City of Newport News Offers Free Web-Site Software and Knowledge Base

Andy Stein, IT director of Newport News, Va. -- Photo by Wayne Hanson 

The city of Newport News, Va., is offering the software that runs its Web site as well as the knowledge base through the implementation process to any organization or individual, free of charge. "Our intent is to create a collaborative software ecosystem," said Newport News IT Director Andy Stein, "where government organizations, non-profits and the private sector work together to share the cost of enhanced capabilities."

The intent is to offer the city's software and relevant documentation integrated with the PloneGov delivery channels. In the meanwhile, all relevant information -- including the software in GPL format -- is available below.

"We intend to provide a low barrier to entry," said Stein. "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.

"We used a leading open source Web content management system "Plone" (based on Zope and Python) available on Windows, Linux and Mac. We added our own set of "Plone products" -- this is what we are licensing as open source (GPL). We also selected and integrated about 20 percent 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 our ecosystem will benefit from our entire experience and complete knowledge base that goes beyond the software itself. We openly share our experience, including:

• Our own 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
• We encourage participants to engage the private sector in delivering services such as consulting, support, hosting, and enhancements
• We 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

The code, knowedge base, etc. are available on the city's Web site.

"What impressed me most about this project," said Deborah Bryant, director of the Government Open Source Conference in Portland, Ore., where Stein will speak on Monday, "is that Andy sees the value of sharing not only the application code, but things like best practices, documentation,  knowledge base, training, enhancements and so forth. This creates an active community and moves past the idea of a static repository, in my view, where traditional "code reuse' has failed."