"At first blush the site seems normal. There is the standard video of the council meeting (queue cheesy local cable access public service announcement), but the meeting minutes underneath are actually broken down by the second and by clicking on them you can jump straight to that moment in the meeting. [...]How to Engage Citizens on a Municipal Website...
"Given Nanaimo’s modest size (it has 78,692 citizens) suggests they have a modest IT budget. So I asked Chris McLuckie, a City of Nanaimo public servant who worked on the project. He informed me that the system was built in-house by him and another city staff member; it uses off-the-shelf hardware and software and so cost under $2,000 and it took two weeks to code up."
Update: It looks like the City of Nanaimo made the wise choice to use a comprehensive content management solition with elementCMS rather than waste their citizens' money building in house a feature-poor equivalent.
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Although Open eGov was built in-house by the City of Newport News, Virginia, it is built upon the open source CMS Plone. Open eGov is itself open source and is provided along with extensive documentation and resources for any other city, municilpality, or individual to mimic or contribute too. In addition, Open eGov is part of the larger, award winning, PloneGov initiative to use open source CMS Plone within governments worldwide. Various organizations have contributed useful features on top of Plone and have shared them for others to use. So here is another example of how open source software can benefit city municipalities.
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