On Thursday (28 January 2009) I went to Rhode Island Interactive to meet Thomas Viall, General Manager, Daniel Chapman, and Joe Alba. My reasons for visiting were to find out what they were doing for municipalities and what their long-term vision was for infrastructure and standards.
RI Interactive is a division of NIC which provides web application development for state government organizations. (They operate in 21 states currently.) The development is done free of charge but is primarily limited to revenue generating services. RI Interactive generates income by taking a commission on each service transaction. Services include fishing license renewal, DMV services, etc. RI Interactive also does non-revenue generating development work but this must fit within their schedules and budgets. The set of work done is managed by a review committee at the Department of Administration. RI Interactive is forbidden from doing time-and-materials development for the state. (They do no work outside of state and municipal government.)
RI Interactive is also in charge of the portal at http://ri.gov/ is managed by them. I do not know how content is added to this site and especially if it is outside of RI Interactive's projects.
RI Interactive has a wealth of knowledge about state web applications. Their development tools include PHP, Perl, MySQL, and Ruby on Rails. They are apparently very good at integrating with the state's existing, leviathan-like systems. They also have the substantial competitive cost advantage: It is hard to not choose RI Interactive when the work needs to go to the lowest bidder.
The nature of RI Interactive's contract and funding does not make them a natural leader in advocating long-term infrastructure and standards needs. The good news is that they are doing good work for the state and for municipalities and are open to using other tools.
Tom was very generous with his and his staff's time and I thank him for that. During the discussion it was mentioned that I should contact the CIO's of Warwick and Middletown because of their leadership within the state IT.
Updated: Tom Viall provided additional information for this updated posting where the original posting had questions or inaccuracies.
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