City Scraps Website Plan; Will Seek New Bids

Austinites will have to wait a bit longer for a new city website. City officials have decided not to award a $700,000 contract to a California company for the work and instead to seek a new round of bids, according to the Austin Business Journal.

Council member Brewster McCracken set off the online buzz this morning with this message on Twitter: "City is scrapping prior website proposal. Will move to open architecture, customer-focused structure. No more Plone. New bid released soon." (Plone is the content management system the city uses to maintain the website.)

The decision to reboot the process, however, was made back on May 16, following a meeting between local open government advocates and the city's IT department. That discussion led city staffers to recommend that the Cignex contract be turned down and the process started anew.

A few days before that meeting, a group called OpenAustin announced a "community-based effort to crowdsource the requirements and development" of the city's web site. OpenAustin organizer William Hurley (known in tech circles and around town as "whurley") said he thought the OpenAustin project influenced the city's decision to go with a new bid.

"I think that the city sees that they have the support of a vibrant community well-versed in the skill required to create the new website, and eager to help in any way they can," whurley said.

In March, news that the city council was set to award the website contract to Santa Claria-based Cignex Technologies set off a series of protests online. The council then postponed the vote indefinitely so that chief communications director Doug Matthews and chief information officer Gail Roper could fully review options for the project.

On Thursday, Matthews told the ABJ that the city is scrapping the proposal from Cignex because officials decided the original request for proposal (RFP) was too restrictive. Matthews emphasized that public outcry was not the reason for the city's decision. But he said officials hope that a more broad RFP will enable a greater number of local vendors to submit bids this time around.

Matthews said the new RFP will likely go out in July, with a decision on a new vendor hopefully sometime this fall.