Skip to main content

Democracy Club

I manage the Digital Services Team for a council in the South of England, I’m also Vice-Chair of the LocalGov Digital Steering Group, a network of digital practitioners working in councils across the country.

It’s the nature of the mixture of local and national administration that sometime geographical boundaries don’t match up. Take Berkshire for example. There are eight parliamentary constituencies and six unitary authorities, but only two of the former are administered by a single one of the latter.

Confused? Voters probably are too.

The local authority that voters pay their council tax to might not be the one that administers polling for their parliamentary seat. For example, if you live in the parliamentary constituency of Windsor, you’ll have to visit the websites of either Bracknell Forest Council, Slough Borough Council or the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead to find the location of your polling station.

This is where the work Democracy Club is doing comes in. By embedding functionality that uses national data in every council website, voters don’t have to know which council website to go to because the data crosses administrative borders.

In lots of cases the council boundary does match the parliamentary constituency, but there are still benefits here too. Hundreds of councils don’t have to produce or purchase this functionality independently, so there’s a cost saving to taxpayers. It also frees the information from the confines of a council website. Hyperlocal and national websites can use it too, or people might want to visit the Democracy Club website itself.

What Democracy Club are doing fits in with the wider idea of local government as a service, and the “Think. Do. Share” ethos, that LocalGov Digital promote. Our Local Democracy Bytes workstream is all about digital and local democracy, whilst our LocalGov Digital Makers promotes collaborative creation.

For my own part, and on the topic of democracy, here’s the code to create a results board utilising the Modern.Gov API, that can be used by councils at the election count and for displaying a simple view of results online. If you have any more projects, it’d be great if you could add them to the LocalGov Digital platform Pipeline that we designed to kick-start collaboration in local government.

I’ve seen much talk of a need for re-usable components, for civic and council websites, so it’s great to see that Democracy Club, along with LocalGov Digital, are getting on developing them and when it comes to the democratic process, Democracy Club are thinking, doing and sharing.

Comments

Post a Comment

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
5 comments
Read more

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
6 comments
Read more

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
1 comment
Read more

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
1 comment
Read more

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
1 comment
Read more