How can Councils use the web to serve you?
April 7, 2009I’m quite interested in both Information Technology and Communications. My IT interest stems from getting a computer when I was really young and facination to make the machine do new and menial tasks for me. Communcation is of interest because it’s so important and we don’t realise just how much information we are bombarded with every day.
So as I sit on Corporate Scrutiny i’ve asked for a debate on communications and IT as I see the great need now to overlap the two. I think the Walsall Council website does a basic job of providing some information – but what can it do to empower people? How can it help councillors make decisions and how can it make citizen’s get their money’s worth out of the Council they pay for?
We’ll be debating the role of this on Thursday at 6pm in the Council House. Corporate Scrutiny is a public meeting so come along to watch. If you have ideas and want to participate then please comment below, email me, tweet me or give me a call! Here are some questions for you:
- What do you need from the Council website? Information, payment facilities, education on what the Council does, accountability, transparency, particpation in decision making, consultation, petitions?
- Do you want to know more about services in your area? Should content be postcodea and map driven like sites such as fixmystreet.co.uk?
- Should the Council use email lists and RSS feeds to update citizen’s via their inboxes and mobiles?
- To what extent should a Council or councillors use twitter and facebook to engage with citizens?
- How can new media, internet, etc help people like me to make good decisions on your behalf?
Also on wider communications issues – what works and what doesn’t? Do you read Walsall Pride, read local newspapers or would you prefer less Council material and more Party political material – afterall the Parties form the policies.
Please think outside of the box and let me know your thoughts and ideas.
Subscribe to feed
First and foremost, it is important for councils to open up their data. Make it visible and usable for other people to build services on – councils do not necessarily have the resources or ideas to create really innovative or usable services. If you release the data through APIs then people like those behind mysociety (who run FixMyStreet and PlanningAlerts) can then create services around it for you.
For an example of some really good services being produced by councils, take a look at Lichfield DC. Their planning service is excellent.
If you are interested, I’d be happy to talk to you a bit more about these things!
Dafydd Vaughan
Developer for CllrTweeps.com and ConsumerFocusLabs.org
The News page of Walsall Council produces regular, informative and well written press releases – it is really quite good (but lacks an RSS feed).
The rest of the website is reasonably informative but quite dull and content on parts of the network is forgotten and neglected.
The satellite site on Council business is poorly designed and very uninformative. The use of pdfs is a barrier, time consuming and often downloads don’t work on certain browsers. When users succeed in actually reading anything it is hard to understand.
Similarly the members pages are poorly maintained and are very uninformative.
Access to information about Council business is a priority if Walsall’s citizens are to be able to participate fully in local democracy.
The Council’s What’s on website looks pretty, and incredibly it has won an award, but it is very difficult to actually find anything. There is also a narrow range of activities listed eg no details of the vibrant live music pub scene around the town – but the once-a-month organ recital always gets a prominent position.
Chase Council have recently announced an email notification service for bin collections, this would be useful in Walsall since there is a lot of confusion over collection times particularly with green and brown bins. I am sure many other Council services would benefit from email/text/rss communications, job roadshows, events, community transport and so on.
Finally, it is one thing to have information technology services (and for the Council Tax payer to pay for them to be built and put in place) but that investment must be protected by employing people to manage the technology and update the content, otherwise the services won’t be used and the original cost will be wasted.
It is amazing how many Walsall politicians just don’t ‘get’ the web despite us living in the age of Obama’s amazingly successful online campaigns – go on Walsall “together we can do it”.
Mark Blackstock
http://www.theyamyam.com
OK, Giving this one another try!
APIs are simply any information that you have and have made available to share. All the info the council has on massive spreadsheets / hidden in databases, like… premises licence records, planning applications, schools data, health services data, crime stats, CAN be API if the council gets together and decides to publish that data freely.
It’s best if the info is matched with real-life info such as postcodes, addresses – then you can map the data, provide services like “find your nearest…”, and more.
You’ll need to invest resources in cleaning up the data so it’s suitable to use, and have a plan for how to keep it up to date as well!
However, it then opens the doors to people like the ones who run fixmystreet (and others!), or you could run a competition to get the best ideas on how to use all the data, or contract some IT people to make something for you.
This isn’t my particular area of expertise, though, I think all these things are great, but they’re built on the model of “build it and they will come”.
I think what councils could really make great strides, online and offline, if they took a much simpler, educative approach. You could get a better response, I think, if before every consultation, campaign, new tool, someone asked the question “Do my constituents know HOW to do this thing?”.
Without simple explanations of the processes, of how these things work, people will continue to think that responding to a consultation or engaging with the council in other ways etc, is just too difficult. You’re working with mental barriers that have built up over time.
Technology can do a lot to dispel the idea that council’s are bureaucratic and hard to get information from / talk to, but it’s not the whole story. If you genuinely want to engage with all your constituents, you have to look at the whole way you talk to the public.
Consultations are the area I’m building up some expertise in, specifically translating them. It’s my long term goal to not have to do this at all, to teach people that it can be done another way!
They should be accessible and easy to understand from the word go. They should dispense with the useless diagrams, business jargon and doublespeak that people use automatically, as filler, or to sound clever, or to give the impression that something is more indepth than it is.
The first question to ask, before you write them, is again “Do my constituents know HOW to do this thing?” (respond to a consultation). I think the second question is “Who do I want to be able to read and respond to this?”. The audience you have in mind should dictate how you write it, every time.
The third question, I think, is “where are these people?”. Then you can take the consultation to them, whether it’s nurseries or schools, hospitals or pubs, nursing homes or supermarkets.
Anyway that’s quite enough for today! Enjoy your exploration of technology, it can reap great benefits, and many people will be grateful that you asked the question at all!
Corinne Pritchard
http://www.simplyunderstand.com
Hi Councillor Flower
This is a great topic to discuss and it’s fantastic to see an elected member talking about these issues. However, I disagree with one of your assumptions. The Walsall Council website does a lot more than “a basic job of providing some information”.
We have dozens of online services on our website: payments; job applications; committee information; planning services; interactive library services; online licensing; problem reporting and payment of parking fines to name a few.
In March 2009, SOCITM (the Society of Information Technology Managers) named Walsall Council as having one of the top 20 local government websites in the UK in their ‘Better Connected 2009′ report. We were the only council in the West Midlands in the top 20.
http://www.lgcplus.com/News/2009/03/best_council_websites_listed.html
This result betters being named in the top 30 in their ‘Better Connected 2007′ report.
I’m the first one to recognise that we could do a lot more to improve the website and build on our success. Ultimately though, it’s down to the resources available to us.
Matt Murray
Web Manager
Walsall Council
Ummm… Walsall’s online services are pretty good, actually. Just because you’re suffering an outbreak of web 2.0-orhea doesn’t mean it’s any use.
The only ‘poor’ online service from Walsall is the planning interface which is clunky and stuck in 2002, but on the whole, it does an excellent job.
As to your obsession with Twatter, you need to take a step back. You’ve communicated little of value to your constituents via the medium; reading your stream (like those of other members) is a mismmash of one sided conversations, trivia and irrelevancy. Try reading it as someone who doesn’t know you – what film you’re watching or what you’re giving up for lent is banal and only of interest to those close to you. Worse, while your use of twatter has increased, for a long time there were no blog posts at all, so when you spoke of petitions and other matters we had no idea what you were talking about.
As to pothole hotlines and suchlike, get the service working first… Commonside had a grand total of 3 potholes filled this year by throwing a spadeful of tarmac into each, which has since predictably washed away. Commonside remains in a bad state, how would a web service help that? Save the money and put it into services to get the potholes filled better and properly, not internet gloss.
I’d wager most of your ward are more worried about the state of roads, Social Services (still failing), job cuts and the astronomical amount spent on wages for top officers and councilor expenses than ever they are about exercises in internet services from a council that’s barely capable of getting basic things right.
Bob
The News page of Walsall Council produces regular, informative and well written press releases – it is really quite good (but lacks an RSS feed).
The satellite site on Council business is poorly designed and very uninformative. The use of pdfs is a barrier, time consuming and often downloads don’t work on certain browsers. When users succeed in actually reading anything it is hard to understand. Similarly the members pages are poorly maintained and are very uninformative.
Access to information about Council business is a priority if Walsall’s citizens are to be able to participate fully in local democracy.
The Council’s What’s on website looks pretty, and incredibly it has won an award, but it is very difficult to actually find anything and there is also a narrow range of activities listed eg no details of the vibrant live music pub scene around the town – and the website’s RSS feed omits the date of events.
Chase Council have recently announced an email notification service for bin collections, this would be useful in Walsall since there is a lot of confusion over collection times particularly with green and brown bins. I am sure many other Council services would benefit from email/text/rss communications, job roadshows, events, community transport and so on.
Finally, it is one thing to have information technology services (and for the Council Tax payer to pay for them to be built and put in place) but that investment must be protected by employing people to manage the technology and update the content, otherwise the services won’t be used and the original cost will be wasted.
It is great to see you leading the way on the technology front but it is still amazing how many Walsall politicians just don’t ‘get’ the web despite us living in the age of Obama’s amazingly successful online campaigns – go on Walsall “together we can do it”.
Mark Blackstock
Yes, our site does lack an RSS feed at present. We are working on one at the moment but it’s proving to be a difficult task. In the database that powers our site there are over a 100 tables – trying to track down bits of information from different tables (none of which have sensible names) is a nightmare!
Believe it or not, we actually had an RSS feed in 2005 before we launched the ‘new’ website. At that stage we moved over to a content management system to make it easier for staff to create and manage their own content. The only downside was that in some cases, having this system has made simple tasks very hard for the web team.
Mark, by the satellite business site do you mean http://www.walsall.com?
Matt Murray
Web Manager
Walsall Council
Thanks for the feedback on RSS Matt – yeah I’m sure it must be a difficult job sorting them out – even if you can just get RSS on the News/PR page to start with that would be fantastic.
No by satellite site I didn’t mean http://www.walsall.com which is cool. I meant the dreadful
http://www2.walsall.gov.uk/CMISWebPublic/ which is really quite an important part of the Council’s activity ie information about the elected representatives and what they actually talk about and vote on…
Mark
While overall I find the website OK and I can usually find things I need, eventually; I often find the pages can be out of date. I expect some of this is down to the relevant departments not updating the information rather than those who design and maintain the site.
I often find it hard to find the name, phone number and e-mail address for the relevant contact and give up and phone the switchboard, maybe some form of contact list could be incorporated, I assume something similar must exist for internal use?
The planning section provides plenty of info, but I do sometimes have problems using the maps.
The news proves very useful, but maybe there could be an e-mail service providing update direct?
On the whole it’s OK but could be better.
If you haven’t seen it already, I’m running a campaign called Mash the State. Our first activity is asking all UK councils to produce an RSS feed for their news by Christmas 2009.
Our ultimate goal, which we share with many other people and organisations, is to get all public sector organisations to get their information and services to the public through open APIs (RSS is a type of API) but we’re tackling the issue one data set and group of public bodies at a time.
http://www.mashthestate.org.uk/councils/walsall
@ Matt Murray:
If you want to produce a feed, start by looking at the script that generates your home page rather than looking at the database schema. The feed will contain the same data items as the web page but just in a different format. I recommend using a pre-written class/library to generate your feed rather than doing it manually as there are various gotchas in the details of how feeds are created and you’ll save a lot of time and hassle.
Once the feed is in place and working, don’t forget to include an autodiscovery link tag in your web page’s head section:
http://www.mashthestate.org.uk/faq#autodiscovery