The City of Austin's Doug Matthews (Chief Communications Director) presented an update on the website re-design at tonight's (3/9/11) Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission's regular meeting.

Below are the key pieces of information shared:

1. 400 vendors were contacted; 20 attended the pre-bid conference.  Only 2 RFP responses were received.  One was non-compliant with MWBE  goals.  The other was poorly organized and constructed. So instead of having the Phase 2 be done by outside vendors, the City will be pursuing the re-design with a mix of existing City staff and external contract consultants. Sounded like Drupal will be the CMS.

2. Total cost will be from $500k to $900k.

3. Mr. Matthews specifically mentioned reaching out to Code for America to coordinate creation of widgets that might be open sourced and wanting to be an "open source leader" in general.

4.  Timeline: City Manager approves new direction in March.  April is used for selection and purchasing of needed hardware and software, as well as configuration.  May and June is used to adapt Phase I
templates.  July and August are used for training of content contributors.  September and October is for core content migration. November and December is for user testing.

5. A community engagement strategy was discussed by Mr. Matthews that included outreach at leading Austin technology events.  Commissioner Rosenthal urged the inclusion of an "independent set of eyes" in the project now that an external vendor was not part of the mix; substantive community engagement was requested sooner rather than later.

Thoughts? Personally, I am excited about this direction.  It's resource-efficient and indeed can position us to be a technology leader if we engage organizations like CfA, as well as Civic Commons, OpenPlans, etc.  I do however want to hear a bit more about how it fits into the City's open data and civic application API plans. Further,  I believe that OpenAustin should be one of the stakeholders
at the table per our partnership agreement.  I look forward to hearing how we can be of help in their community engagement strategy.