Understanding what services are available is fundamental to the website.
But first there needs to be effective explanation of which services are provided by the Local Authority and how to find any run by others. This may mean having sign post pages on the Local Authority that point to the appropriate agency or allowing partner content to appear in search results.
Service channels on the the Local Authority website should be:
It is essential that staff are given excellent tools to create content.
These tools must remove the toil and frustration from creating and managing content. The process should be easy, have low cognitive load and be fun. Specifically the tool box should allow staff and in appropriate cases citizens to:
It is essential that all content is up to date, consistent and accurate.
There should be a focus on empowerment and responsibility over approvals and editorial control. Good content is informative and engaging, it is in the most appropriate accessible format and is not hidden in attached documents. Content should be well tagged with easy-to-use taxonomies by readers as well as editors and have embargo and review dates. Readers should be able to feedback directly on the content they are reading with further levels of participation available to readers to help improve the content. There should be to-do lists for information that has been identified as missing.
There should be integration options that provide efficiency through standardisation, and others that prioritise expressiveness.
As well as a set of processes and templates for migrating or building websites on the common content management platforms, other integration mechanism must be provided that allow for websites to have more expressive designs.
Rather than having a set of integration rules for adopting and integrating other websites, guidance, tools and resources must be provided. This guidance should explain the rationale behind any design decisions and give practical support for website creators and the tools and resources should make it easier for any website creator to use them than to not.
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.
The capabilities provided by the federated services must be integrated by the existing and future web properties.
While it maybe advantageous to make a big splash by launching a large number of upgrades in one go, this strategy allows for the capabilities to be integrated on a needs basis.
All of the websites and systems owned and run by the Local Authority and other community based websites should be identified and the benefits of integrating each capability with them should be assessed and scored based not just on the benefit to the users of that website but also the benefit to the portfolio of websites as a whole.
Sharing common capabilities across a family of websites.
A federated service is one that provides its capabilities to a network in the knowledge that users will also be utilising other services in that network. This means that they both provide their capabilities in a way that other services can integrate them and that they integrate the capabilities provided by other federated services.
The core capabilities that any Local Authority web system should federate include: login and profile management, user activity streams, search, top level navigation, security auditing and content notification.
Allowing access to structure content and content events via programming interfaces
All website content should held in a storage mechanism that is not just robust and reliable, but also allows for the content to be accessed and retrieved by systems other than the website.
Of course the storage mechanism should be able to manage different types of content like unstructured documents, files, images, audio, video and structured data, keeping full version histories of all content. It should also provide interfaces that can notify external systems of changes to the content it holds.
All of this should be done using standard storage technologies to avoid the content being locked into a proprietary database structure.
A tiered architecture for the web systems to allow for integration and future change
All Local Authority systems that provide web based user interfaces (to any users, whether customers or staff) must allow for those interfaces to be redesigned, changed and managed using suitable mechanisms.
The ability for changes to be made to the presentation of interfaces (including static information pages) should not be limited to specific parts of the interface and should not be implemented solely through point and click editing tools.
It should be possible to replace the presentation elements (usually HTML and CSS) of a web interface or page via an API or through editing files.
Adopt a service oriented architecture that allows a number of interdependent systems to work together now and in the future.
In order to connect the various web systems that are provided by the Local Authority, its partners and other organisations and individuals, a flexible and accessible mechanism must be implemented. A service oriented architecture (SOA) should be adopted to allow interconnection between the numerous systems without requiring direct and tight coupling of the systems.
A messaging system to communicate events and data such as a lightweight enterprise service bus (ESB) should be used to connect the systems (via the necessary security devices and mechanisms) using the standard protocols that are most convenient and appropriate to each system e.g. REST, WSDL, JSON, SOAP, etc.
The Connected City 