In a Medium article about the project, Joe DeLaTorre and E.J. Kalafarski—Innovation Fellows with the New Jersey State Office of Innovation—said, “In the beginning of 2020, we partnered with SeamlessDocs (now GovOS) — whose platform powers online services for a number of municipalities throughout New Jersey—to adapt the design to a new content management system…The new Business.NJ.gov is modern and mobile-friendly, and our content management platform allows the team to easily make design and content changes hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute. But perhaps the site’s most important feature is the fact that it will constantly be changing, driven by ongoing user research and feedback from business owners.”
“Open source” means that the source code—the lines of code that make a program run, or determine how a website loads—is available to anyone to view, copy, alter or share it. By making code available to the public, other programmers can study and learn from it. Making source code available for sharing and re-use also helps reduce duplicative software purchases within the state, and promotes collaboration and innovation and collaboration across NJ agencies.
GovOS adapted the New Jersey Business Portal from open source code made available by the Cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and their technology partners, Tomorrow Partners and CivicActions. This new iteration, which is hosted on Webflow, is now available to the public. Any citizen or municipality can download the source code and create a website with similar layout and functionality.
“We worked closely with E.J. and his team to build a clean, modern website that’s easy to use and loaded with helpful information,” said Jonathon Ende, CEO and co-founder of SeamlessDocs (now GovOS). “The Office of Innovation does so much for the state of New Jersey to advance the adoption of new technologies. So in that spirit, we decided to make this an open source project, so innovators across the state and country can learn from what we’ve built, use it for their own projects and hopefully propose ways to improve. An open source project will continue to grow and develop on the shoulders of all who use it, and we’re excited to see the next iteration of our work here.”
To access the open source code, go to https://github.com/newjersey/open-business-portal
For more information about the NJ Office of Innovation, visit https://business.nj.gov/
About GovOS
GovOS is a leading provider of transaction and compliance software for state and local governments to streamline property, licensing, and tax interactions with businesses and citizens. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, GovOS serves more than 800 government agencies across the United States. With the company’s secure suite of cloud-based solutions, governments can maximize revenue, increase compliance, reduce costs, and meet constituent demand for modern, self-service transaction and payment services. In 2024, GovOS was named to the GovTech 100 list by Government Technology for the second time.
For more information, visit GovOS.com
