Me, I really liked the “life events” idea that seems to have got lost along the LGCL way somewhere. You know, “I am getting married” – links to register office, town hall venue booking, on to local churches and cake makers, links to electoral roll or crm to register address changes, onwards to the DWP etc to register name changes

Do any “customers” care who does what between town/district/county councils, agencies, central govt

RT @davebriggs What makes for a decent Council website? | DavePress [link to post]

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RT @DomBurf: What makes for a decent Council website? [link to post] #gov20

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[Global] DavePress » What makes for a decent Council website?: After the kerfuffle over the Birmingham C.. [link to post]

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I think that on balance, whilst SOCITM have struggled, like many organisations, to update itself and the way it works to meet the current needs of the technology community in local government and beyond, they are at least making great effort to do so. Commenting on this blog, for instance, would have been unheard of not too long ago.

Plus, the great support SOCITM and Vicky personally provided to the LocalGovCamp event – which was theoretically competition to much of the business SOCITM does – was vital and welcome.

That’s not to say that they have all the answers, of course, and there are still issues of openness, amongst others, that I feel need to be addressed. But that’ll only happen by taking a conciliatory approach, in my view.

As for the IdeaScale being an example of local government’s onanistic tendencies… well, maybe. I dunno. It just seemed to me there were a load of ideas flying around the web after the Birmingham site launch, which were of value, but which were only published in ephemeral media like Twitter. It seemed sensible to capture that stuff, somehow, and share it with everyone who is interested. What they do with it is their business, and with cost at zero, why not?

I think it DID serve a purpose back in the early noughties when some LG orgs did not even have a site, and were starting from scratch, but now you have to sift through loads of bleeding obvious repetitive dross just to tease out a list of slightly interesting CMS hacks and system integration milestones.

Why did it take until Jan 2008 for the word RSS to even appear in their reports? ( I was consuming RSS in 2001 and writing it in 2002)
Why until recently were they awarding points for having a text-only version of a website, then wordlessly the next year they switched it to removing points if you HAD a text-only version?
Could it be that they are not techies and do not understand technology?

SOCITM and innovation are two words that should not to be used together.

To take your place at any IT table you need to be able to predict the future with some degree of success.

You need to be able to assess something and say with some certainty “this is a waste of time, it will fail” or “this could actually be the future …”. In order to do that – and bet the farm – ( which we all do when we decide to hop jobs, learn a new language, spend some company time on a proof of concept etc ) we have to take a risk, a personal risk.

That risk, that ability to predict the future is hard earned, and you should not profess to either have it nor be the judge of it by virtue of having a history of simply reading other peoples websites.

What we want from SOCITM reports is someone to point out the things on the horizon, or at least be honest and say “we think this is the big thing” – something they have dismally failed to do.

Year after year – we, local government, have to shell out big lumps of tax payers cash to SOCITM just to find out what we all collectively decided to do LAST YEAR, using the budgets from the YEAR BEFORE, when we really need to know what we should be investigating THIS YEAR because maybe its going to be big NEXT YEAR. I resent those payments and the ridiculous service it actually delivers just as much as I resent other such “clubs” that LG is collectively peer-group hi-jacked into joining such as Sitemorse.

So, sadly while this looks like great fun ( no naming and shaming now, nor flag waving for your fave council – oh, its already started! ) its sadly going to be another grand example of self-masturbation by the LG cognoscenti – which is OK, some nuggets may evolve from it, and you didn’t have to pay a massive fee to get the information!

But SOCITM popping up here and adding their “credence” to proceedings, oh please …

I’m for fewer guidelines and more examples of best practice like your links to Westminster and Lancashire sites – the annual DavePress awards?

I agree with Paul Canning’s comment on commercial best practice. Agile development, focusing on the bottom line, engaging with the customer… all need to play a part.

Some great stuff coming through on http://bit.ly/mhAY8 and an interesting debate here: [link to post]

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I think there is a difference in both the method and the audience of these exercises – the more formal SOCITM consultation and my quick 5-minute bodge of a survey of – effectively – my mates on Twitter. Both have their advantages and disadvantages – mine more of the latter than the former, I dare say – and both will yield very different results.

But the SOCITM consultation – even with the added layer of interaction that the CoP brings – is going to pass an awful lot of people by, who aren’t part of the local government IT loop, but nonetheless have interesting and innovative ideas on what a Council website could do.

I’m delighted by the quality of submissions to http://localgovweb.ideascale.com/ so far, and think there are some really good, sensible suggestions that could be refined and brought together to complement the more formal advice provided by bodies like SOCITM – and which you don’t have to pay a subscription fee to read