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.

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

Visibility

Content that is currently hidden from the public must be made visible in the most useful way.

All portfolios/directorates should be on the constant lookout for things to make usefully visible to the public, to help citizens understand and help the staff to make the community better.

The design guidelines that apply to the website should include recommendations on the use of visualisation techniques including:

• diagrams
• maps
• infographics

Connect the external digital community

Allowing services built and managed by the Local Authority to be used by individuals or groups within the digital community will benefit all parties.  Services such as taxonomy and localised gazetteer suggesters will allow local newspapers, bloggers, forums and hyperlocal websites to relate their content directly to Local Authority content and services.

In addition to simply allowing links to form between the web systems in the region, the Local Authority must foster greater connections between them allowing them to find opportunities to share with each other to mutual benefit.

Making data available

Providing citizens and businesses with access to Local Authority data delivers greater value for all citizens. When in re-usable and easily consumed formats data enables the large community of technically adept citizens and businesses to create new tools and visualisations that can extract greater knowledge and understanding from it. This is in alignment with open.gov.uk, championed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt.

Initiatives like this are designed to show the potential economic and promotional value of government data by making it freely available to the public in formats that allow and encourage the data to be re-used.

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.

Opening and Enabling

Stewardship involves making public information accessible in formats that are useful to citizens.

Local Authorities should make information that was traditionally closed, or difficult to access, available to citizens. They should do this digitally where possible and in formats that make the use of the data easy. If this data is made available, then people with the right skills and interests at the Authority, and in the community, will use this information to create new views, new applications and new meanings. This will serve to increase everyone’s awareness of their social and civic reality.

Sensing and Listening

Stewardship involves being aware of what is happening and what is being said publicly.

Local authorities should monitor relevant public activity and provide their citizens with views into that data. They can monitor activity by employing networks of sensors; they can monitor conversations by using social media analysis tools. They should be open and honest about what is being monitored and why, and they should be engaged in the conversations.

This serves two key purposes:

1. It provides the Authority with better, more timely information for planning.
2. It provides citizens with new views of their region and encourages engagement with shared concerns.