The City of Austin Begins the Redesign That Buzzed the Net in 2009
It was almost exactly a year ago when the news was tweeted and retweeted about the City of Austin farming the website redo project out to a California web dev shop. Using two hashtags #coawebsite and ___ the tweeters of Austin hammered the officials on the net and demanded an explanation for the seemingly illogical business decision.
After much hemming and hawing the City Manger decided to postpone awarding the business to the California team and later decided to put the bid out for bidding yet again. (This would be the fourth time the city had tried to bid the website work.)
So on the COA website today, there was an update about the begining project. On a FRIDAY? Funny, maybe they had beers at the kickoff.
On Dec. 17th it was announced that SteelSMBology (a mutual partnership between Austin-based Steel Advertising & Interactive Inc. and SMBology Inc) was tapped to do the local work. Today the city issued more information about a kickoff meeting.
Here’s the statement from the site, “Our goal is simple: the City’s website should be an unobscured window in to what we do, how we do it, and how our residents can play a part. Providing residents the online tools they need to interact and do business with the City is imperative in order for us to be the best managed city in the nation,” said City Manager Marc Ott.
So here we go. They are saying the evaluation portion of the project, or Phase 1, will take between 6 – 8 months. Wow, that’s a lot of consulting. But I guess there are a ton of legacy systems and legacy management teams that will need to be corralled and herded onto the path to web 2.0.
Let’s wave and wish them luck on their journey.
And again, congratulations to SteelSMBology for taking on the task that will be watched by thousands of rabid developers and designers in town.
@jmacofearth
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