The latest in the seemingly unstoppable movement of localgovcamps is happening today, in Cheltenham. It’s subject specific, and is going to be all about project management and that sort of thing.
Great work by the team at Cheltenham Borough Council in throwing this together: Jon Hyde, David Wenban and Fiona Legge, amongst others.
Learning Pool is proud to be sponsoring the event, and you can follow all the action on Twitter via the ppmlgc tag.
I wrote a little while ago about how council’s websites might look, and ventured the idea that perhaps all that is needed is a big search box.
Look what Cheltenham Borough Council have got now!
OK, so it isn’t the home page, but it has extra use as it searches other local sites too.
Great work. If anyone knows the folk behind this stuff, can you make sure they come along to LocalGovCamp? 😉
Simon Wakeman presents a nice roundup of some of the new websites being launched, comparing Barnet and Cheltenham‘s latest efforts with the current poster-child, Redbridge.
Generating an environment for residents to interact online with their councils will generate more engagement with the democratic process and council work in general – but it needs truly interactive platforms, a supportive culture within the council and a drive from officers and members to create genuinely two-way conversations.
Simon is right to call out Redbridge for the lack of interactivity in his post. Some basics have been missed: no RSS, no home page box for me to enter my email address to get news updates straight to me.
I think Redbridge and other sites like this are missing what the web is really about these days.
What local authorities (and government generally) need to understand is that they need to stop thinking about their websites as a destination. They should provide people with the information they want, where they want and in the format they want – not force them to spend hours personalising a site in which they have very little interest other than finding out when their bins get collected.
In fact, here’s a (only slightly stupid) vision for council websites. Make them look like Google. Not iGoogle, but the actual Google homepage, with just a search box on it. Make sure the search works, so people can actually find what they want, and then add an option to receive an email when that content changes.
Sorted.