Infographic: Australian government agencies and councils have now sent 2 million tweets and have 3.9 million followers

I've been tracking the active Twitter accounts of Australian government agencies and councils for over four years now.

In February 2013 I reported that the number of tweets by government agencies and councils had reached one million in January of that year, and eleven months laters in November 2013 I reported that the number of tweets had exceeded 1.5 million.

At the time I predicted that it would take a shorter time to reach two million tweets from 1.5 million than the eleven months it took to reach 1.5 million from one million. I then predicted that the two million tweets level would be reached around 2014.

I was half right. It was faster to reach two million tweets - taking only ten months - however by my count it wasn't reached until this month, September 2014.

Given I'm sure I've missed a few active accounts, and I excluded deleted and decommissioned ones, I'm comfortable with a two month margin of error.

Many of the numbers numbers have more than doubled since January 2013. Agencies are tweeting three times as frequently and the total number of followers has increased 2.22 times.

To celebrate the occasion, I've created an infographic of the key numbers (below), as I did at the one million milestone (compare it with the one million tweet infographic, which is here).

You can view my raw figures and analysis in my Google spreadsheet and I'll provide more information and analysis in coming weeks.

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Do government agencies and councils deliberately make it harder for citizens to engage?

I've been watching a great TEDx talk by Dave Meslin on citizen engagement, which asks the question - if governments want to be open and engaging, why do they make it so hard for citizens to engage?

He raises a very good point, and demonstrates it very clearly in the video (below).



This is one of the areas I've struggled with for years.

Some of the processes governments and councils put in place around citizen engagement are designed to address political considerations, such as minimising the advertising spend (so government is not seen to promote itself too much), or address agency resourcing or timing limits, such as having extremely short engagement processes or 'hiding' consultations deep in a website so they receive only a few responses to analyse.

There's also cases where the people managing the consultation don't really understand the audience they are consulting. They may use specialist terminology, language or documents so long and complex they are impenetrable to the average Australian (who has an 8th grade reading level - that of a 14-15 year old), let alone the 46% of Australians who were considered functionally illiterate just a few years ago.

As an example, I recall an Australian council development proposal just a few years ago that was 385 pages long, provided via a sub-page in their website (with a limited number of printed copies) where people were expected to provide feedback within two weeks, responding via email.

Most Australians couldn't finish a 385 page novel in two weeks (given the amount of time per day they'd have available to read), let alone a complex planning document - even if they could find it in the council's website in time.

Response methods are equally an issue.

Holding a community forum or town hall meeting is still a popular way of consulting, and suits people who have the time and the interest to dedicate several hours to travel to and attend such an event in order to speak for a few minutes for or against a proposal. However many are increasingly dominated by retirees, the unemployed or students - who have the time to attend.

Professionals, people with young families, shift workers and tradies often don't have the time available when councils and agencies wish to hold these events.

Email-based online consultation, which is still the predominant way Australian governments ask for feedback via the internet, is dangerous in a number of ways. Emails may be blocked due to large document attachments or misclassified as spam and lost (as has happened on several occasions in the last few years - almost costing Ministers their jobs).

The generic form of responses received through emails may not suit the complexity of the consultation process. An email response to, for example, that 385 page document, may be very difficult to match against the key topics and themes, requiring a lot of time for a council or agency to analyse.

Then there's the cost and complexity of publishing responses. One of my pet hates while working in government online communications was the policy area who came to us and said, "we've just held a consultation and received 500 email responses - could you publish them in the website within two days please."

The resourcing required to publish email responses - even without considering the accessibility and privacy considerations - was immense, and was never budgeted for by the policy area.


These issues reflect on what I feel is the key issue with citizen engagement - not the common view that citizens are disengaged, but the challenge to governments to adapt their engagement approaches to provide the right environment and information for citizens to get involved and respond.

While governments tout their openness and transparency, how they are adopting a 'citizen-centric' focus and employing techniques like crowdsourcing and co-design to involve communities in decision-making, are they making the necessary changes in their own processes, approaches and people to ensure that citizen engagement is actually inclusion and effective?

In my view there's a long way to go - in Australia and in similar nations around the world - to retrain public servants, politicians and even the media, to put citizens at the centre of engagement.

It's not simply about engaging more or using online. It is about rewriting community engagement guidelines, redeveloping consultation procedures and revisiting political concerns to ensure that citizen engagement is indeed about engaging citizens, and not simply about ticking a procedural box in a government process.

For citizens to be central in engagement, perhaps governments and councils should be approaching citizens to involve them in codesigning their engagement processes.

Perhaps groups of citizens should be commissioned (at a small fee for their time) oversee or audit agency and council engagements, to provide advise and suggestions on how specific processes could be improved, or consultation materials adjusted to suit the audience being targeted.

Perhaps governments should even crowdsource the development of major consultation processes. Before asking citizens 'do you want....' they should ask 'how should we engage you on do you want....' for each major engagement.

Whatever the approaches taken, one thing is clear. If governments and councils want citizens to feel more engaged, they need to start by changing the way they engage.

Repeatedly using the same approaches to citizen engagement as have been used in the past is unlikely to deliver improved outcomes.

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Where are Australia's tweeting councils and do they have enough followers

I've mapped the 222 local government Twitter accounts I track to their geographic locations around Australia (excluding NT), and it forms an interesting picture.

UPDATE: I've updated the map data to include NT data, thanks to the help of @Maxious, who found an ABS dataset which includes them.

Local government use of Twitter in Australia by tweets - zoom for detail
There was a direct correlation between population density and the propensity of councils to tweet. This was intriguing, but not surprising.

While Twitter is most useful as a real-time news and interaction service, and therefore has enormous value in sharing information across geographically large regional councils, a combination of limited internet infrastructure and experience using services like Twitter tends to create a digital divide between rural and metro councils. As a result, many of the local governments that could most benefit from Twitter's capabilities are the least likely to use it.

One of the most critical factors on Twitter is the number of followers an account has. This is because the more followers, the greater the impact of your tweets. This becomes particularly important when distributing information on disasters, consultations or even for customer service purposes, where more people can view and act on answers to questions.

In analysing how local governments have done in building their Twitter followings, the results were quite dim. Only the six largest council accounts, all from major city councils, had more than 7,000 followers, while the average number of followers for all local government accounts was only 1,043 - compared to 2,556 for Federal and 2,459 for state and territory government Twitter accounts.


The average number of followers by state varied quite significantly, with Queensland councils tending to have the most followers (2,073 on average), followed by Victoria (a long way back at 1,196) and NSW (on 873) . Tasmania and the Northern Territory did worst, with councils in those jurisdictions having an average of 448 and 239 followers respectively.


The data also suggested only a weak correlation between how active a council was on Twitter and the number of followers they had. As pictured in the chart below, the councils that tweet most frequently are not necessarily those with the most followers and there was only a slight correlation for councils with a higher than average (1,000) followers.

Note I used a logarithmic scale for Followers in all of the following charts to emphasise the spread.

Looking at account age, there was some indication that the longer a council had operated its Twitter account, the more likely it was to have accumulated more followers, however the chart for this (below) didn't really strike me as that impressive. Many older accounts still languished below average (1,000 followers) and local councils who had more than the average number of followers were only marginally older than the average account.

A slightly stronger correlation was with the number of accounts a local council followed. Councils with more than 1,000 (average) followers were significantly more likely to follow more accounts, however it was unclear if this was a cause of their level of followers or the effect of them following people back.


To provide a comparison on this last chart, below I've looked at Twitter accounts operated by state and Commonwealth agencies on the same axes. In this case it looks as though councils have done better than other levels of government in achieving a good divident of followers by following people.


So to sum up, it looks as though neither the length of time a council operates an account, the level of active tweeting or the number of people followed adequately, or together come close to explaining why some local councils do better at gaining Twitter followers than other.

So let's consider the two elephants in the room - council resident population and connectivity. Councils with small population bases will struggle to build their numbers significantly unless their content is either tourism-based or extremely entertaining. Equally councils with poor internet infrastructure are likely to have fewer people using social media and hence less Twitter users to follow the council.

Unfortunately I don't have detailed information on the population in every council region (though I am putting this together at the moment), nor do I have a map of internet connectivity speeds across Australia.

However I have reviewed a sample of councils in WA, NSW and Victoria, and from my understanding of this data (not yet sufficiently processed for publishing) population has a significant impact on Twitter follower numbers for councils and connectivity probably does as well.


So what should councils do to increase their follower count and improve the effectiveness of their Twitter engagement?

The first and most basic steps are to ensure the council has the right Twitter accounts in place and there's staff able to, and responsible for, managing them. They should also follow an active (and entertaining) tweeting program and follow people, to build awareness - these steps do appear to increase following, at least modestly.

Alongside these steps, local governments should take actions to inform their residents about their Twitter account and its benefits. This can be done via their other material (bills, pamphlets, websites, business cards, etc), and also provide classes and training on how to use the service - both for residents and their own staff.

Finally, while councils are unable to change their population numbers significantly in a short time, they are often able to take steps to improve internet connectivity and usage in their region. This can involve lobbying the NBN to provide or accelerate services, or installing their own networks to provide a solution where commercial providers cannot financially justify wiring a town.

This last approach has been taken in the US and, to a lessor extent in the UK, and I am aware of a few old examples in Australia. I think this is still a valid approach in Australia, particularly for councils receiving limited NBN wiring, and one that needs to be considered for the economic as well as the communications benefits.


Notes and caveats
All Twitter usage data was current at 25 January 2013.

The map has been updated to use ABS derived local government boundaries.
I may not be monitoring all government accounts in Australia. New ones are created regularly and while I update my list on a regular basis it is unlikely to include all goverment accounts at all times. However I am confident it contains the vast majority of accounts and is statistically accurate.

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How nine year olds can now reform governments, one bite at a time

With the tools available today, influence over government policy is no longer the preserve of the wealthy, the well-connected or those people with a significant TV, radio or newspaper presence.

While traditional media and interests still have significant influence, social media has allowed individuals to become far more influential.

Blogs, forums and social networks give individuals and small groups the ability to have a national or global public platform, at little or no cost, that can be used to tell their stories and present different views or facts.

This is both challenging and an opportunity for governments. Governments, including politicians and officials, that seek to ignore, marginalise or otherwise discredit individuals for standing up for their beliefs or reporting facts are much more likely to be publicly exposed, their reputations damaged and any hypocrisy cast into the public eye.

Governments that embrace the opportunity to bring more people inside the tent, balance well-connected interests with individual views and question whether traditional lobby and representative groups actually represent the groups they claim to represent, are likely to find their work more complex but ultimately more effective, with better policy and more relevant service delivery outcome.

A great example of the influence of individuals due to social media (bolstered by traditional media once the groundswell grew) has occurred over the last week.

NeverSeconds
Some of you may be aware of the NeverSeconds blog, and the struggles its 9-year author has had with the Scottish council, which banned her taking photos of her school lunches until convinced otherwise by online public opinion, celebrities and the Scottish Education Minister.

However if you're not, here's the story in a nutshell (referencing Wired's story NeverSeconds shuts down).

In April this year nine-year-old Martha Payne in Scotland, with some technical help from her father, started a blog as a writing exercise to document what she ate each day for lunch in her school, Lochgilphead Primary.

Martha's lunch on 18 June

Before starting the blog, she and her father (who is a local farmer), encouraged by her mother (a GP), surfed foodie blogs for inspiration. Martha decided as a result that she wanted to photo each of her lunches and provide a report including how much she liked the food, the number of bites each meal took to eat, the health rating (from a nine-year old's perspective), the price and the number of hairs in the food.

The blog was approved by the school and was written entirely by Martha under supervision from her father.

Over the first two months of the blog's life, Martha attracted a huge audience from around the world, with more than a million views of her posts.

Her blog started driving good outcomes. Her local council 'remembered' to tell the school that students were entitiled to unlimited salad, fruit and bread, she and her father were invited to participate in a workshop on school lunches, other students from around the world began sending her photos of their lunches (which she posted in her blog too). A newspaper sent her some money for use of her photos, which she donated to a charity (more on this later).

The media caught wind of her blog and began writing articles about it, including Time, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. She was interviewed on the BBC and also attracted the attention of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who has crusaded on the topic of healthy school lunches in Britain.

This, however, is where bureaucracy stepped in.

Martha's lunch on 30 May

An article in a newspaper used a throw-away headline, "Time to fire the dinner ladies", while discussing Martha's involvement in a thinktank on health school meals.

The local Council, Argyll and Bute Council decided that this criticism was too much, and claimed media coverage of the blog had led catering staff to fear for their jobs.

They promptly decreed on 14 June that students would no longer be allowed to take cameras into their school canteen.

Martha was accordingly called out of maths class and told that she could no longer photo her lunches.

By this time Martha had had 2 million views of her blog and had raised £2000 for charity, including £50 from the newspaper mentioned earlier.

However, as an obedient nine-year old, Martha wrote a goodbye post on her blog.

At this point her readers became activated, and the media coverage exponentially increased. She received 2,370 comments on her goodbye post and over 200 articles were posted in newspapers, plus radio and TV stories around the world. She received celebrity support from Jamie Oliver and Neil Gaiman.

Twelve hours later, the Argyll and Bute Council published an official statement (now removed from their site, but still visible online thanks to @peterwalker99 at http://www.twitlonger.com/show/hrom1r).

This statement, in part, accused Martha of misrepresenting what was on offer in the canteen,

 "The Council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils"

Martha's lunch on 16 May

It went on to state the Council's dedication to good food standards in school canteens, said they'd not received formal complaints about the food in the last two years other than from Martha's family, and that the blog had, and would have, no influence on what they served students anyway. (It is interesting to compare the quality of the statement's writing with the quality of Martha's writing.)

Around this time the charity Martha was supporting, Mary's Meals, reported that they'd now received over £40,000 in donations from her blog - more than enough to build a new kitchen at Lirangwe Primary School in Blantyre, Malawi, to feed its 1,963 students. The kitchen is to be named 'Friends of NeverSeconds'.

Three hours after the Argyll and Bute Council published its statement, the council's leader, Roddy McCuish, told the BBC that he was rescinding the ban on photos in school canteens, and the council issued a statement commending Martha's blog and indicating that the council would be involving students in their efforts to keep improving school meals,

We need to find a united way forward so I am going to bring together our catering staff, the pupils, councillors and council officials - to ensure that the council continues to provide  healthy, nutrious and attractive school meals.  That "School Meals Summit" will take place later this summer.

 I will also meet Martha and her father as soon as I can, along with our lead councillor on Education, Michael Breslin to seek her continued engagement, along with lots of other pupils, in helping the council to get this issue right.   By so doing Martha Payne and her friends  will have had a strong and lasting influence not just on school meals, but on the whole of Argyll & Bute.

Martha has resumed her blogging, and has now raised over £87,000 for the Mary's Meal charity - see her total, and give to the charity here.

Meanwhile the issue of healthy school lunches is being more widely discussed and debated, and the council has learnt it needs to more closely consider the views of its constituents and the children it serves. Shutting down debate is no longer an option for successful governance.

And the children of Lirangwe Primary School in Malawi are extremely happy, with the short video below a fitting tribute to the impact individuals can now have on governments - one bite at a time.

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Participate in Melbourne Knowledge Week 2012

The City of Melbourne was recognised in 2012 as ‘Most Admired Knowledge City’ in an award from the World Capital Institute and Teleos, an independent management research firm.

The city is building on this with the annual Melbourne Knowledge Week, designed to engage both the knowledge community and the wider public in a range of events and opportunities that help promote Melbourne's identity as global knowledge city.

I reckon there has to be a place for Gov 2.0 in this mix and wanted to flag to all my Victorian readers that an expression of interest is now open to businesses, organisations, educational institutions, networking groups, community groups and individuals who wish to showcase knowledge-related projects, thinkers and capabilities as part of this year's event.

Melbourne Knowledge Week runs from 26 November to 1 December. More details on the event, and the expression of interest, are at http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/enterprisemelbourne/events/KnowledgeWeek/Pages/KnowledgeWeek.aspx

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Presentation from Friday's Seamless conference

Last Friday I presented on a personal basis at the Seamless CMS Government Conference in Melbourne to a collection of Councils from around Australia and New Zealand about the state of Government 2.0 in Australia.

I've included my presentation below.

It was an interesting conference. Councils are struggling with the same issues regarding Government 2.0 as their larger cousins at state and federal level, limited resources, management buy-in and mitigating the risks of engaging online.

As the 'front-line' of government, service-focused but smaller and often very agile, local councils have some unique advantages in the practical implementation of Government 2.0. In many cases their smaller constituencies can allow for deeper engagement simply as there are less relationships to maintain at any one time.

However they may suffer as well, having insufficient constituent mass on some issues to maintain an effective conversation and their individual lack of resourcing can make it difficult to add new capability.

One topic I spoke about was how councils can work together to leverage their resources. As they generally don't compete (except over attracting population or tourists) and perform almost identical functions - garbage, roads, community services - they have many opportunities to co-design solutions across council boundaries.

I also suggested that as the first government mash-up competition was run by a local council, the District of Columbia, they have a similar capacity to run events which attract best practice ideas and solutions from around the world - not simply their own constituents.

Over time I'm expecting significant Government 2.0 innovation to come out of councils - as we've already seen from places such as Mosman Council.

Also speaking at the conference was Ben Peacock, a founder of Republic of Everyone. He laid down five guidelines for social media that I felt were worth repeating:

1. Involve people,
2. Show respect,
3. Share the wisdom,
4. Don't be boring,
5. Be prepared to lose control

View more presentations from Craig Thomler

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100 Ideas to Help Engage your Community Online - the book and the wiki

Bang the Table has released a fantastic little handbook for online community engagement.

Titled 100 Ideas to Help Engage your Community Online the book provides 10 ideas in each of 10 topics.

The book has been released under Creative Commons (BY) - allowing organisations to reuse, share and mash it up for their own needs - provided they attribute the creators.

To help this along, and in recognition that online community engagement is a living topic, I have converted the book into a wiki, allowing anyone to add their own topics and ideas.

I hope this proves useful, and becomes a living resource for online community managers across governments and the private sector.

View the wiki at: http://engageonlineideas.pbworks.com

Or download the original book from: 100 Ideas to Help Engage your Community Online

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ACT launches Fix My Street - but not like the UK Gov 2.0 service

The ACT has launched a Fix My Street service providing ACT residents with methods for reporting and tracking "municipal service requests" online.

According to the site, ACT residents can submit service requests using a menu of topics and even create an account to track the progress of their own requests.

While a major step forward, unlike the popular UK service of the same name, the ACT's version of Fix My Street may only be used by ACT residents rather than by local governments across the country.

The ACT version also does not include photos, allow residents to view the service requests submitted by others or provide details on the number of service requests received or addressed.

A service similar to the UK's site was developed during one of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce's mash-up events last year, named It's Buggered, Mate.

The OpenAustralia Foundation is also working towards introducing a version of the UK's Fix My Street in Australia.

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The street as a platform, what's government's role?

An extremely thought-provoking post about The street as platform written by Dan Hill in February 2008 has been brought to my attention by Darren Sharp.

The post explores the virtual life of a city street, all the digital data exchanging hands between systems, infrastructure, vehicles and people in the street unseen to human eyes.

While condensed into a single street, the post is based entirely on current technologies and practices. It could easily represent a real street in any major city anywhere in the world today.

The question for me is what is government's role in building the infrastructure, managing and effectively using the data collected?

Streets are generally infrastructure created and maintained by governments and the systems that 'power' a street are often installed and managed by public concerns (roads and pavements, water, sewage, electricity and telecommunications) or at least guided by government planning processes (the nature of the dwellings and commercial services provided on the street). So there's clearly a significant role for government in the virtual aspects of streets as well.

There has been some work done internationally on what precisely is the role of government (some articles and publications listed at the Victorian Government's eGovernment Resource Centre, but have we done enough here in Australia?

Given we have a national broadband network planned, and are already in the process of preparing for pilot roll outs, ensuring that this enables, rather than limits the vision of our digital streets in a managed and well-thought out manner is clearly moving its way up the priority list.

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Sharing your photo library

Has your organisation ever considered sharing your photo library with other government organisations? With the costs of conducting new photo shoots, why not share your images with other organisations who might use them - and encourage them to share their images with you.

Some agencies may even wish the public to reuse their images.

Some departments councils and museums are already doing this via services such as the the National Library of Australia's Picture Australia site.

If your department has a library service, keeps a register of particular images of historic or national significance, or simply wishes to promote the reuse of specific images, this might be a way to encourage takeup.

Frankly it could be even more beneficial to have a cross-government photo and even video sharing library internally. With appropriate consents and licensing it would allow government to save significant funds by supporting reuse of images and snippets of visual media across departments and levels of government.

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At least 70 agencies on Twitter across all layers of Australian government

Being sick in bed at the moment, I've used the opportunity to review which Australian Federal, State and local government departments and agencies are now using Twitter.

My count is 9 federal, 24 state and 37 local government agency streams - excluding politicians and public servants. A total of 70 government streams in Australia, which I take as indicating it's moving from early adopters into early majority.

There's also at least 4 Premiers and the PM using Twitter - which is more than 50% of our most senior elected officials. In terms of population, this includes the three most populous states.

It's a shame there is no official online tool tracking these streams so at least government could understand the extent of its own tweeting.

This tool could pull data via Twitter's API to give a total number of tweets and followers by Australian governments - able to be viewed by state as well as in aggregate. That'd be a useful project for someone with technical nouse and some spare hours.

In lieu of that, I've updated the Government 2.0 Best Practice wiki with all of these streams on the Australian Tweeple page.

If you know of, or operate, any Twitter streams that I've missed, please add them to the wiki.

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How Web 2.0 will transform local councils

Given that a case study on Mosman council is being included in today's Web 2.0 in Government seminar being run by AGIMO, I thought it was worth referring people to this article in Govtech by Bill Shrier, the CTO of Seattle.

The article, per its title, discusses How Web 2.0 will transform local councils.

Rightly or wrongly, Bill draws a strong connection between the core goal of local government and the intent of Web 2.0 technologies,

Government is, by its very nature, all about community. Government is a group of people - citizens or constituents - doing together what they can't do as individuals or otherwise obtain from private business. I believe most of us wouldn't want individuals or private businesses to manage street networks, maintain parks or operate police and fire departments. In the end, government is community.

Therefore, Web 2.0 - community building tools - seems tailor-made for government, at least theoretically.

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Teaching public servants to blog

The British government is funding a campaign, CivicSurf to teach British local politicians how to blog.

It would also be useful to public servants in understanding and communicating the benefits of blogging (as well as how to become bloggers themselves).

Thanks to Stap isi for referring me to the site.

The campaign includes the website, a booklet (PDF) and a video viewable in two parts as below.

Part 1


Part 2

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588 nominations received in the UK e-Government National Awards 2008

Considering the 30-40 nominations received in Australia's annual egovernment awards, it's staggering to consider than in the UK there were over 588 initiatives to be nominated in 2008.

Judging is underway and finalists in 11 categories will be published on 7 November.

If you're seeking a source of inspiration regarding egovernment initiatives, the e-Government National Awards 2008 finalists will be certainly worth reviewing.

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Why do some local councils in the UK have better websites than some Commonwealth agencies in Australia?

The question in my title is of course a little provocative - who is to say whether a website is better or worse?

The answer, in my view, is our users.

For some reason in Australian we have never, to my knowledge, asked our citizens to compare government websites against universal categories such as awareness, ease of task completion, information depth and quality, findability, usability or design aesthetics.

There are few objective standards or comparison processes in use in government - although Global Reviews has a good stab at rating local council sites. Having worked with them before, their methodology is robust and well developed.

Users aside, I do feel safe in saying that the UK is far ahead of Australia in the field of egovernment. While some Australian Commonwealth agencies are still struggling to introduce Web content management systems some UK local councils are now adding advanced Web 2.0 features as below (and it's not the only example, just currently the best one).


Redbridge-i
Redbridge Borough's website is a leading example of user customisable government websites in the UK and is recognised as a world leader.

As a London Borough with roughly 250,000 constituents, Redbridge's site was developed on the basis that the public own the local administration and should have the ability to comment on services and engage on an ongoing basis with the council.

It drew from best practice private sector websites, incorporating features from sites such as Amazon, Google, eBay and Facebook.

Part of the design philosophy was to allow the public to decide what was most important to them. Therefore, except for a fixed space in the upper right, the website's homepage can be reorganised as desired by individual citizens, with sections able to be dragged and dropped to other locations on the page and content hidden or show.

The site can also be customised by postcode to show the services most relevant to individual households.

Another decision was to continuously innovate, develop and release new features and let citizens decide how valuable they are. This taps into actual citizen behaviour, rather than anticipated behaviour and provides a uage-based measure of what the website's users will use than do focus groups and wishlists.

One particularly successful feature of the site are the forums supporting community consultation. Councillors are active at responding and use the forums to identify comment trends and useful stakeholders to inform council decision-making processes.

The site also has a growing transactional function and has demonstrated cost saving by transferring business from phone and face-to-face channels.

The site was developed in-house over a nine month period by a team of up to 6 people, with up to 500 staff consulted about the development, and released in 2007.

The best way to learn to learn the site is to play with it. It really is easy to use and effective at task completion.

More information about the site is available from the Innovation in local government services awards page.

A very good 5 minute video about the Redbridge-i website is available at Localgov.tv.

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Do people want the same things from council, state and federal government websites?

The UK recently held its annual seminar on How to build the perfect council website.

This discussed strategic approaches to egovernment at a local level and provided key insights into what local residents needed and expected from their councils and shires.

Carl Haggerty of Devon County Council, one of the presenters, has provided a synopsis of his observations and thoughts from the event in a post titled Thoughts on a “perfect council website”.

Reading his post, I do not see enormous differences between what it appears people want from local councils and what they want from state and Federal agencies;

• Get rid of those damn press releases (who the heck reads them).
• Stop the political messages (Our Leader).
• Nobody cares for this stuff, they are task focused and don’t have much time.
• We already take their money and if we take even more of there time we will only create more frustrated citizens and visitors.
• Delete most of your content as nobody reads or even maintains the stuff.
• 80% of web management is observing behaviour.
• Do the tasks your customers do and experience the “journey” yourself.
• Personalisation doesn’t work, most people don’t want to do it - interesting considering i was on the panel about web 2.0 techniques with “Steve Johnson” from Redbridge and “Suraj Kiki” founder of Jadu CMS, more on this later)
• Start with your top tasks and get them on your homepage to stop people having to search for them.
• Don’t force “corporate” crap at your customers, they don’t really care

Presentations from the 2007 seminar are available online and I am hopeful that the 2008 presentations will be as well soon.

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