Why town and parish councils are important #nalcconf09 #localgovweb

My twitter feed tells me Justin Griggs is at a NALC conference, and prompted by @podnosh a few hours ago he just asked the question.

"Are Parish/Town councils really telling the story of why they matter?".

Probably not, probably because they haven't woken up the new digital dawn themselves.

This posting is prompted by my understanding of why they are going to matter in the future and ends with a sales pitch.

The web is level playing field isnt it?  Anyone can be anything, they just have to dare to be it. 

Here's a few inflamatory observations outlining my jaundiced view of the current state of local gov play on the web:

When it comes to the big councils (ie not town and parish councils) most local government websites are a mess, they are a mess for many reasons:

  • Political pulling and shoving
  • Too much marketing input, or not enough marketing input
  • Poor in-house technical skills
  • Over-reliance on technology to cover up poor man management skills
  • Over-reliance on outside suppliers whose products are not up to the task
There are lots more reasons, but basically even if a council were to work out explicitly just how they could improve there content delivery, their CMS supplier's product will likely stymie them.

My background is working on the web at the district level, and the town and parish level in a Shire county area and I have documented many local government anti-patterns, the familiar telltale signs that hint at the turmoil beneath - emanating from decisions made in the committee rooms and IT departments of councils.

Councils ingrained ** "My Silo" behaviour nixes joined up government and the public just plain don't know who the hell does what in local government.

(** "My Silo" is another local government anti-pattern - I may be jaundiced, but I know my stuff)

So in a nutshell (I am time-restricted here) The public doesn't know who does what in local government and what is worse they generally have a less than ideal time of trying to find out who does do it, and if they DO find it - the chances are the process they find at the end will be imperfect.

Town and parish councils are generally visible in the community and don't need to waste energy on hand-wringing identity and marketing issues.

  • they usually sport the name of the town
  • they usually have an office, usually a notable building
  • peope know their own towns and village names
Town and parish councils do not suffer the identity problems of their upstream counterparts

Town and parish councils do not suffer from "My Silo" thinking because to a great degree everyone else delivers the big important services

Town and parish coucils are not tethered to outmoded content, they can be nimble

Town and parish coucils DO understand who does what in local government

Now at the same time we are seeing the evidence of the new era of liberated government data being put "out there" for anyone to use, fuelling what is known as "the semantic web".  Some of this is government data, and some of it is just being put "out there" the BBC, Wikipedia, Tesco, Google, the newspapers ...

Each town and parish council website should act as the natural portal to all the government services "upstream" of themselves

  • district
  • county
  • national government
Websites are going to change, they are going to become "stream" portals.  Think of how blogs are evolving now.  Here's my twitter stream, here's the places I have bookmarked, here's my picture stream, here's where I am at the moment (or where my phone is).  Blogs are becoming the aggregators of peoples "streams".

Local websites have the capacity to behave like blogs, they will be places where people go to discover, understand and contribute into the various streams of data and social interactions that are centred around the topic of "place".

Town and parish councils are the natural homes for these streams to be brought together, but do not expect any but the most enlightened upstream councils to bring them the wherewithall to do this - for the most part they simply dont get it themselves yet - and even if they did, many wouldn't want to lose precious 'website hits'.

Town and parish councils can tap into streams of data and information which can be filtered and presented for local people as new "streams"

Town and parish council websites should be the aggregators of all local information

Town and parish councils are neither cash-rich nor tech-savvy, so the only way they are they going to be able to swim in these streams is if they can develop and adopt a shared code base, using the SAAS (Software as a service) model to make a tool which - thanks to "place" (location) - unlocks data feeds from around the web.

  • Centrally held metadata on local government services
  • Centrally and locally hosted data feeds
  • The local social web (twitter,. facebook, flickr)
  • Centrally liberated services (as in www.fixmystreet.com - a council agnostic reporting feature)
This tool should at the same time provides the core functionality they need to digitise some of their backroom operations;
  • Website CMS (Content management system - run their website)
  • Agendas and minutes (document their core business - in an open way)
  • Simple CRM (Customer relation management - tracking a complaint)
  • LBS (Location based services - putting places on maps)
  • Messaging, diaries etc.
It should natively, and by default, join together the various "streams"
  • Images could come from flickr
  • Contect can come from the social web
  • Comments can be made from the social web
  • Links to local and central government
  • Local feeds from councillors, councils, papers, local action groups
For many years I have been putting together and testing many of these elements.

If any of this makes sense to someone at either a:

  • National level - ie you think this idea has legs, and you think I am going in the right direction, or you'd like to sponsor an open sourced version of it
  • Regional level ie you'd like to discuss offering this to a group of councils
  • County level - ditto
  • Town level - you just want to understand how this vision could work for your town
Then please get in touch, because I am driving this agenda forward on my todd and could use some support(£), more customers or some encouragement.

I hope you can excuse this rather imperfect rant, but I am not going to sleep on it or re-read again.  I just have that feeling the time is right.


Tagged locagovweb local councils town councils
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