Hello and Happy Holidays from the City of Santa Cruz. The City of Santa Cruz and Mayor Hilary Bryant would like to invite you to the formal public launch of our online small business permitting portal, OpenCounter this Wednesday, the 9th at 9:00 a.m. in Cruzio's co-working space at 877 Cedar Street in downtown Santa Cruz. OpenCounter gives entrepreneurs and small business owners an intuitive online experience that helps them discover the applications and clearances that they will need and apply for them online in a single web session and is the product of an intense year of discovery, development, refinement and more than 750 individual commits to the codebase by ten different developers from the City and Code for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to using the web's tools to make government more open, accountable and accessible. The smallest City ever to utilize a Code for America development team, Santa Cruz's collaboration with the nonprofit also saw the development of an open data portal at data.cityofsantacruz.com, new City Hall wayfinding and even newly painted bike lockers downtown. This was an ambitious and innovative project from the very beginning and we want to thank you for your help and support in getting is done. The code for the application is already online and ready to be re-used for other communities at github.com/codeforamerica/opencounter We're happy to give targeted briefings for any community group or company that wants to leverage this code base for their own small business permitting. Again, thank you so much for helping us develop this resource for our small business community, we hope its one of many initiatives that we'll undertake this year to make Santa Cruz and even better place to live, work and shop. What: Public Launch of OpenCounter, the City's new small business permitting system When: January 9th, 2013 @ 9:00 a.m. Where: Cruzio Coworking: 877 Cedar Street, Santa Cruz California 95060 Who: Mayor Hilary Bryant, Economic Development Director Bonnie Lipscomb, Cruzio Co-President Peggy Dolgenos Details: Coffee and light refreshments