Iowa’s Sex Offender Registry is Top Ten
Last week some of the local news channels reported the Iowa’s Sex Offender Registry is one of the nation’s ten best. It is managed by the Iowa Department of Public Safety and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation but the website itself is one our organization maintains. This is fantastic news for our customer and good news for them is good news for us. I want to recognize the people on my team that manage this system, particularly the project manager, Mary Hadd, and the lead developer, Justin Carlson, should be given most of the credit. Hell, this is the closest to fame a government run website can get! To see how Iowa scored see this and of more interest to many of you will be the side-by-side comparison with other states.
For those unaware the Iowa Sex Offender Registry is written in PHP and is basically a mash-up using custom application code, Google Maps and a mailing list manager. So despite what a recent, poorly written magazine article had to say (and it’s subsequent rebuttal) not only is PHP getting it done for online giants like Yahoo! and Facebook it is also getting it done in state government.