a city and a private volunteer group to channel the power and potential of crowdsourcing in this way.
We maintain regular upates through facebook and twitter, and will hold regular meeting opportunities to get you involved in the work. Plan to come to our OpenAustin Meetup Drinkup Signup on March 5th to learn more and meet the team.
Open Austin needs your help! Please register and then fill out our skills survey. We will be in touch by email right away with your first assignment.
Initiative list
OpenAustin and the City have chartered several starting initiatives:
- Assess the validity and usability of the city e-service inventory.
- Compare city service inventory with other peer cities to assist in gap analysis
- Work with the city to determine what data streams are currently available and those that should be made available publically in machine readable form, and what technical approaches to use in publishing them to a city data portal.
- Test social media strategies and tools for applicability to the city’s web needs.
- Assess options to incorporate crowdsourcing as an appropriate development approach for components of the city’s web, mobile and e‐service capacity.
- Support usability testing efforts for the current and future iterations of the city web presence.
Current work focus is on using tools developed by OpenAustin to assess and properly categorize
available services available through the city of Austin to establish a baseline for further work efforts.
Additionally we are working to establish the right infrastructure to support the work of OpenAustin now and in the future.
Register your talents
Are you able to contribute time and talent to making OpenAustin a success? Give us some information on who you are and what you can do, and we'll get in touch about how to to get you started.