LG/WWW

You might have seen in the media, it's been a bit soggy in Berkshire over the past couple of weeks. They say necessity is the mother of invention and because of the flooding we bought forward the launch of our new news page by a few months. The page is still a bit rough round the edges in its design, doesn't yet do all it will, but we took the same line as the Government Digital Service , and release something that's certainly a Minimum Viable Product . It'll eventually show a summary of latest blogs, events listings and most recent consultations, but for now it just provides the additional functionality of a feed of news. What's so special about that? Don't most council sites have a list of press releases? As well as our news content, including the service status of over 100 schools, libraries, car parks, children's centres and more (something we introduced during the snow of 2010) it gives us the ability to import tweets into the news feed. Th...

This week the Department for Education (DfT) changed twenty or so pages on their site, so I thought I'd write about it. Seriously, that's what this piece is about. So you're probably thinking, why does it matter, it's the department's site they can do what they like, and you'd be right. You're probably thinking, twenty pages, we've published more in one go before, it's not a big deal, and you'd be right. So why on earth am I writing about it? When it comes to digital, Central Government and local governments need to work closer together. The LocalGov Digital Content Standards promote this idea, and there's a whole section called "Is the content original" which basically says, if it already exists, link to it. I've seen whole parts of local governments' websites that have been lifted from others' including those of Central Government. In almost all cases, this is a complete waste of time. Why reproduce what a ...

Last year I wrote for Comms2Point0 about what Google+ can offer. Communities such as the one run by LocalGov Digital give you a great new way to connect interest groups. Pages are another way to promote one's brand or organisation, but like much of Social they're still reminiscent of the telegraph and newspaper era of traditional media. It's Google+ hangouts that bring Social into the radio and television age. Skype has been offering video chat for years but it's more akin to the telephone than broadcast media and with the number of features to help one engage with one's audience being added to all the time, hangouts really feel like the the next generation of Social. So here's my quick guide for get the most out of attending a hangout: Step One Join Google+. You'll probably find you've already got a Google account if you use Gmail, or Google Calendar, or Google Drive, or one of the many other things Google provides. Step Two Buy your...

New Year can be a time for reflection, and partly promoted by an excellent post from Dan Slee about radio and content without boundaries I thought my first post of the year might be one of introspection and a look back at the history of one aspect of communication. Long before Twitter , long before the internet, there existed a publicly available, worldwide network of transient conversation between people around the world. These former day "tweeters" were Amateur Radio (sometimes called ham radio) enthusiasts, or radio amateurs as they're known. During my childhood my dad was (and still is) a radio amateur and this played no small part in forging my interest in communications and techno geekery. As a kid, I spent time with my dad in a room not dissimilar to the picture above, listening to crackly voices being broadcast through the ether. In these pre-internet days there was something incredible about being able to listen to radio broadcasts or even better, stra...

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 ...

There's an elephant in the room of channel shift. In fact it's knocked through to social media's gaff and is currently residing in the whole ground floor of the digital comms building. I'd been meaning to write about this for a while and Helen Reynolds post asking " Isn’t it time ALL employees were encouraged to use social media " promoted me into doing so. Channel shift encourages not only customers to use digital, but also those providing the service to communicate with service users using digital too. That might be using social media, a Customer Relationship Management system or some other electronic means. In my LocalGov Digital role I talk to lots of people, in lots of organisations, in lots of sectors and one thing is apparent; the standard of literacy of some delivering services is perceived as not good enough to communicate effectively using digital. This is not in any way a judgement on their professional capability. I myself once worked with ...

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...