In conjunction with Sunshine Week — a national initiative created by the American Society of News Editors aimed at educating the public about the importance of open government — Hopkinton launched a new project portal on the town website. The portal is designed to increase overall awareness of town projects, simply access to the information, and engage with the community by providing space to submit questions or comments.

“We are thrilled to expand our partnership with ClearGov and become the first municipality in Massachusetts to launch a Project Portal on the ClearGov platform,” town IT director Josh Grocetti said in a news release. “We hope this helps encourage more residents to explore our existing ClearGov open budget transparency and data visualization tools, which we launched in May of 2018. Hopkinton strives to be a leader in transparency in government, and will continue to explore new technologies and platforms to aid in the sharing of open information.”

The portal’s first feature item is the Downtown Corridor Project, which affects a nearly 1-mile stretch of Main Street in the center of town.