AchieveCity to offer municipalities free, open source government platforms

Firmstep has launched a new service called AchieveCity, a Web-based government platform powered by the Drupal distribution OpenPublic (developed by Phase2 Technology) and hosted in the Amazon EC2 environment.

Firmstep says five municipalities will go live in August, and those signing up now will launch beginning in September. Founder and CEO Brett Husbands talks with GovFresh about the new service.

[GF: ]What’s the technology driving AchieveCity and why is this important?

[BH: ]For the customer we try to keep the technology understanding to a minimum. We are working to get AchieveCity to be easier to try than setting up a wordpress site. Reducing set-up overhead by hosting as SaaS allows people to focus on CMS functionality rather than thinking about technology and makes it easy to try, it also means we can keep improving it more easily than with installed software.

The technology used is the OpenPublic distribution of Drupal 7 built by Phase2. This distribution is government focused and well proven by Phase2 who worked on www.whitehouse.gov and www.house.gov and that heritage is baked in. For any government organisation proven security and scalability are a pre-requisite. We have extended it, and we are making those contributions back to OpenPublic. The “Apps” model makes sense, and any developer can make an app and contribute it....