Promote

Promotion in this context means making sure that the activity that happens in the community is visible and recognised. The community has a need to promote itself to a variety of audiences and for a variety of purposes. Some of those purposes such as inward investment may have dedicated websites. However, in addition to that, the Connected Community’s digital presence should be a promotional mechanism in itself. If the Local Authority’s websites reflect the activities, connectedness and involvement of the community, then much of the work of promoting the area becomes a great deal easier.

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 does the community work?

The Connected Community is not a monolithic entity with a centralised command and control structure.

The Local Authority’s web presence should explain what other institutions and partner organisations there are and how they all fit together. Co-operation agreements should be sort that will allow for these relationships to be reflected in the information architecture and search results. Digital channels are ideally placed to allow for low cost provision of links between the Local Authority and other websites so that citizens confused about which agency is responsible for a service can still find it.

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.

Common navigation tool

Joining up many websites with a consistent way to find your way around them.

In order to present the many different Local Authority web properties as a coherent family of sites, a common set of navigation tools should be provided.  These tools should provide: some element of common branding; a link to the main Local Authority website; a set of top level navigation links to other websites and commonly used facilities; links to timely information; and a common search tool.

The tool should be managed centrally in order that changes to the links can be kept up to date and to reduce the cost of making any changes across the entire family of sites.

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.

Push and pull news

Local Authority activity must be consumable by individuals, content aggregators and publishers they way they need it.  Content curators should push relevant news up through the site’s hierarchy. This activity in itself can be hierarchical. Pull news should be provided by providing generic and specific news feeds, email subscriptions and other notifications. Tools should be evaluated to provide these services in tandem with event and press release information in useful formats and with the maximum re-use of relevant content.

Promotion of the community is about activity

The best promotion of any place is to witness it, to see its vibrancy, to connect to its people.  This is best achieved by the Local Authority’s websites reflecting the community itself rather than being a static and sanitised brochure of the city. This does not preclude the creation of campaign based web properties, but suggests that these should be focused on gaining citizen involvement. Just as the Local Authority website can be the digital echo of the community, that echo should demonstrate the values of the community, by showing in a tangible way what is going on, and what people are doing. Commercial activity by the Local Authority must be seen as beneficial to the body politic.

Embed activity and pledges

Involvement is about activity rather than passive consumption.  In order to generate network effects that will benefit both Council and citizens, all activity on the Local Authority’s websites should be made visible, subject to privacy controls and of course with users’ consent. All activity should be presented in a way that encourages further activity by other users. For example, the site can show that an individual has signed a petition, or showing the number of users who have pledged to attend a community meeting or participate in a neighbourhood cleanup.

This activity should also be visible outside of the Local Authority’s websites (again with user consent and privacy considered) and pushed out to users’ preferred social networking sites.