austin.gov is the new online interface for City of Austin services. It will replace the existing austintexas.gov.
Please come say hello if any of these things excite you!
- design (interaction, css, html)
- frontend (reactjs, a/b testing)
- backend (python, nodejs, database, email)
- bringing equity to digital services
- helping all Austinites
There are 3 projects we'd like your help with.
The federal government has a comprehensive analytics dashboard for easily viewing website traffic. We'd like to reuse their code to bring that awesomeness to austin.gov!
Speaking of their code, the main repos involved are:
We've got a sweet new site for residents to use. We also want to empower Austinites to suggest changes directly.
Some example uses might include:
- Pointing out incorrect content
- Suggesting a better translation or adding untranslated content
- Adding or removing content to make it more clear
There are some interesting challenges: What's a good workflow to allow residents to make suggestions on austin.gov? How can we show those changes to reviewers at the City of Austin? Can we make it easy to accept and publish those changes?
Here's a rough initial sketch of how users might start the editing flow:
ReCollect is a 3rd-party widget that allows residents to look up the day their trash or recycling will be picked up. You can see an example of it being used on the Trash & Recycling Lookup page.
The downside to using a 3rd-party app is that it doesn't provide all the functionality we'd like. An example of this is that the language can't be set programmatically (e.g. we'd like to show the widget in Spanish if the rest of the page is being shown in Spanish). Another issue is that the widget isn't translated into all the languages we need (it only has Spanish, but we also need Vietnamese and Arabic).
Thankfully, we can use the City of Austin's open data portal to recreate the same experience, but in the open so anyone can use or improve it!
Want more information or to keep working with us after the hackathon? Check out the list of all issues the city is tackling to create an amazing online experience.
Our office is located at the Faulk Building (the former central library). Please feel free to drop by anytime! We love talking to anyone, especially those interested in making better online experiences for Austinites!
If digital communication is more your jam
- read our posts on medium
- tweet @civiqueso
- email innovation-engineering@austintexas.gov
- check out the Office of Design & Delivery website