That was the local government week that was

Goodbye to a mild January, hello to a wintry February!  While local government has been working to cope with the snow, other work has not sat still.  Here’s our round-up of some of our favourite blog posts of the week.  If you’ve got others you think we’ve missed, tweet us @welovelocalgov or share it in the comments below.

Coming hot on the heels of our own post looking at local government websites comes this thought provoking post from Ben Welby, in which he talks about the possible implications of the recently launched gov.uk website.  We are cautiously excited about the possible options ahead of us, and Mr Welby puts this across across perfectly.

And it’s all happening in the open. Since before the launch of AlphaGov there has been a steady flow of information covering the wider strategy for how the Government Digital Service imagines the future to look. The code is open source and therefore freely available, fixes are being contributed by the public and the beta is changing on a dailybasis. They’re up front about what’s not there (yet) but they’re equally clear that gaps will be plugged as and when they get there.

If ever you were to believe hype, I’d say this would be the moment.

Some of the WLLG crew have got in trouble in the past for constantly asking ‘why not’ rather than ‘why’ when an idea for a new project comes up; depending on the situation, either question bears asking.  However, the ever inspiring @helreynolds of Monmouthshire fame has popped something on the always interesting comms2point0 blog post asking a different question altogether; ‘what if…’

Is content king?

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Jeremy Hunt sat in a packed room in the House of Commons and spoke with the expectant crowd about his plans to both open up broadband access to more of the public as well as to enable the roll out of ultra high speed broadband for a small number of towns. He also sat through a rather cheeky and lengthy pitch for Gateshead’s city status bid, but perhaps that’s a mini-rant for another day.

These plans for enabling more people than ever to get online are very welcome, especially with the ever growing importance of channel shift (moving people from face-to-face contact to phones, and from phones to online in order to save money). Smartphones are becoming ever more prevalent, and decent Internet connection will help make these channel ambitions a reality. We’ve previously discussed that this isn’t for everyone, but the direction of travel for the masses appears to be clear.

So far, so good. We are helping people to get online and encouraging them to do so; what could go wrong?

Have you seen your average council website?

If its anything like the random sample we looked at then it doesn’t matter how fast your web access is or how much you are pushed towards it, you are not going to go back any time soon.