Open eGov is the winner of the 2008 Havlick Award for Innovation in Local Government. The City of Newport News awards ceremony took place on June 10th, 2008 with Mayor Joe Frank presenting the award to the Open eGov team.

The following organizations currently benefit from Open eGov:

• Franklin County, VA (hosted by the City of Newport News)
• City of Staunton (Intranet only)
• City of Waynesboro (Intranet only)

We welcome additional participation and encourage regional shared services implementations. In addition to Open eGov, a regional shared services implementation may include the Plinkit for Public Libraries, both Plone based projects. Communities within the region may be interested in either service or both. There are no software license fees and the cost per organization decreases with higher participation. With shared, co-hosted implementations, organizations can be provided a secure virtual environment for managing their own web content. The provider of web hosting could be a government organization, a non-profit or the private sector.

On August 24, 2007, Open eGov joined 55 other government organizations from Europe, Africa and South America and merged with the PloneGov project. We offer our software and relevant documentation integrated with the PloneGov delivery channels.

• We intend to provide a low barrier to entry. 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% 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

To see the capabilities of our production environment, please look at http://www.nngov.com.

Evaluation Process

We recommend the following documents as a starting point in the evaluation process:

Information regarding Plone CMS

• Introducing Plone, a Screencast (HTML)
• The Definitive Guide to Plone (PDF)
• Wikipedia on Plone (HTML)

Information regarding Newport News' Open eGov Project

• eGov Overview (PDF)
• Project Plan (PDF)
• Infrastructure (PDF)
• Plone Products (PDF)
• Web Standards and Guidelines (PDF)
• Lessons Learned (PDF)
• Admin Tools (HTML)

Software Download

• open eGov releases (HTML)

For additional information, please contact astein@nngov.com.