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Project To Offer Free, Hosted Websites for Governments Launches This Week

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, July 28 2011

The government software firm Firmstep announced Tuesday that they've begun offering free hosted websites for city and state governments using an adaptation of the Drupal 7 content management system.

If you work on web infrastructure for a state or city government, chances are you've heard of Drupal by now. The White House uses it. The Republican leadership of the House of Representatives uses it, and makes it available for members to use if they so desire. Some cities and states around the country have started to adopt it as their content management system. (TechPresident does too, in the interests of disclosure.)

Built on OpenPublic, a flavor of Drupal custom-built for governments, Firmstep founder Brett Husbands says the solution his company now offers is meant to make it easier for governments to bring their IT into the 21st century.

"Open source CMS is already free and we're just going that extra step and hosting it so that we can start to see a platform for government," Husbands told me yesterday. "For about two years, we've been hearing the cry of 'government as a platform' and no practical technical application of that."

The platform, AchieveCity, is supposed to make it easy to get to the kind of Internet presence a government needs before officials can start talking about releasing data online, or posting information about legislative proceedings. Husbands says his team is working on integrations with popular third-party services to do both of those things.

AchieveCity is a custom-configured, cloud-hosted instance of OpenPublic, and Firmstep promises to contribute all its improvements to the OpenPublic distribution back to the developer community. AchieveCity was developed out of a pilot project with the city of Manor, Tex., an Austin suburb that has long been reaping the benefits of a willingness to experiment with technology.

Firmstep, a government-services firm with clients in the US and the UK, offers web-based software for online forms, customer service management and customer self-service. Husbands wouldn't say it, but getting governments this far onto the web gets them to the point where they might be on the market for the kinds of services Firmstep offers.

"We do offer other (paid-for) services around the solution including data migration, support contracts, and a few other bits and pieces, however we intend to keep AchieveCity free forever," the company says on the AchieveCity website.

Husbands thinks of AchieveCity in the context of the "open stack" for government — layer upon layer of open-source applications for governments, all of which can be shared, extended and repurposed with the help of connecting organizations like Civic Commons.

This post has been updated.

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