Collaboration amongst local govt's anybody?

Our recent director of IT for the City I work for is trying to get some
traction in the arena of collaborative programming to replace applications
like real estate tax assessment, treasurer tax collection, codes and
compliance permit issuance, voter registrar vote tally web reporting for
the masses, etc.

Originally, he had hoped the emphasis wouldbe on open source products like
PHP, Pyhthon, and the like, but we are now finding that many local
governments have already standardized on .NET or its predecessor.

We are members of repositories like http://www.core.gov and the GOCC group
out of New England, but these are new initiatives and they don't have much
traction, yet.

Anybody out there writing in-house local government applications using .NET
and hoping to share code with other localities? Anybody tried it and had it
fail?

Thanks,
GregD
City of Newport News, VA