[lauradhamilton]

Chicago has a group called "Open City" that builds open-source applications for the city.

Link: http://opencityapps.org/

One thing you could do is look through their apps (they're all open source & on github) and figure out which ones might make sense for your city.

You can then clone the apps you like, configure them for your city (many cities use the Socrata data platform, so this may be simply a config change in some cases) and deploy it for your city.

[Lichine]

Hi Laura!

Thanks for the link. :-) It's bookmarked now!

This reminds me of something we discussed at a hackathon some time ago, where the government representative raised the issue of how to connect all of these apps together (like Legos) to make maintaining and integrating them into a workflow that makes sense to government employees.

I could try contacting Open City to hear what their thoughts on this. The current solution that's on the table here is to require the apps to be able to connect to a central "engine" that would act as a "local government dashboard". The apps would stream the data, either raw or filtered and be presented and manipulated in an interface that's understandable and actionable for non-technical employees.

If it's the right way, we don't know yet though. :-)