Ask HN: Where do people discuss and implement micro-scale Open Government?
I live in a part of the US where mostly county-level government delivers local services (the state for road maintenance, and federal steps in for disasters, city-operated company for electric utilities, area Municipal Utility District for water, most waste water in privately-owned septic systems regulated by a local water authority). The residents like this state of affairs very much, but the nearest big city has its eyes on annexing our area of approximately 1500 residential units. For various reasons, the vast majority of residents conclude the costs and drawbacks of annexation far outweigh the benefits based upon numbers different residents have investigated and the past historical experiences of previously-annexed areas and their broken promises from the city.
The majority of residents are quite keen on maintaining the status quo of extremely minimal involvement with the city polity. Some residents are investigating the feasibility of incorporating the area into its own village to prevent an annexation.
I thought for fewer than 10,000 residents, there likely is already a lot of effort directed at producing and maintaining open source software for such extremely small municipal governments. Kind of like an ERP for such entities. To my surprise, while there are entire law firms dedicated to doing nothing but interfacing such small municipalities with larger polities, and addressing their mundane legal process needs, I could not find any groups gathered to promote the packaging and configuration of existing open source solutions into templates targeting specific municipalities.
My goal is to automate away as much of the absolutely statutorily-required red tape as feasible, and share our experiences attempting such with other like-minded municipalities. My Google-fu fails me, though.