LG/WWW

To say the ”do we need a local GDS debate” is a slow burner would be an understatement, but recently it’s ignited again, just as it did before the 2015 General Election. I’ve been compiling people’s thoughts on it for the past 13 years , and looking back through them, what’s striking is that the debate hasn’t moved on a great deal in a decade. In fact some of the same issues Carl Haggerty talked about in 2012 are still being discussed today. So let’s think about what’s actually being asked. The majority of digital services offered by councils are procured from and provided by the private sector. Whether you’re looking for a planning application, reporting a pothole, searching for a social care provider, or applying for a school place, you’re probably doing so through something built and supported by the private sector. Even the growing number of councils building services themselves using low-code are doing so through a proprietary platform supported by the private sector.   Whilst it

Content designers, we need to talk, and you might not like what I have to say. Just over ten years ago, I wrote a piece on  how to reduce visits to your website . Even then the concept wasn't new, but with the emergence of large language models over the past year, it's become even more relevant today. Over the past decade years, you probably found an increasing number of people obtained information about your organisation online via a third party. First through the growth of social media, and then personal assistants, mainly on smartphones and speakers. As a result we've had to think about how content will be delivered through different media and therefore design it differently. For example, here's Richard Copley asking Google Assistant about school term dates in West Berkshire in 2017. It works really well Phil. This is entirely about content rather than code, is that right? pic.twitter.com/AGQF4aR21S — Richard Copley (@Copley_Rich) December 31, 2017 In the next few y

A few years ago along with many others I had a small part in helping draft the Service Standard , a replacement for both the Digital Service Standard and Local Government Digital Standard . Four years on, whilst the Service Standard has been adopted by some digital teams within local government, my far from extensive research failed to find one council where it has been full adopted across their entire organisation, although some elements have been in some larger councils. So why is that?  Perhaps it's because the Service Standard describes how services can be built by the very few public sector organisations where large fully multidisciplinary teams of user researchers, services designers, content designers, UX spcalists, developers, and so on exist? In reality, for local authorities such as smaller districts which make up the majority of councils in terms of numbers, that kind of team will always be unobtainable. The second factor is that no matter what size the council, there i