Social design

All important components of a Local Authority’s web presence should be designed to be used and engaged with socially.

Social design means designing things inherently to be shared, commented on, republished, reorganised, co-created and re-purposed. Furthermore, social design should force a ‘bottom up’ navigation structure, as well as a move away from the page as the primary unit of the web. In other words, instead of determining in advance where content is located, pieces of content should be designed to be appropriately social in themselves, according to predefined standards and metadata associations, and then made available in flexible, personalised ways. This allows people to discover the content via navigation, searching, relevance, serendipity and sharing.

Conversation management

Local Authorities will have to learn how to effectively and efficiently participate in and host online conversations.

The need to engage with citizens in digital spaces, either provided by the Local Authority or by another party, has two major implications:

Firstly, staff at all levels of the Authority must be familiar with the skills necessary to engage effectively, understand how to speak differently in different circumstances, and have the confidence to engage without fear of doing something wrong. Secondly, without excellent tools for monitoring and managing conversations, the administrative overhead could be so great as to be unsustainable in the long term.