LG/WWW

It's funny how conversations on Twitter start off about one thing and end up about another. This morning I started tweeting about how we're aggregating Google Calendars (gCal) into an events search, found out Kevin Jump had written some code for pulling events from gCal too, talked about testing the Solr search engine against Google with Jason Williams , Sarah Jennings and Richard Kingston , and ended up discussing a local public services search engine with James Cattell and briefly, Saul Cozens and Tom Loosemore too. Both the first two subjects deserve their own post, but this one's about the last, a local service search engine. On 20 June LocalGov Digital Makers are running a Hack Day in partnership with Nesta and for one of the challenges we're looking at is creating a central resource for local governments, perhaps based on the some of the work the Government Digital Service have done. The discussion this morning got me thinking, what if we could p...

A few weeks ago I spoke at an event in London about the LocalGov Digital Content Standards and how they're helping councils make better websites. Another talk covered user testing and the speaker showed a picture of session they'd helped facilitate. In the picture however, there were no real users, just personas. Wikipedia describes a persona as "a social role or a character played by an actor" and it's not uncommon for digital teams to create persons to help them design the content, taxonomy and other aspects of their sites. User testing by young people with learning difficulties So in the picture I saw, council staff were interviewing other council staff who were role playing users. Now, there's nothing unusual about this in usability testing, however when I asked if they'd tested with real users the reply was "No, we tried that and they're too unpredictable". This seemed bizarre and reminded me of an example of unpredictably t...

This week I had a brief chat on Twitter with John Jackson and Gavin Beckett . John mentioned a National IT Procurement Strategy so I thought I'd write mine own. OK, so it's not really a strategy, just three options I think you should consider when creating a new digital service. Borrow If you're looking to create a new application the best place to start is finding someone who's already made it and willing to share the code. There's increasing number of public sector organisations on GitHub all round the world. Sites like Europe Commons also offer a catalogue of open applications and networks like LocalGov Digital's LGMakers and the Open Systems Alliance are promote code sharing. Build Last year I wrote about an Kickstarter for local governments . As collaborative working becomes easier and professional networking more prevalent this is increasingly becoming an option, however I've yet to see a platform that will really enable this. LGMakers will ...

When most people refer to something as Web 3.0 I usually call shenanigans. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee calls something "a component of Web 3.0" I take notice. This is what he said of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is the "internet of things", compared to Web 1.0 and 2.0 which perhaps could respectively be described as the "internet of information" and the "internet of services". Back in 2011 I was already boring people about " being objective ", but a conversation with the award winning Carl Haggerty this week reminded me of this again. So what's it got to do with local governments? Councils look after a huge number of physical assets. My area has 10,000+ streetlights for example, and at some point they'll all exist as an entity on the internet. Actually, they kind of do already. Here's a link to report a problem with the streetlight nearest to where I work for example. In fact you could do the same with any of ...

Ten years ago, a general view of local governments' websites was bigger is better. "We've only got 2,000 pages on our site; you've got 5,000? Brilliant!", I remember conversations at conferences going. Today however it's widely accepted that some local government's websites are almost impenetrable fortresses of content, not just through incomprehensible language but because of the sheer number of pages one has to sift through to find pertinent information. The LocalGov Digital Content Standards seek to help put this right, and these days participants in unconference conversations are more likely to take the view that it's better to have the minimum number of pages needed to do the task of delivering information and services. So what's this change in best practice for local governments' websites got to do with the number of visits? Most local governments now have some sort of Channel Shift programme in place, which seeks to direct as m...

This week we had an incident on one of the trunk roads in our area. Fortunately there were no fatalities, but the road was closed in both directions for a few hours. The incident happened around 6.45am and TVP Roads Policing tweeted about it. Ideally partner organisations would have someone monitoring Twitter and have re-tweeted it, but often it simply isn't possible to have dedicated members of staff to do this, around the clock. So this got me thinking, could I build something to the task? I was reminded of films, where in a civil emergency, radio and television becomes one broadcast network. Could something be done along similar lines with Twitter? I started to build a proof of concept and surprisingly, in a short space of time it was finished. So how does it work? Firstly, (this is the technical mumbo-jumbo) set the code up with your OAuth application authentication and then get it to run at scheduled times, ideally every couple of minutes. Even running the code this ...

You might have seen a paper published last week by UKAuthority reporting that 40% of councils say they're not making savings by using digital. Whilst I agree with much of the sentiment of the paper I noticed that Steve Halliday , President of SocITM commented on Twitter that perhaps it was "council accountants fail(ing) to count savings achieved through digital"  and I can see his point. I very much doubt that there's a single council that isn't making some sort of saving through digital, it's just that this information hasn't been collated or reported. After all, every council has a website, so this must be be providing some saving, in that it's preventing a level of what used to be referred to as "avoidable contact", so why wasn't this reported? I'm not advocating the introduction of performance indicators that tie council staff up in red tape rather then delivering services. I'm just saying that when a council sa...

Today the sites we're producing as part of our Choose Digital Project moved into their Alpha phase. You can read about why we're creating two new sites , on the Choose Digital Blog. We're inviting comment from local residents and businesses, peers in other local authorities and our own councillors and staff; in fact anyone who wants to. We've released templates for home pages, landing pages, services and information pages. One of the first things you'll probably notice is a warning on every page. This is because the sites are far from finished, in fact they're barely started in terms of design, development and content. So why release a site to the public so early in the process? I wrote in the past about the Government Service Design Manual and how some of it could be adapted for local governments . The basic framework for creating a digital service is something that certainly can be applied to every design and development process for a publi...

A while ago, at a LocalGov Digital Steering Group I suggested the idea of a "dating site" or Kickstarter for Local Government. This week I was discussing Nesta's new Creative Commons Europe site with Carl Haggerty and Paul Mackay ; it seemed like a good idea to re-visit the subject. When it comes to digital services, councils often tend to buy off-the-shelf solutions with a customised look and feel. This means that essentially, some suppliers are selling the same thing over and over again with a different paint job. It's production line development and sales in digital services, or IT systems as they're often seen as, which are treated as a purchased product with a limited shelf-life. When the shelf-life expires the procurement process starts again. Producing digital services should be an iterative process, as documented in the Government Service Design Manual . People's expectations of digital services are constantly evolving and Local Government is no...