Opportunities

The opportunities presented by digital technology are widely acknowledged.

The savings that can be made through shifting service to cheaper channels are hugely enticing. However, we believe that the other, less easliy quantifiable benefits will turn out to be far more significant. The ability to go beyond using the web to enable self-serve and into sustainable self-help networks and the changing relationships between service providers and consumers will lead to greater efficiency in services and more effectiveness in business supporting functions.

Educate

Education in this context means explaining to citizens and businesses what the Local Authority does.

In order to fulfil their mission, Local Authorities must engage with their citizens. The website should show citizens not just what the council does and how it does it. It also needs to show citizens exactly what they can do to change it.

The web needs to be a key resource for mapping out the most appropriate avenues for involvement both offline and increasingly online.

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.

Represent

The Local Authority’s digital channels should give citizens access to the democratic process. These mechanisms should be designed to make councillors more effective – and protect representatives from being overwhelmed. Many citizens will feel that their channel to change things at the Local Authority will be through their elected members and in many cases, this is entirely appropriate. However, this may be a symptom of other means of feedback and change being unavailable.

Digital Inclusion

Ensuring that the all sections of the community are able to take advantages of using the web.

Web usage is not evenly distributed across all sections of society. Unless positive action is taken the people who use council service the most won’t be able to take advantage of them online.

Such is the importance of digital inclusion that it warrants the appointment of a Digital inclusion Champion within the local authority. Their role will be to ensure that digital inclusion is tackled using all of the available support from national and local programmes and initiatives.

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.

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.

Real-time Information

The power of real-time information to engage citizens is enormous.

It can potentially change the perception of the Local Authority’s data from that of a staid library to a busy TV news station. Some examples of real-time information are: conversations going on right now on the council platform, council-related topics elsewhere or information that is published in response to an emergency.

This shift in perception of the purpose of the Local Authority’s websites from being narrowly focused to a broader remit, engaged with the life of the community, will embed the Local Authority in citizens minds as being a relevant source for much real-time information. It will also act as a tool to help influence changes in citizens’ behaviour.

Social media integration

Integrating interaction with the council into citizens’ online lives.

The ability for users’ activity streams, their actions and participation, to be visible on their own social networks is critical in increasing citizen engagement.  At service should be provided that links with the single-sign-on and profile service and allows all Local Authority websites to publish (with user’s permission of course) activity to their Facebook, Twitter and other social media statuses.

This service must provide the users with the ability to approve each status update or set persistent permissions and so it will require user interfaces as well as APIs.

Conversation

Allowing users to converse with council staff and other users about the content on the site.

It is important to provide a consistent mechanism for online conversations to happen across all Local Authority web properties.  A conversation service should be provided that ensures that any conversations (including comment streams) are:

• have consistent interfaces and facilities
• can be monitored, moderated and managed
• meet the requirements of the AUP

This service should be adopted by any Local Authority  and available to other community websites, but there should be an expectation that conversations will also happen elsewhere online.