LG/WWW

The people of the UK have just voted in a new government, and in local authorities across the country, thousands of councillors have been elected. For the past few weeks I've been involved in a small way, in the electoral process and over Thursday  and Friday I worked 27 hours out of 32. Some of my colleagues continue today, for the count of the parish elections. Prior to the election, working with Democracy Club I helped them produce their polling station finder . When I say I helped them, we gave them some data, they put in the long hours of creating and refining the finder, and I did a bit of bug testing. I wrote a lot more about why the polling station finder is a good thing here . The polls opened at 7am on 7 May and we were able to offer voters not only the location of polling stations in our district, but neighbouring Reading Borough too. This is a model that I've talked about for a while. Civic coders, or perhaps even a GDS Local producing common functionality ...

I don't write about social media a lot these days. As far as Facebook and Twitter goes much of the conversation has been said. Online discussion usually follows the circular argument: "Isn't social media great?" "Yes, governments should do more with it" "That's right, because isn't social media great" That's not to say governments and their agencies could and should do more, but talking is easy, hence the success and some of the great fails of social media. Putting ideas into action is harder. There's still room for innovation in social, for example the trial of What's App at Shropshire Council , or the number of councils looking at using Meerkat and Periscope for election coverage, although this does feel like a bit of a fad as video streaming apps like Bambuser and Hangouts on Air have been around for a couple of years now. Anything that pushes governments in the right direction must be a good thing though. I...

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 c...

In Part One I offered a rough guide to local government . A quick explanation of how complex this bit of the public sector is compared central government. In this part I'll discuss how we can move things forward, not by amending existing practices but by taking a new approach. I'm going to use the contentious issue of "one website to rule them all", that is, a single website to publish information from all 6,500ish local government departments that some have proposed. Local government websites are a good example of change by consensus. Even as little as ten years ago, not every UK council had a website. There's no general legislation to ensure that councils have websites (though there is some around specific content provision), it's just by consensus of user need that they've been created. They're also a good example of the speed of change. Local politicians have been told by professionals of the need for bigger, better websites for years. This i...

I've seen a lot written recently about what local government should do in terms of digital services, so I thought I'd write a quick guide to this bit of the public sector, for those who might not be so familiar with it. Local government isn't one government like central government, but a collection of Counties, Districts, Boroughs, Unitary, Town, Parish and a few other Councils. There's around 9,000 of these. Many members of these councils have affiliation to a political party, but some don't. When people say "local government" however, they're usually referring to the 433 Tier One and Tier Two councils though, so for the rest of this article that's what I'll mean, when I refer to local government or councils. Each council is split into departments or service units. Depending on the size of the organisation there could be quite a few of these, but I'm going to guestimate on average there's 15. They're sometimes referred to autho...

This week LocalGov Digital launched unmentoring. Based on Nesta's Randomised Coffee Trials, you sign up to committing to having a conversation remotely with a random person over a cup of your favourite refreshment (non alcoholic of course), for around 30 minutes to 1 hour once a month. With a background as a developer I usually deal in the tangible, the doing and sharing bit of  LocalGov Digital's "Think. Do. Share". So why have I signed up for unmentoring? Coding out loud The first port call when you get stuck coding are often sites like stackoverflow , an open compendium of public questions and answers about all sorts of coding problems. If you can't get an answer from here then talking through your problem with someone else is usually next. Sometimes, working through the code, or rather the intention of the code helps you spot the problems with it. The solution might be something as simple as removing a stray speech mark, right though to having to r...

This is a post about two events, both last week. The first the LocalGov Digital Steering Group meet on 6th February, and the second Local Democracy for Everyone: We're Not in Westminster Any More on the 7th, both in Huddersfield Perhaps they warrant two individual write ups, but as the two are inextricably linked, both because LocalGov Digital was a sponsor of the latter and with the LocalGov Digital Steering Group's Carl Whistlecraft and Dave McKenna being involved in its organisation, I've decided to write about the two together. A four an a half hour journey gave me a chance to play with Google+ Locations, and watching Carl Haggerty and Lucy Knight race me across the country, in a sort of virtual It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World gave me a few ideas, but that's for another post. The trip from Manchester to Huddersfield, over the beautiful snow peaked Pennines also remind me that life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while,...