2018–2024
CMAP: putting the Chicago region’s 2050 plan online for the people it affects
ON TO 2050 is the plan that guides transportation, housing and environmental priorities for northeastern Illinois. With Clarity Partners, we completed its award-winning website on Liferay DXP when it launched in 2018, finished the Contact Manager CMAP uses to reach the public, and ran CMAP’s Liferay sites until 2024.
- 2
- web awards for the ON TO 2050 website (2019)
- 33,000
- contacts in the Contact Manager (2020)
- 2018–2024
- running CMAP’s Liferay sites and applications
- Client
- Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning
- Industry
- Public sector
- Scope
- Liferay development · Custom application · Platform upgrade · Application management
- Platform
- Liferay DXP
- Partnership
- 2018–2024
Challenge
The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) plans for the 7 counties, 284 municipalities and 8.6 million residents of northeastern Illinois (per CMAP, 2026). In October 2018 it adopted ON TO 2050, the result of three years of research, analysis and public engagement, and the plan had to reach the residents it was written for, not only the planners.
CMAP’s sites and applications ran on Liferay DXP. The ON TO 2050 website had been designed by Thirst, and the Contact Manager, the application CMAP uses to keep in touch with the people who take part in its work, had been started by Workstate. Clarity Partners, which held CMAP’s contract, brought us in for our experience with the platform.
Approach
A plan residents can explore
We completed the implementation of the ON TO 2050 website on Liferay DXP: interactive infographics, data compared across US regions, implementation matrices for each chapter of the plan, ways for people to contribute and use the data, and stories from residents of the region.
The people CMAP talks to, in one place
We finished the Contact Manager, a Liferay DXP module where CMAP keeps its contacts: guests and collaborators at public events, members of the press, residents of the Chicago region and the general public, the people it reaches with its emails, campaigns and surveys.
The main site and its authors
We built front-end components and templates for CMAP’s main website to CMAP’s design, and wrote a manual for knowledge transfer and author training.
Kept current until 2024
We upgraded the custom modules and themes of both websites and the Contact Manager to Liferay DXP 7.2, and provided application management and technical support until 2024.
Impact
The ON TO 2050 website launched with the plan in 2018. In 2019 it won Gold in the Government Agency category of the Horizon Interactive Awards and an Award of Distinction in the General – Government Websites category of the Communicator Awards. Clarity Partners developed the site in collaboration with Base22, with contributions from Thirst and Workstate.
By early 2020 the Contact Manager held 33,000 contacts gathered over 10 years. We kept CMAP’s Liferay sites and applications running until 2024; in June 2024 CMAP launched a new website on a different platform, where ON TO 2050 lives on.
