Manor

Gov 2.0 guide to a city makeover

My name is Dustin Haisler and I’m the Assistant City Manager and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the City of Manor, Texas.  Manor is a small community, located just east of Austin, of approximately 6,500 citizens. More recently, Manor has received a lot press for some of our innovative projects; such as our QR-code program, citizen idea portal, and pothole reporting system.  In fact, we are in such a state of continuous improvement that we even added the word ‘beta’ to our city logo.

    Small(town) is beautiful and the manor.govfresh wrap-up

    E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful neatly summarizes my beliefs on how society should work and provides the most appropriate slogan for the way I approach much of my life.

    ‘Small is beautiful’ best describes manor.govfresh, held this past Sept 20-21, in Manor, TX, and exemplifies where I believe we can have the most impact on changing how government works and where the open government community should turn its focus. The theme around manor.govfresh was government and technology, but the underlying premise was learning how we can strengthen community at its most local. So much is discussed at the federal, state and major metropolitan levels that we see small-town America as an after-thought. It’s not sexy, but it’s where change can happen faster and have a more immediate impact on citizens.

      My Gov 2.0 Hero: Phil Tate

      Manor, Texas has received lots of recognition for the innovative technologies that have come out of it, but many people don’t know all the individuals that are responsible. My role as Assistant City Manager and CIO is to steer the development of emerging technologies in Manor, but the real hero is our City Manager, Phil Tate.

        Why government should go beta

        In the spirit of innovation, we are happy to announce the launch of the City of Manor in open beta. Manor launched in alpha in March of 1913, and has been operating as such for the last 97 years.

        What does open beta mean?

          What’s missing from Gov 2.0?

          What missing from Gov 2.0?

          The answer: Education.

          Like most agencies, we have done a significant amount of research at the City of Manor to determine how we could best use new technologies to interact and engage our citizens. In the process, we have discovered that there is one element that is quite often overlooked within the Gov 2.0 movement- education. Citizen and employee education is critical to the adoption of new technologies because the technology will not be used if it is misunderstood.

            Poll: What dates work best for you for manor.govfresh event?

            We’re taking a poll on what dates work best for you on our manor.govfresh event.

              manor.govfresh: Big ideas for small-town America

              When GovFresh first started, I got an email from Dustin Haisler, CIO of Manor, TX, who shared with me all the work they were doing there. At that point in time, I was new to ‘Gov 2.0′ and what could be considered ‘government innovation.’ I was skeptical. I never really thought government could innovate itself out of a paper bag. To think a small-town Texas could do it was completely laughable.

              Was this guy for real?

                Whiteboard Innovation: How Manor Ideas Become Solutions

                The City of Manor’s open innovation portal, Manor Labs, has been live for a few months turning ideas into solutions. When talking with other cities, I find that the entire concept of open innovation is a bit misunderstood. It is very easy to put up a voting platform to rate ideas, but what happens afterwards? With Manor Labs, powered by the Spigit open innovation engine, the system is user-driven and self-sufficient. This allows our small agency the ability to process large quantities of ideas with limit staff involvement.

                Here’s a breakdown of idea stages and functions.

                  New year, new Manor innovations

                  It seems like today so many agencies are plagued by the expenses of online web development and associated hosting. Manor was no different. Smaller agencies pay thousands of dollars to private companies to developed attractive websites that can be done at a fraction of the cost.

                  After discussing my frustrations with Luke Fretwell, the founder of GovFresh, he had a solution that would not only work for Manor, but many other cities as well. His idea was to build the entire site on Wordpress, which is an open-source blog publishing application, with full-social media integration. I knew of Wordpress, and had even used it for my personal blog, but have never thought of using it for a government site outside of a traditional blog.

                    Gov 2.0 Radio: Local Government Innovation from Manor, TX

                    Manor, TX: Local Government Innovation: Guest Dustin Haisler, CIO of Manor, Texas, discusses Manor Labs and local government innovation. Laurel Ruma of O’Reilly Media will also join us at the top of the hour.

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