I think you are write that a council could provide someone with enough interest to be their home page, but increasingly the first port of call is becoming ultra sociable sites, so the council would have to tolerate a very broad range of stuff happening on it’s place or perhaps accept that it is simple a feed reader branded with some links to services.

The interesting cultural challenge comes from citizens who get and do stuff because the council isn’t doing it well enough or the way they like it to be done. Mysociety has done this often and the healthiest response is not to say we want one of those but to encourage their citizens to use the sites that work. Another example is http://bigcitytalk.org.uk/ which are a group of people trying to help the council have a richer conversation around a consultation.

Institutions wince at efforts like these – words like “anarchy” get bandied around – or people ask “who gave them permission”. It’s a control culture which will take some eroding.

Both of you are right to say that the secret is go and join the conversation where people are making ti happen.

Thank you for your comment. It is good to see LAs such as Bracknell investigating different ways to engage with their citizens and customers.

You quite rightly pointed out that a Council website has limited attraction to the general public, and even then only for a dedicated purpose that dose not happen daily – i.e. planning application, report a problem etc..

My view is that councils need to look to other sites and ask what attracts surfers to visit those sites everyday and try to incorporate those elements into the council site. Why shouldn’t a council site be a surfer’s homepage..?

It today’s world of mash-ups, RSS feeds and open APIs there is no excuse to re-visit the look and feel of a council website, or even enabling it to be shared with other sites such as igoogle.

Thank you for your comment again and I will watch with interest the work of Bracknell.

Paul.

We are very much ‘newbies’ to social networking and will certainly make some mistakes along the way. But hopefully this will demonstrate that we are human and do understand the value of hearing what people think of our services and website. How can we improve if we don’t listen?

We are very keen to invite people and particularly local residents of Bracknell Forest to join our Focus Group to help us during the redevelopment of our website and beyond. http://bfcwebdev.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/website-focus-group/