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by samkline 4469 days ago
Boston's neighbor, Somerville, has taken this a step further and made it all public: http://www.somervillema.gov/dashboard/index.html
5 comments

The source is even on github: https://github.com/DanielHadley/SomervilleSystems

As someone who grew up in Somerville, I'm impressed.

Although that doesn't seem to be the same thing as a "realtime" dashboard, that is an amazingly well-done site.

20 years ago it had the not-entirely-undeserved nickname Slummerville. It's remarkable how much it's changed.

The city site isn't bad either - http://www.somervillema.gov/

Yeah, 20 years ago I wouldn't have considered a move here. Been here since August last year and we really love it. The city "works" with effective city services (call 311 for anything) an open planning process, social media communication channels, and a coherent vision for future development. If the city has a major challenge right now it's gentrification. The city has become almost too popular - and the influx has been driving up housing costs dramatically. The typical home purchase is a brutal bidding war. But for those of us already here, it's great.

Holy shit, a relatively small municipality whose website doesn't look like complete ass! Elected officials know what they're doing in Somerville.
Bootstrap. It helps any site go from looking like crap to passable.
Or look like it came out of the same cookie-cutter
For typically slow-moving small town/city officials, anything that doesn't look like a 90s relic that probably has no Javascript at all, Bootstrap is a massive improvement.
Do you mean to say a look-and-feel consistent with other sites I may have visited rather than some special snowflake whiz bang mystery meat UI that some "designer" cooked up? Yeah, the people of Somerville are really missing out.
we see the cookie cutter - the vast majority of people will have zero idea what bootstrap is or notice the similarities. we also are exposed to many more sites using bootstrap than the average user as it is so heavily used in tech circles.
Would you rather sites look like crap and have bad functionality, or look the same and have good functionality and UX?
that's much better than 'hand crafted in MS Word' or 'broken Wordpress'
Or Frontpage.
Which is better than looking shitty.
I live in Somerville (for school) and didn't even know about this. Cheers.