Guardian: Digital technology for public services and communities could make bottom up more effective than top down

I just left this comment on an article on the Guardian site that seems to be very relevant to BCCDIY.

(I tweeted Charles and he asked me to mention BCCDIY in the comments – here goes…)

Following @pezholio, the DIY Birmingham City Council site (BCCDIY.com) came out a sense of frustration that quickly turned into a postitive attempt by a group of us in Birmingham to try an experiment. Could a team of volunteers build a website as good as, if not better than the original site in a short space of time?

“Better” is a difficult thing to judge on a site of the size of a city council. What are the main things that users want to do? What problems are we trying to solve? What could be the solutions and features we need to solve them?

Starting from that point of view we’ve built an open source system that’s a little like a ‘wiki’, based on ’scraped’ versions of the existing pages on the site, and combined with a variety of other tools – OpenlyLocal, Plings, Office of National Statistics, Flickr, etc.

What we want to do is to make it easier to do common tasks via the site, and then link to the council’s existing site for more complex, niche issues. Eg. Pay your council tax online is very hard on the existing site, and one click from the home page on ours. Find your local councillor is easier, as is viewing planning applications, and so on.

We’re really focussing on doing things that a council couldn’t achieve, but that users might want, particularly around a ‘near me’ function by postcode, which gives you lots of local council info that applies to you as well as bringing in relevant feeds from other non-council serices. Try “B5 5SL” on the home page, for instance (it’s a bit ugly so bear with it!).

You can view all the code and participate, which could mean that we have the beginnings of an open source ‘my council’ system that anyone can set up, offering similar services.

In response to your article’s title: “Digital technology for public services and communities could make bottom up more effective than top down” – I agree, and in fact there are tools we can use or build as an extension to council services if information is provided in an easily ‘mashable’ form, which might be a step from top-down/bottom-up to a more network-based thinking on the subject.

I’m hoping that Birmingham City Council are looking at this project as a kind of free-reign ‘what would people really want?’ user test and that it might in some way influence their next phase of development, in the same way that other councils are looking at BCCDIY and taking ideas for their own web builds.