Stap isi

29 September 2009

The twain shall meet

If government is the most interesting new tech startup of 2009 give some credit – especially in local government – to web workers within the institutions themselves. They have mostly been acting on their own initiative (and against the stereotype of the risk averse public servant). They are usually anonymous, but are driving change from below.

Of course the digital activists working outside of government have been crucial. MySociety are the classic example but I’m also thinking of Nick Booth and social media surgeries, Shane McCracken and the CivicSurf project and Will Perrin’s Talk About Local.

Now look what’s happening in England’s second city…

Earlier this year Birmingham City Council put up a consultation on the future of the city. The local (online) community didn’t think it was up to scratch and built their own unofficial, plain English version. “We wanted a place to discuss the issues and options and help each other (and everyone) understand the Big City Plan.” They collected the comments and passed them on to the council.

What?!

It can be difficult enough to elicit contributions on ‘big picture’ topics. But for people to build their own portal to encourage community participation?

If you think that’s good (and to be honest, it floored me), they are now doing over the council’s website.

It’s in response to a newly launched platform for Birmingham City Council that cost 2.8 million pounds, was delivered several years late (in fact, is still being delivered) and doesn’t do basic stuff like RSS. Paul Canning has summarised and commented on the story in Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster.

So here’s the DIY BCC website, delivered in under a fortnight (albeit beta) with a mix of screen-scraped council information and integrated third party services like FixMyStreet and Planning Alerts. Best of all, the content has been wikified. (Here’s an outline of how it came to be.)

Two points:

1. The official site was a stuff up because the BCC web team were not involved. Traditional government procurement practices do not necessarily work with online service and community engagement projects as they favour large companies who offer a one-size-fits-all solution, the exact opposite of what we want (very specific tools to assist with actual, researched wants and needs).
2. The council is no longer the only organisation resourced enough to provide a useful and comprehensive web service for a local area.

As a council web worker, you may be thinking “Hey! That’s my job you’re doing!” As a resident, you may be wondering if the council is being rendered irrelevant.

But, as Alastair from Newcastle says, the middle ground – somewhere between ‘corporate’ and ‘pirate’ – is where it’s at. “Borrow practice from each to challenge and improve.”

Co-creating council websites – that’s got to be the future.

And here the empowered, digital public servant is critical. There is good reason for those codes of conduct and other (sometimes elaborate and clunky) mechanisms against corruption and for privacy. Do we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Andrea DiMaio has been articulating this view in an excellent series of posts. Start with From Athens on the Net to Spartans at the Gates: The Missing Link of Government 2.0 where he outlines the role and value of government employees:

They are bound to a code of conduct, they are required to be “super partes” (i.e. independent from political parties and elected officials, vendors, and so on), they understand intricate processes and organization, and they live every day the frustration created by those very processes. Let them be both agents and brokers of innovation. Let them engage with people outside, on topics they are expert in and accountable for. Let them be the filtering mechanism that both articles mention as needed to prevent the obscurity that crowdsourcing may create. Let them be the “democracy police”.

I made this point a number of times in the past (see here and here), and yet it seems to me that employees 2.0 are not yet given a fraction of the attention they would deserve to untangle the paradox of government 2.0. And to keep the Spartans out of the gates.

Not sure how I feel about being a ‘missing link’ – but better than just being missing.

— b3rn   councils, uninstitutions, web teams   Sep 29, 06:23 AM   #

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