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.

Guidance and Standards

Providing people with the information they information they need to make good decision.

A key theme of the strategy is to change the governance methodology of the web strategy from one of command and control to a more disseminated model where staff are informed and skilled enough to make good decisions on the ground.

This will necessitate the creation and adoption of numerous sets of guidance and governance documents and processes. It is incredibly important that these are understood and adopted and so they should be designed in collaboration with the people who will be using them and be documented to be easy to understand.

Owned, partnered and community sites

Different approaches to integrating with websites must be taken depending on their origins.

The integration of a website into the platform, or of platform services into a website will be managed differently depending on the ownership model of that site. If the site is owned by the Local Authority (as in funded entirely) then a set of integrations can be agreed with the site creator.

A website that is owned and managed through a partnership, where the Local Authority only partly funds the website, will need a more collaborative approach to defining the integration methods. While a website that receives no Local Authority funding will only integrate it the platform where it benefits the site owner.

Technical integration options

A multiplicity of methods for integrating websites together must be supported

There are many different ways to integrate capabilities into websites. Each has advantages and technical constraints. Options include: HTML snippets and fragments; hosted HTML embedded via iFrames; Javascript libraries; web service APIs, both client-side and server-side; plugins and components for common platforms (for example Sharepoint, WordPress and Drupal); developer libraries for common web development languages such as Java, .Net, Ruby and PHP.

Different selections of these integration options should be made available for different services.

Formal petitions

There needs to be formal mechanisms for promoting issues that have significant public support. There will need to be systems in place to move popular motions through the system, from discussion point to poll, from poll to petition and petitions with enough signatures into the formal business of the council.

The early steps on the pathway can be driven by the community with moderation, while the final steps will be subject to specific policies.

Take responsibility

The web is too important a strategic concern to be neglected in the organisation’s management structure and responsibilities.

Local Authorities must take responsibility for the web and all its related activity at a high level, and not consider it to be either an IT function or simply a further delivery and communications channel. Futurist and publisher Tim O’Reilly famously called on governments (local and national) to use the web to create ‘platforms’ for innovation and service delivery – the vision, insight and integration necessary to do this successfully depends on high level strategic ownership and oversight.