From ‘Very Outdated’ to Open Source: How This California County Transformed Its Content Management
San Mateo County's homepage. San Mateo County
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Using Open Public 1.0, San Mateo County has unified the management of its online footprint.
The content management system California’s San Mateo County previously used for its websites was “very outdated.” That’s according to Beverly Thames, the county’s content and collaboration manager for information systems, who noted in a recent interview that their old system lacked the flexibility departments needed to personalize their sites.
Like other local jurisdictions around the country, San Mateo County, located just south of San Francisco, decided to rebuild its online footprint and in the process, it created a unified website that’s accessible, secure and user friendly on multiple platforms.
Those are some of the core ideas behind Open Public 1.0, a content management system aimed at helping ease the pains of operating government websites. It’s used for different sectors of government both large and small on the state and local level.
Greg Wilson, director of government practice at Phase 2, the parent of Open Public 1.0, said they realized that governments were having similar problems with issues like accessibility, website security and mobile presence. Open Public 1.0, which uses Drupal—the same open-source platform the White House’s website uses, along with the cities of Austin and Los Angeles plus Australia—helps make it easier for governments to create and maintain their websites.
Phase 2 works with Massachusetts-based open source software company Acquia to provide the cloud platform for the websites.
In San Mateo, the county government rolled out its implementation of Open Public 1.0 in multiple phases, adding different agencies to the new system each time.
From the government perspective, one of the benefits is that the system already takes care of accessibility, security and responsive design, Thames said. There was no need to start from scratch, she said, as the system had already been successfully implemented on other government websites.
The system makes it easier to update the county’s website. County departments and agencies—ranging from the coroner's office to public works—can add different applications to their pages based off of their specific needs.
"Having a flexible platform like this is really giving us the ability to customize the experience depending on where you are in the site," she said.
Wilson said San Mateo County had been struggling with keeping its site up-to-date and secure. Like some of Phase 2’s other public-sector customers, different county agencies had been managing and maintaining their own web presences, which created complicated layers of content management.
Before, updating the website was difficult and the search tool wouldn’t search across all of the county agencies’ websites, making keyword searches difficult.
Open source technology has created opportunities for the public sector, Wilson said, and has hit a point where it’s ready to be utilized more broadly in the state and local arena. Georgia’s state government has been using Open Public 1.0, too.
Open source systems are built for innovation, said Tim Marsh, director of business development and industry solutions at Acquia. And when there are new innovations, governments can start using them right away, he said.
Allison Prang is a journalist based in Columbia, Missouri. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and The Kansas City Star, among other news outlets. Follow her on Twitter at @AllisonPrang.