Middletown, Conn., has created a website for individuals, namely business and property owners, to apply for a slice of the city's $20 million in American Rescue Plan Act money. The city will also offer ARPA workshops.
With residents clamoring for services and information, many agencies turned to chatbots during the pandemic. But aside from simply gaining momentum in adoption, it seems government use of the technology is also maturing.
The move closely follows ArchiveSocial's acquisition of NextRequest, meaning the combined company now covers social media communications, websites and public records requests in one organization.
The move will give Granicus a variety of tools for collecting public sentiment — polling and surveys, website analytics, etc. — as well as tools to understand that data and personalize user experiences.
This Cyber Citizenship initiative, developed by a partnership between New America and Cyber Florida, will equip educators with resources to teach K-12 students how to identify misinformation online.
Facebook and Google publish local news articles, sell ads off them and pocket the vast majority of the profit, giving local news outlets little in return, which pushes readership online as profits erode.
The company, which offers technology to help local governments set up and run their websites, is using certified partners so that agencies can use different firms for things like implementation and content development.
Insight Partners, which has done several high-profile deals in the gov tech space in recent years, has bought a majority stake in CivicPlus, a popular website builder and software vendor for local governments.
Five years ago, a report from the municipal website builder OpenCities found many ways local governments needed to improve. Now a follow-up finds that they’ve improved in some areas, but still have plenty of work to do.
Cybersecurity is only becoming a more urgent and important need as time goes on. Now CivicPlus, which has thousands of local government customers, is bringing on a partner dedicated just to that challenge.
