by Paul Johnston
London-based ex-civil servant now working for Cisco as head of the European public sector team within IBSG, Cisco's global strategic consulting arm. Launched and helped shape this site after wri... More about Paul Johnston
Local Govt website of the future?
It is nice to see that local authorities have started to experiment with their websites and moved away from the very static sites of old. The pathbreaker in the UK was Redbridge i which went with a Google homepage style with lots of scope for user personalisation. Recently, the london borough of Westminister has got into the act - again with a strong Google influence but this time focussing on search rather than personalisation. What do people think - is this the way to go? Or have you come across better ways forward in your area?
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Comments
Here's another one Brent - a bit more conventional than Westminster and not so good looking, but the find the nearest function seems particularly good. As one commentator pointed out, there is a strong emphasis on getting the citizen as quickly as possible to the information he/she wants in the form that he/she will find most useful.
posted 7 months ago
I'm going to applaud - hooray :-) - and I'm going to question a couple of things - boo :-( - Anything that improves the state of Local Authority websites is a good thing. In an attempt to meet all of the rules and tick all of the boxes they've become terrible places to which hardly anybody but the most determined goes. Customisation is great! Lots of channels are great. Bright attractive and appealing to a wide audience is also great! I also like utah.gov which has a lot of these facilities and there are a few lessons we can learn there.
However, isn't this still hierarchical, inward facing with outgoing messages? This is important in a democratic and inclusive sense. We don't just want to engage people, we want to empower them but as I seem to have been saying all week (it must be topical) a voice has to be listened to otherwise it just becomes a disengaged voice and a disengaged voice is a disempowered voice. I think we can see the impact of this in the US now. Not just in terms of a right wing backlash which we see in the increasing incidence of astroturfing at local meetings but in terms of the whole health care debate where the peoples' voice appears to be being heard through the lense of the lobby groups not through the channels of an empowered population.
I suppose I'm being provocative here but having long experience of local government I recognise the tendency to tick the box and move on. What we need here is for these sites to be the start of a process which sees the capacity to receive in bound messages through channels that are heard by the authority - not necessarily owned by them - and acted on so that people feel empowered. Hats off to Redbridge and Westminster but let's see this move on to the next stage and we'll give a full throated hurrah!
posted 7 months ago