How WordPress changed the face of Croatian politics

The basic idea of WordPress was to redefine online publishing with allowing anyone to easily publish their articles. More than 10 years later, we used WordPress as an open source publishing platform to build a website for one of the largest cities in Croatia.

I’ll tell you a story of how the city of Rijeka decided to go with open source software and how the people reacted to a fact that everything will be open sourced as well. One of the first large-scale “design in the open” projects in Croatia is defining standards for future web development. We’re discussing the web design process, sharing knowledge with the public and asking citizens to be a part of the redesign effort.

By delivering designs, HTML and CSS, WordPress theme and documents like Content Strategy and Accessibility Guidelines – we’re redefining how the public website should look like. And with the help of WordPress, we’re promoting the power of publishing and transparency.

Serbia and Croatia share similar transparency problems and we can only start to solve them if we step out from our comfort zone. And not only us, but the local governments as well. It can be done, though – if we invest in it – so we can make a better world for our children.

Speaker