The City That Works (Really Hard on Its Websites)

By Sean Corbett in Miscellaneous on Oct 27, 2006 7:02PM

While looking into the story about Chicago moving some of its servers to Red Hat Linux we stumbled upon what might be a trend for the city. Let’s call it a trend in blowing lots of hot air. Chicagoist is very into both the ideas of the city saving money, and in supporting Linux, but we hope this venture is not just an “us too” kind of a gesture. Jumping on the bandwagon is cool for a little while, but there’s potential for so much more. Remember the city-wide Wi-Fi plans? Imagine Chicago taking a leading role in technology adoption and setting an example in the country. That would be cool. We’re a little ways away from that vision at this point though.

Chicagoist took a look at a few of our local government’s technology-oriented sites. They are kind of sad:

The Technology Development Initiative’s website features a horrible user interface and scores of broken links that have probably not been updated since the site was created, which was the year 2000.

Connect Chicago is a program which aims “to bring high speed Internet connection to Chicago” as described on their main page.

The Illinois Technology Office site doesn’t look as horrible but is still pretty light on useful content.

Can anybody recommend some good sites for technology resources in Chicagoland? (Please?) Maybe someone will also update (or take down) the bad parts of the sites listed above?

Hopefully the use of Linux is a permanent and worthwhile shift for the city. Several hundred thousand dollars have already been saved in equipment costs with more to come. Most likely this will not result in switching all city-owned computers to Linux anytime soon like they are doing in Germany, but we can still dream.

Thanks to racatumba for the image