Bristol City Council’s New Website

I’m just back from this event, getting together the ‘great and good’ of the Bristol digital media community to discuss what the council should do with its new website.

The backstory is that the council has seen that its current site doesn’t fit what is needed either internally or externally, and so they’re currently in procurement for a new CMS. After that, they’re up for suggestions from the digital community on what more could be done with it and their general web presence. They’re very much trying to avoid the unfortunateness that happened to Birmingham City Council, where they launched a new (and seemingly very expensive) website, only to have the local digital community rip it to pieces, criticize it massively, then build a better alternative over a weekend. As ever, you’ve got to wonder how good that weekend build would have been if used properly, but as a proof of concept it was interesting.

So, thoughts on the meeting.

First off, it seemed really positive, the council seems keen to engage with new ideas and are genuinely open to suggestions, that came across very clearly. Excellent stuff.

The thing is though, it may be that there’s still a bit of a learning curve for them with some of this. We broke into group sessions, and the first thought of our group was along the lines of ‘so the new CMS you’re procuring will be open source right? Or else we can’t do much with it really…’. Cue slightly blank and worried faces.

There were also concerns that the cart is being put before the horse somewhat, in that they’re getting a new site and perhaps not articulating clearly enough at the moment who the new site is for. In internet parlance, what are the user cases for the site?

They were talking about freeing up the data the council holds in all sorts of areas, so I suggested that they give us their google analytics account password. Someone else chipped in and said they should release the SOCITM user experience survey data that’s collected too. They seemed to agree, but will be interesting to see if that happens. If they want our help as a community with the new site though, then we need to know what they know first.

Another interesting thing that came up was the idea of getting council staff involved in this process. It was mentioned in the presentations that lots of areas of the council have things they’d like to do with the new site, but that was as far as it went. How about council staff are allowed to submit ideas publicly about what the new site should do, and then us digital lot can comment on and help the staff refine those ideas? Cut out the middle people in this process, as the free sharing of ideas is what helps drive innovation after all.

Given that some of the people in the room were the same people who have in the past banned council officers from blogging about their work at the authority, it has to be hoped that a culture shift has taken place since, as getting real staff involved in ideas for the site would be a real benefit. Apparently some staff are, or at least were as far as I know from a couple of months ago, restricted from accessing the council’s own consultation site http://askbristol.wordpress.com, the sort of thing that will have to change if a true crowd sourcing process or free exchange of ideas is to take place across the authority on this.

One thing that also come up though was the notion of whether the council actually needs a website at all? Sure, it needs a channel for paying council tax, parking fines and providing core bits of info, like when the bins are collected and so on. But beyond that, Bristol is a city of bloggers and micro journalists. How about the people of Bristol provide the content in lots of areas, and the council just facilitates the finding of it? The council has an events listings page, how about the content for it is automatically put into it from Bristol sites that already list events through using RSS feeds, rather than it just being something the council can post to?

Similarly, many years ago I bought some domain names that were pertinent to a site that would aggregate all of the content from blogs in Bristol in realtime, along the lines of www.libdemblogs.org.uk. The idea was to aggregate content from across the city, and provide basic info on blogging to get more people out there blogging about their local area. The council’s welcome to have these domain names if it fancies helping facilitate the use and aggregation of blogs in Bristol, and encouraging more people to get active in talking online. A quick win no doubt.

Similarly, we want to add twitter integration into our consultation finder system we built for the council, to open consultations out to that communication channel too. Another quick win for a small amount of work.

So, there are some thoughts on what the council’s going, where it should go, and two quick wins it could do right now. It was a great meeting though, really looking forward to getting involved in more of the debate!