The ‘Open eGov’ open source project led by Newport News, a mid-size city of Virginia (USA), won the 4th Annual J. Robert Havlick ‘Award for Innovation in Local Government’.

Open eGov is a web software application available to other local governments free of charge. By creating a collaborative software ecosystem, government organisations, non-profits and the private sector have been invited to work together to share the cost of enhanced capabilities. The objective is to deliver on-line web services to citizens in the most effective and efficient manner by reducing or eliminating the duplication of effort between localities through sharing and collaboration.

The Award for Innovation in Local Government is bestowed on annually by the ‘Alliance for Innovation’ in order to further encourage innovation and recognise excellence in local government.

The ‘Alliance for Innovation’ is an international non-profit local government association whose mission is to network innovative local governments and private companies in order to bring about cost reductions, service improvement, and productivity increase in the public sector through technologies, processes and ideas.

‘Open eGov’ is one of the subcommunities of ‘Plone eGov’, an international open source collaborative project aimed at sharing best practice and software among around 70 public organisations from Europe, North and South America, as well as Africa. The goal of Plone eGov is to develop, in a cooperative manner, applications and websites suited for public organisations, both for their use and to the benefit of their citizens. All the applications developed by PloneGov are made available free of charge on the website www.plonegov.org.

Following recognition of PloneGov in Paris, Lisbon, Brussels and Dublin, this new award becomes the 5th nomination in less than a year for this initiative and the collaborating public organisations. This shows that such collaborative initiatives have merit and are applicable in a broad sense to local governments anywhere.

Further information:

• More about PloneGov 
• Alliance for Innovation Awards 
• City of Newport News – Official website – Open eGov