Striking a Chord at the National Association of Government Webmasters conference.

Posted on September 20, 2011 by in Uncategorized

I feel like I just came back from a journey to the secret nerve center of local government IT: the 2011 national conference of NAGW, the National Association of Government Webmasters, held in Cincinnati, Ohio last week. There’s some wonderful stuff happening there — I’ll give you an example in a moment.

I attended the conference together with Code for America fellows Michelle Koeth and Jeremy Canfield. We all presented (slides below). Michelle gave a session called “Beyond the commons: Exploring and deploying open source code” about how to use collaboration tools like git, Subversion, etc. Jeremy did a “Civic commons apps lightning round”, in which he talked about upcoming Civic Commons apps catalog (and asked for help seeding it and making it useful to governments). I gave a workshop entitled “How To Open Source Your In-House Apps”. During the workshop, we actually open sourced one of the attendee’s applications, a web display block that parses a feed from the National Weather service and displays current weather information — without any corporate logos, thus making it acceptable to city regulations.

(UPDATE 2011/09/20: Since this post was published, we’ve learned that that app has already received its first outside code contribution. Hey, we don’t rehearse this stuff — it’s just what happens when code is made available for spontaneous collaboration.)

I think my favorite moment came during Jeremy’s presentation, though. When he was asking the audience what sorts of apps they needed, and what they had that they might be able to share, Ron Pringle, who happens to be the president of NAGW, raised his hand and mentioned a feature he’d written for the City of Aurora, Illinois web site, that generates all sorts of useful information (including spiffy PDF zoning letters) based on street address. Jeremy brought it up in a web browser, and we did a little demo right there. Ron was the one who had open sourced the little weather-display web app in my session earlier (he’s written more about it here), so we sort of guffawed when we saw what else he had in the bag. No one was surprised when Ron said it was one of the most popular things on the city’s web site.

Then two other people in the room turned around their laptops and showed us how they had developed similar apps for their governments, and how they’d like to have some of the features Ron’s had, etc. There followed a few minutes of discussion on how it might be possible to merge features between the applications, or even unify them. It was a perfect illustration of how cross-jurisdictional collaboration has the potential to improve the quality of government services for everyone — if government technologists have forums for showing what they need, finding out what others have, and working together.

Trying to put my finger on exactly what it was that made the conference click, I realized later it was really two things. One, the members of NAGW come from jurisdictions of all sizes, which means that most of the people there are from counties and towns small enough (or at least medium enough) that one or two determined technologists can really make a difference. And two, webmasters are almost by definition the most public-facing civic IT staffers around — they know all about their unique visitor statistics, what pages and services get the most use, the exact complaints citizens have about government portals, etc. They’re very plugged in, just by the nature of their work. That also makes them exactly who we at Civic Commons needed to talk to.

If you’re a webmaster for a government agency, consider joining NAGW. There was a lot of talk about technology-sharing throughout the conference, not just in our sessions; I also noticed that in the vendor exhibit hall most of the booths had materials mentioning open source offerings. Civic Commons is certainly going to stay in close touch with NAGW.

Slides:

  • Jeremy Canfield, Civic Commons “Apps Lightning Round”
    [ SlideShare ]
  • Michelle Koeth, Beyond the commons: Exploring and deploying open source code
    [ Google Docs ]
  • Karl Fogel, How To Open Source Your In-House App
    [ ODP | PDF | PPT ]

Twitter ephemera from the conference: twitter.com/#!/search/#nagw2011

About Karl Fogel

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  • http://sidburgess.com Sid Burgess

    It was another great NAGW conference and the level of skill of the webmasters that come each year is amazing.  

  • http://twitter.com/rpringle Ron Pringle

    Thanks for your assessment of the conference Karl! It’s always great to see a fresh perspective from someone outside of NAGW. I’m not sure why, but I’m always amazed by the level of passion and commitment that people at the conference have for their jobs. They truly want to serve the public in the best way they can.

    Open sourcing and sharing code and applications is definitely one way we can accomplish that.  That discussion you referenced during Jeremy’s talk was like a lightning bolt. So many of us are coding similar services that it just makes sense to start collaborating on these projects.

    I’m very excited about the possibilities of Civic Commons and am looking forward to its upcoming launch.

    Thanks to you, Michelle and Jeremy for attending the conference and speaking. Your sessions were the highlight of the conference for me.

  • Matt Harrington

    Nice works and words. Thank you for joining us this year!