Skip to main content

Content Together

This week the Department for Education (DfT) changed twenty or so pages on their site, so I thought I'd write about it.

Seriously, that's what this piece is about.

So you're probably thinking, why does it matter, it's the department's site they can do what they like, and you'd be right. You're probably thinking, twenty pages, we've published more in one go before, it's not a big deal, and you'd be right.

So why on earth am I writing about it?

When it comes to digital, Central Government and local governments need to work closer together. The LocalGov Digital Content Standards promote this idea, and there's a whole section called "Is the content original" which basically says, if it already exists, link to it.

I've seen whole parts of local governments' websites that have been lifted from others' including those of Central Government. In almost all cases, this is a complete waste of time. Why reproduce what a credible source has published, potentially four hundred plus times across the country?

But there is another side to this, and it's the biggest argument for maintaining the wasteful practice I described above.

On Monday morning twenty emails from our Content Management System were sitting in my team's inbox telling us we had broken links to the DfT site. This means, that we had to try to find the new pages and replace the links. This isn't a huge amount of work, but sites change regularly so this happens reasonably often.

Not every organisation has a method of checking links like this, so they'd have to wait until someone came across them to find and replace them.

What would have really helped is to be told in advance when they were changing, and what they were changing to. This isn't a criticism, just an idea to make things better. There are technical solutions to solve this problem like persistent URLs that Legislation.Gov already use, but I suspect we might be a little way off this being enabled for all Central Government sites.

So here's a proposition. If LocalGov Digital continue to promote not recreating, but linking to Central Government content through our Standards, slimming down local governments' sites and only publishing what really needs to be there, perhaps the Government Digital Service might promote better communication with local governments.

I realise this only one minor part of how Central and local governments could work better together, but it could be another piece in the jigsaw.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Digital best practice checklist

This week I finished the draft of a digital best practice check-list. It's not digital strategy, in fact I'm increasingly thinking organisations don't need a digital strategy, they need a delivery strategy. My draft has check-list of seven questions and recommendations, with one overall recommendation regarding best practice for delivering digital. Ideally it would be incorporated into a wider service and information delivery strategy. Below I've omitted the bulk of the content, the reasoning behind arriving at the recommendation from the question because it's still in draft, but here are the seven questions and eight recommendations: 1. Is the council properly promoting its digital services and content, to reduce avoidable contact? Recommendation: Establish a “digital first” ethos to the promotion of services and better targeting what, when and where they're promoted. 2. Are the digital services the council offers, especially where the design and

Carl's Conundrum of Internal Influence

I'm writing this partly as a reply to an excellent piece that Carl Haggerty published about the disconnect between internal and external influence and partly due to various conversations over the past month about how to make using tools like collaboration platform  Pipeline common practice. This isn't really about Carl though, or Devon County Council, or any other council specifically, it's more a comment on the influence of digital teams in local governments, or lack of, and how to resolve this. So here's the question that prompted this piece. How can someone who's been recognised nationally for their work, first by winning the Guardian's Leadership Excellent Award and who has more recently been placed in the top 100 of the Local Government Chronicle's most influential people in local government , "sometimes feel rather isolated and disconnected to the power and influence internally". First, let's consider whether is this a problem to

Pipeline Alpha

In September 2014, officers from 25 councils met in Guildford to discuss a platform to enable collaboration across Local Government. A "Kickstarter for local government" is the missing part to Makers Project Teams , a concept to enable collaborative working across different organisations put forward by LGMakers the design and development strand of LocalGov Digital . Based on the user needs captured at the event, LGMakers created collaboration platform Pipeline and by October people from over 50 councils had signed up . Pipeline is an Alpha, a prototype set up to evaluate how a Kickstarter for councils might work. It is a working site though, and is being used as the platform it is eventually intended to be, at present without some of finer features a live offer might have. So what have I've learnt in the eight months since we launched Pipeline? There's a strong desire to collaborate  LocalGov Digital isn't a funded programme. I wrote about how much it

Superfast highways

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation This week we launched a new beta service to report speeding traffic. It looks fairly simple but to give you an idea of what's happening in the background I thought it might be useful to show you the before and after. So here's the before and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district. Here's the after What this doesn't tell you is that it's basing whether the request is for the parish or district on three questions. It's also doing a spatial look up to find the parish and returning the parish clerk details using the Modern.Gov API. Because these are already part of our platform this is data that we currently maintain, so there's no additional work to keep this up to date and we've reduced the h

Defining transformation to a wider audience

For the past month I've been putting together a paper on the next steps of digital transformation, for the organisation I work for. I'm proposing we look at two capabilities and two business areas, and if approved I'll be writing more about it. It's been a great exercise in gathering my thoughts and helping me to define digital transformation to a wider audience and how it fits into the bigger picture of service improvement. Here's some of the stuff I've learnt or had affirmed: Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied. It's unlikely a commercial operation would launch a new product without first researching the market, so why would a digital service be any difference? A couple of years ago I wrote how the phrase "digital transformation" was hindering digit