Enable

The role of the Local Authority in the Connected Community is that of steward rather than owner.  The Local Authority’s web properties and systems should provide the right features to enable the people of the community: citizens, businesses, and staff, to do what they need and to connect to each other for civic activity. This entails providing tools that allow staff, citizens and community groups to help themselves, such as collaboration tools, platform access, open data, APIs and other facilities.

Engage

The Local Authority must do more than serve its customers, the citizens and businesses of the Connected Community.  

To stay relevant, it must engage with them and encourage them to engage with each other.  By encouraging and facilitating involvement, not only will the perception of the Local Authority among the citizens change, but the Local Authority will get the considerable benefit of the effort of its citizens to improve services and solve problems. This entails encouraging citizens and staff to organise themselves into groups that discuss and actually do things. The Local Authority will have to have policies and procedures in place to manage this engagement activity.

Connect

The vision is to create a Connected Community. this will be achieved by joining the Local Authority to the citizens, and enabling the citizens to connect with each other.  The aim is to join information, facilities and resources together to make them greater than the sum of their parts.

The key issues for a Local Authority are providing cost effective joined up communication that engages citizens. This cannot be seen as just shifting as many people as possible into using the web channel as their are still many people who are not connected. There are also those who are restricted in their internet usage at the one place they are regularly connected, work.

Continuous feedback and improvement

Planning for products and services to be continued to be developed after they have been released.

Any system deployed by the Local Authority should have a plan for coping with the changing expectations of users and technical environment. The continuous development and improvement of any system should built into its maintenance processes and should be documented as part of any project. The continuous improvement plan should include:

• how feedback will be gathered
• how it will be reviewed and actions prioritised
• what resources are required

Checking for these considerations should also be included in the project
review process.

Open data and data format standards

Allowing other organisations and individuals to work with council data and systems to derive more value.

The reasons that block the opening of data should be identified, understood and addressed. At present these blocks are thought to be:

• lack of visibility of benefit
• concern over misuse of data
• lack of data release/control mechanisms

A channel for communication between the users of the data and the data managers/guardians should be set up by encouraging and supporting the forming of a community group of developers, data journalists and engaged citizens and businesses. Conferences and open days should be organised to catalyse the communications

Joining Local Authority properties together

Connections between people and communities must be encouraged by creating links between the resources that those people use.

This should be primarily through visual design; the family of Local Authority sites should all use common design elements. Information architecture, all labelling, navigation and options should be consistent wherever possible. User experience must be consistent, efficient and based on common search & navigation features. There should be a simple, consistent means of promoting important initiatives and information, and all opportunities for offering related information should be exploited.

This commonality should include properties and services related to the Local Authority including partners.

How can people get involved?

The Local Authority website should power the involvement process.

Educating citizens about how they can engage with the Local Authority is fundamental. This starts with  comments on content and develops into further use of communication mechanisms.

The Local Authority web service should also act to enable grass roots digital services. This could be through providing a platform or by enabling the use of low barrier to entry services. This growth of community based activity is key to getting maximum buy-in.

Engagement

Allowing and encouraging the customers involvement in all aspects of council business.

The biggest anticipated shift in the way all organisations operate over next few years is the way that they relate to their customers.  Rather than just serving their customers, organisations are going to be working with them. Staff will need to understand:

• that networks of people have become an important resource
• that personability and responsiveness can disarm and convert a critic
• their own limitations to effect change
• how to deal with abusive or persistently disruptive people (tools and processes must be available)
• how to mobilise and collaborate with the public

Service improvement is part of the service

Service improvement (with involvement from the community) must be an integral part of service provision. All transactions should offer citizens the opportunity to use commenting and feedback to suggest service improvements as part of the process. Analytics and metrics should be used as part of an in depth user experience strategy to find and fix points that cause high dropouts. Services need to be provided via as many channels as appropriate and an engaging practical website will bring more people towards the self service end of the spectrum.

Access the power of local innovators, developers and social entrepreneurs

The Local Authority must engage with those who can themselves generate more involvement. The local communities of social entrepreneurs, web specialists and technology innovators are already imbued with the will and wish to be involved.

Enabling these groups with support, tools, and even contracts will result in higher returns as the work they do will enable others. The Local Authority must spend time and effort to reach out and find these groups through physical and social media.