In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But existing (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic. Like so many others, I’m currently in voluntary quarantine at home - and I used some time this weekend to put a small boilerplate together for this exact usecase. Here’s the main idea: • generate a static site with Eleventy • minimal markup, inlined CSS • aim to transmit everything in the first connection roundtrip (~14KB) • progressively enable offline-support w/ Service Worker • set up Netlify CMS for easy content editing • one-click deployment via Netlify The site contains only the bare minimum - no webfonts, no tracking, no unnecessary images. The entire thing should fit in a single HTTP request. It’s basically just a small, ultra-lean blog focused on maximum resilience and accessibility. The Service Worker takes it a step further from there so if you’ve visited the site once, the information is still accessible even if you lose network coverage. The end result is just a set of static files that can be easily hosted on cloud infrastructure and put on a CDN. Netlify does this out of the box, but other providers or privately owned servers are possible as well.

CIVIC Platform is a technology environment that makes institutional data more accessible, enabling creative applications and analysis. We connect resources and a nationwide network of collaborators with complex information challenges in the public interest to build projects on CIVIC’s open technology frameworks. Our vision is for public data to be available as a vital resource for collaboration and group problem solving -- accessible programatically, in common formats, with excellent documentation, using secure and reliable technology. The technology is only part of the challenge. Custodians of this data in government, nonprofit, and academia face barriers of limited funding, access to talent, and unique compliance. We’re building the teams and systems to make it happen.