New City of Austin Website Beta Released To Public

[Jace Deloney]

All,

The new City of Austin Website has been beta released for your viewing & testing pleasure: http://austintexas.gov/. I think it would be a good idea for us to start sharing this news with our friends and community, gather feedback and then give our formal recommendations on improvements. I imagine that the AustinGO Community Advisory Group will gain particular public interest and momentum during the next few months in relation to the new website. All feedback and discussion is greatly appreciated.

Now is our time to shine. Have a great Holiday!

Thanks,

Jace Deloney
Open Austin
Mobile | 409.289.2447
Email | jaced...@gmail.com
Twitter | @JaceDeloney

[austintexasgov]

Hello everyone - I just wanted to check in a quickly reiterate Jace's
post from Dec. 19 and give you a quick update on where we are at.

We are still actively accepting and acting on feedback from the
public, and we welcome any thoughts you have about the new site. Feel
free to use the Google Group for a more direct line of communication
with the project team.

If you haven't, please communicate to your groups the opportunity to
give feedback on the site. We'll be communicating some feedback
results and actions we have taken soon, and also offering an update to
Community Technology and Telecommunications tonight.

Our plan now is to exit Beta and officially launch on JAN. 26. We had
previously communicated Jan. 12, but are pushing this back 2 weeks due
to the outage we had last week (we call it "Horrible Tuesday") but
also due to the quantity and quality of helpful feedback we are
getting from the community.

Feedback has been generally very positive - we are tracking a
phenomenon where regular internal and external users of the site seem
to be the ones who are experiencing the most problems. This was
expected - if you are aware of members of your groups that are having
these problems (or seem to be having them yourself!) please don't
hesitate to let us know in this or any other forum. Feel free to share
my email - chris.f...@austintexas.gov - with anyone who has
concerns. We think this feedback is especially valuable, and want to
identify the common issues these power users seem to be having.

We will have our next meeting in February when the Code for America
fellows are in place. Charles Purma is identifying a quality time to
meet with them, and we will be sending that invitation very soon so
you can all attend. You have all been great about participating, but
this meeting with the Code for America fellows is not to be missed.

As always thank you for your feedback and support - we have been very
busy and I apologize that we have been out of touch. You will be
hearing more from us very soon.

Thanks!

Chris

On Dec 19 2011, 11:59 am, Jace Deloney <jacedelo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> All,
>
> The new City of Austin Website has been beta released for your viewing &

> testing pleasure:http://austintexas.gov/<http://t.co/GPrLKhOa>. I think

> it would be a good idea for us to start sharing this news with our friends
> and community, gather feedback and then give our formal recommendations on
> improvements. I imagine that the AustinGO Community Advisory Group will
> gain particular public interest and momentum during the next few months in
> relation to the new website. All feedback and discussion is greatly
> appreciated.
>
> Now is our time to shine. Have a great Holiday!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jace Deloney
> Open Austin
> Mobile | 409.289.2447

> Email | jacedelo...@gmail.com
> Twitter | @JaceDeloney <http://www.twitter.com/JaceDeloney>