LG/WWW

Last year I helped put together the LocalGov Digital Content Standards . They're a guide to writing content for local government websites, drawing from and adding to best practice that already exists. I also managed a project to create a local government site written to the standards. It made me think about written language in a new way, though Twitter and its 140 character limit had already done this to some extent. There's a great quote from Mark Twain: I didn't have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one. It's harder to put your point across succinctly without losing the meaning, than it is to waffle on using superfluous and convoluted phraseology over and over again, much the same as I've just done. Along the same lines, I love this video from GDS, "It’s not dumbing down, it’s opening up": Enough said. So what's this got to do with digital transformation? In the past few weeks there's been some discussion abou...

Last week LocalGov Digital Makers published information about the creation of Makers Project Teams . Unlike top-down initiatives such as Individual Voter Registration (IER), Makers Project Teams is very much a bottom-up collaboration, largely created by local government digital practitioners. Makers Project Teams will commence with two pilots and they'll form part of the discussion at the Makers Meet-Up on 11th September . There's still a few places available, so if you work for a council and are interested in joining the discussion please get in touch with @LGMakers or leave a comment on my blog. The pilots will not only create outputs to improve cross-council collaboration, they'll allow those who take part to assess and improve how project teams work. Think of it as an alpha version of a project team creating a beta product. Given my involvement, naturally I'm a big supporter of this initiative however I do have one word of warning. Makers Project Teams ne...