honestlyreal

Icon

A little local difficulty

Summary–this post describes:

  • why there are some particular challenges to overcome in making online local government services findable and usable
  • what Local Directgov is and where it came from, and
  • …and wonders where all this might go next.

 

I spotted a question within the LocalGovCamp tweets at the weekend:

Who are local directgov & what do they do does anyone know?

There’s a pretty dry and factual explanation quickly visible at the top of a Google search: here. It talks about an “application”, and uses a lot of localgov-type words.

Hopefully I can put a little more colour around the story in this piece, and illustrate the complex and interesting nature of the problem that Local Directgov was invented to try and solve.

Let’s set a bit of background texture first:

In any type of public service delivery, there’s a tension between “just getting it done” and “seeing who’s getting it done for you”. (There are other tensions, but for brevity, this is the one that is most relevant in this discussion.)

“Just getting it done” involves helping a user to accomplish a task as quickly and painlessly as possible, ideally using low-cost channels (such as the Internet), and steering away from the need to make phone calls and visits to check on how the task is getting on (sometimes known as “avoidable contact”).

“Seeing who’s getting it done for you” might seem a lesser priority: something that’s only going to get in the way of JGID, but there are some good reasons why it needs to be considered, no matter how much your customer might prefer to cut to the chase at their actual point of need. (There’s also the fair point that–taken too far–having your local authority keep telling you about the hard work they’re doing on your behalf looks like the most awful, wasteful showboating.)

In the private sector, knowing who you’re dealing with builds brand trust and loyalty. Assuming the services go well, that is–there’s a whole separate discussion to be had about “hiding” who’s really behind the crapper ones. But that’s for another post.

In the public sector, there is the small matter of local democracy to contend with. If your local services are rubbish, then by rights you should be able to express your discontentment, or otherwise, with your elected representatives on a regular basis. They are there to make choices that may be able to make a difference. (What happens if they really can’t make a difference, because of centrally-imposed funding cuts, for example, lies beyond the scope of this post. But again, there are interesting nuances about visibility that lie therein.)

So the argument goes: if you “mask” who’s providing the services–even though you may actually make the citizen’s task experience much more standardised and straightforward–you’re harming local democracy. Imagine a “national missed bin collection reporting site”, perhaps surfaced through a central website like Directgov. Just one place to get the task done, with someone else mopping up all the interfacing to the various local authorities behind the scenes. What’s not to like? (Apart from the uncertainties of who pays for all that mopping, of course…)

Well, a passionate advocate for local democracy might well stand up and say: “What about localism? Where’s the connection between that citizen and their own local services and decisions? A little crest in the corner of an otherwise nationally-uniform [orange] website doesn’t really cut it!”

Maybe they’d be right. The householder with the festering bins may not give a hoot in the short-term, but have they lost an important connection to local policy-setting? Even, in the extreme, to their right to have festering bins (and a cheap refuse collection contract) so that they can pay for better adult social care? Their choice.

And the other killer argument away from nationally-aggregated super-sites of local government services (all your environmental health inspection information and contacts in one place!) is that they are expensive and take forever to agree even simple standards. And basically, just don’t work.

And yet, and yet, people want to search by the problem they want fixing, not the authority they think/know/guess will be able to help them. A problem that Alphagov has put front and centre with its focus on information served up–wherever possible–around where the user is.

So, to the issue of Local Directgov. (Thank you for your patience.)

Having taken an information architecture decision that bundling local stuff all together in one place and style is most likely going to be a waste of time, and possibly counter to a fundamental principle of local democracy, we also note that almost all local authority services already have a web page somewhere, for good or for bad.

So the challenge then becomes: how can we get someone who searches, centrally (could be Google, could be Directgov, could be anywhere…) to the best online page to meet their needs?

We’re not going to try and re-present the local authority content, or dress it up with nice orange borders. We’re just going to link to it.

And to link to it, we need to be able to reference it.

Fortunately, a nice piece of work was done a few years ago to classify all local authority services using a standard referencing system (the Local Government Service List). “859” stands for “request a collection of clinical waste”, “59” for “apply for a discount on council tax”–you can find the whole list here [opens an Excel file].

And the other reference is of course, place: which local authority is responsible for the question you are asking? And that just needs information on local authority boundaries, ideally behind a front-end which can cope with a few variants on the way people describe “place” (town, postcode, local authority name, etc.)

So the building blocks are all there for a simple database that takes three pieces of input data: Place, Service, and the type of Interaction with the Service (get information, pay, etc.), and returns a web page. It’s a little bit more complicated than that; some parts of the country have two-tier councils, responsible for different services, and the database has to cope with that. But it does.

This is Local Directgov. I’d describe it as a database service, rather than application, but that’s just my opinion.

It takes some maintaining, of course. Those pecularities of boundary and service provider have to be taken care of. Links will change over time. They should also improve over time, as a basic “we don’t have a page for this, so here’s their homepage” response matures into “here’s the service page” and even to “here’s the task page”. There are some tools to allow councils to manage their own links, but it still has a small team to keep it running smoothly, run out of DCLG.

So that’s the paradigm: getting people who look centrally, to a page provided locally. Simples.

If I have a criticism, it’s that its use has been very much pointed at councils, rather than developers. Perhaps it’s not surprising that it hasn’t been better used? I see this is changing, with some forthcoming developer engagement and hack days, which is a Good Thing.

It has an API (though it sometimes seems like it’s trying to hide the fact). At the time (and this is going back around three years now) when we were starting to cotton on to the fact that government should be opening up APIs to its data so that more use could be made of them, why wasn’t this one blazoned out there as an early example that actually existed (and worked)? Properly documented, and made as usable as possible.

The Local Directgov team describe it as:

Links in the The Local Directgov application is constructed based on a set of parameters taken from these lists. Each service is matched against its Local Government Service List number, for example ’57’ for Council Tax, and its Local Government Interaction List number, for example ‘2’ for paying for something: http://local.direct.gov.uk/LDGRedirect/index.jsp?LGSL=57&LGIL=2.

…I’m thinking more could probably be done to tell its story.

So, it’s a value-adding data-rich service. It is the data that the Directgov family collects and holds from local authorities. A table of links. That’s all. And it is freely available, via that API, ensuring an up-to-date and usable service is maintained. I think it’s an unsung success story.

Years ago, people like the team at Hampshire County Council were innovating using it to identify services around their boundaries provided by other authorities, and ensuring people could get as smooth a journey, via the best links, to what they needed.

Will it be the way forward under Alphagov? Is there a better way of connecting a central request to a local page? Will we tilt back into trying to produce more service aggregations “in one place” for local services? Perhaps there’s a completely different approach that will crack this issue of findability with the need to preserve local visibility that we just haven’t tried yet?

What do you think?