The City of Newport News is offering the software that runs its web site as well as the knowledge base we created through the implementation process to any organization or individual, free of charge. Our intent is to create a collaborative software ecosystem, where government organizations, non-profits and the private sector work together to share the cost of enhanced capabilities.

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

• General CMS overview and selection criteria
• Introducing Plone, a Screencast
• The Definitive Guide to Plone
• Wikipedia on Plone

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

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