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...

Yesterday I joined in a discussion on Twitter about "what is digital" and then read the piece that provoked it. Usually you'd do this the other way round, but conversations online don't always follow a linear pattern. That's my excuse anyway and I'm sticking to it. The piece was called Defining Digital by Matt Jukes . It's an excellent summary of the problems one faces when trying to define what "digital" actually means. It got me thinking about how I define it and I was with Matt all the way to his statement: Digital is a belief in the ability of the internet to transform…whether that be society, businesses, education, government or whatever…and the understanding of how that might be achieved. For me, digital doesn't mean online or relating to the internet. If you're using digital to mean online, just say online. Matt's research shows that it's a far more prevalent term which means users stand a greater chance of un...

Register to vote is a new digital service created by the Government Digital Service and is available on GOV.UK. All you need is your National Insurance Number and it takes about 5 minutes to start the voter registration process. Satisfaction with GOV.UK users is high, around 95%, and I can say from experience that I found it quick and easy to use, myself. There are problems with the process once you leave GOV.UK however, in fact the first warning signs are as you finish the GOV.UK part of the process. "contact your local electoral registration office" says the completion message, but there's hundreds of them. Given the address of the user is known, wouldn't it be better to do the hard work to make it simple by adding a link to the appropriate council? Perhaps I'm being unfair, but to me this says to users, "we've done our bit, you're not our problem any more". User experience once the process is passed to a local government is varied. ...

There's no substitute for face to face communication but sometimes it's just not possible. Take UK GovCamp this year for example. I know for a fact there were local government officers who wanted to attend but couldn't afford to pay for travel themselves, nor could they get their organisation to fund it. If you're wondering why there was less local government representation at UK GovCamp 14, this may be the answer and as an aside, anyone proposing a centralised local government digital service would need to factor in the travel of talking to multiple service teams at 400 councils across the country, but that's another topic. After the LocalGov Digital Makers Hack Day I talked about how hack days are essential for better digital services, and LocalGov Digital are working to help create formal structures so collaboration can occur where political priorities and local user needs align. Given that financial constrains are limiting some from attending discover ...

This week I've seen discussion about a "single website for local government", so I think it's important to clarify what's being talked about when we're talking about local authority websites. Council websites deliver information to residents; that's traditionally been their core task and if they're following the LocalGov Digital Content Standards , where possible they've linked to a definitive source rather than write a page themselves, unless they're the definitive source of the information themselves. This means that the 500 to 1000 pages on the site all serve a purpose. This content could be put into a central local government site (if that's not an oxymoron) but it still takes someone to author and edit these pages that are specific to each council, so putting them all on one site isn't really going to be any more efficient. So that's information, but councils offer a lot more online and many will have a collection o...

LocalGovCamp 2014 was last weekend and judging by the response on Twitter and blogs, it looks like people thought it was a success. From a personal perspective there were so many people I'd talked to online that I met in person for the first time. There were people I really wanted to chat with but missed or just nodded to as I dashed to a session.  However long the day is, it's never long enough. I was also proud to organise the Makers Hack Day which around 50 people attended on a work day, and importantly I learned a lot for the next time. I'll post more about this later. I've already seen blog posts about a coming of age for LocalGov Digital, how LocalGovCamp is vital for disrupting and pushing the sector forward, how LocalGov Digital should have more balls (in fact perhaps Glen Ocsko should have the title "LocalGov Digital Voice of the Balls"), all of which I agree with, so in Makers' style, I wanted to focus on doing stuff. I've put tog...