Sarah Lay » Usability

Power to the People (reprise)

Sarah — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:35:42 +0000

I first blogged asking for people to share their experience of devolving authorship responsibility back in June. From the response I had then and since it seems that this is a thorny issue that many of us (as local government web people) are grappling with.

As a theory, creating content for an organisation’s website and sharing responsibility for its maintenance by devolving the authorship (allowing many to write and publish) is a pretty fine idea. However, for it to work well the authorship needs to be given to the right people otherwise you end up with no content, bad content, unhappy authors, an unhappy central team and a spiral of training-correcting-retraining which means the model may as well not be in place.

There are lots of reasons why this theory shouldn’t be written off merely because it is hard to implement and maintain. The main one is probably this: councils have hundreds of services they could or should publish information about online and the staff in those services are the ones with the knowledge about how they work. They are in a good position to know what information they are commonly asked for or what a citizen needs to know in order to access that service or carry out a transaction.

What they don’t have (in most cases) is the specialist knowledge and experience of presenting that information to meet a variety of online targets or the time / interest / empowerment to add online publishing as a task on top of their unrelated workload. This means a central team either ends up re-writing the content to make is meet accessibility, usability and house style; there is a long cycle of training where neither the trainer or the trainee end up happy; content gets stuck in a workflow because the central team aren’t happy to publish and the author can’t or won’t make changes. In other words the model stops being efficient and starts evolving into a beast.

Of course those issues could be dealt with by taking away any involvement by a central team. In essence this means deciding to no longer manage the content of your website and in the end this will lead to the citizen and the organisation losing out. The citizen may lose out due to poor or out of date information or no information at all and through a lack of consistency and therefore confidence in the brand. The organisation will find itself failing to work to optimum efficiency with duplicated information, some services not represented at all, reputation issues and (probably) breaches of accessibility guidelines.

So, what to do? We discussed this at length in the small session I ran at LocalGovCamp Lincoln. It was interesting to hear views from North Devon, Coventry City and East Lindsay councils on the models they had in place and how they were working. We all seemed to be struggling to get the right people into the author roles and therefore be able to balance efficiently with central editorial control.

I don’t think we came to any firm conclusions about how to tackle changing an existing model or how to engage stakeholders in the importance of this issue to the success of the website / online channel. What did come out of it, for me, was:

What works for one organisation probably won’t work for another. In fact, in big organisations what works for one department may not work for another.
In the same vein, I’ve come to the conclusion that what works for your external site in terms of authorship may not work for your intranet or smaller sites. Some of the success may depend on the workflow here and that should be considered as a vital ingredient in implementing a devolved authorship, not a separate decision.
I’m not aware of any way of trialing or testing to find out what is an appropriate author model for a department, organisation or site. If anyone knows of a way of analysing before implementing I would be really pleased to hear about it!
I’m also not aware of anyone who thinks they have successfully devolved authorship. If anyone would like to share an example of an organisation in which the model is working well from all view points I would also be happy to hear about this – especially if you want to share the secret of the success!
It is easy to get carried away talking about the newer channels of the digital stream but if we can’t produce the right content in the right way at the right time either through devolved or centralised authoring we won’t have anything worth publishing to the wider social web.

I’m still interested to hear others experience or view of devolved authorship so please join the discussion through the comments section. Thanks!

Do councils need websites?

Sarah — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:10:01 +0000

This was the question posed by Peter McClymont for his LocalGovCamp Lincoln session and the answer may not be as easy to come by as you think, even when presented to a room of council webbies.

In fact it isn’t even quite the question which needs answering. A more appropriate way of phrasing it, as quickly became apparent in the session, is Do Councils Need the Website They Have Right Now?

Councils have huge amounts of services and information which they need to get to residents. They also have tight budgets to meet, lots of requirements from central Government, limited resources but in most cases a big desire to do things right. Having a website helps to meet lots of these requirements with the limitations in place. Or they would, if they were done well.

Lots of people in this session felt that council websites had in lots of cases got a little bit out of control. A sometimes bloated beast hard to control with only the whip of a malfunctioning devolved authorship model. We agreed in the group that an online channel or mix of channels would meet the efficiency savings head on while fulfilling an increasing demand from residents to communicate in this space – if only we could get it working right.

So, councils need websites but how do we build and run the website a council needs?

We discussed a whole range of things but most of the sharing focused on:

Devolved authorship – a really nice theory but almost no-one has got it working right. I blogged about this separately as it was also the theme of the session I ran later in the day.
Respect for web teams – the need for organisations to recognise that online is a channel which needs to be run with the same respect as traditional channels, and that respect should also be given to those employed to be experts on how to do that.
Definition of boundaries – how much of what is online is within the remit of the web team to either run or advise on?

All three of these issues could come under one broad heading – respect and understanding. Where many websites and web teams are struggling is that there are two many cooks for the broth. In most councils at the moment there are a lot of people who have a say in what goes on the website and in what format. Some web teams have more control than others in terms of approving or improving this content before it is published but in some cases there is little control at all.

Compare this to the way that information is published through traditional channels and the service areas have to pass several gate keepers and abide by the advice of the communication professionals in order to get messages out. This allows them to reap the success and benefit from the experience of those professionals.

Online is a different matter though. Vanity publishing and ‘just in case’ publishing (there is no real drive to get this online now but one day someone might want this so I’ll publish it anyway) abound. And while there are lots of good reasons to devolve authorship if it isn’t implemented properly and backed with a workflow approval process it causes more problems than it solves. This can lead to poor content (in terms of accessibility, usability, relevance and currency) and too much of it.

Then there are the bits which aren’t directly part of the website itself – the bolt-ons, the dreaded applications. In one of those moments so typical of a LocalGovCamp that I felt simultaneously glad not to be the only one struggling with this problem and disheartened that the issue was so all-encompassing. Council websites are let down by the applications which make them interactive and transactional. Why? Partly because web teams have no seat at the table when applications are procured and no jurisdiction to have them removed if not improved.

What can be done then? Well, there is the Web Professionals group for a start. Paul Canning did a great job of introducing this to us all and it is a good step toward building that respect for communications and technical professionals specialising in the online space.

Each council also needs to work out how to publish information to the online space (across an increasing number of channels rather than just a website) tapping the knowledge of the service from that area while also utilising the skill of the web team in writing content which is accessible and usable.

Councils do need websites, the cost not to is too great (as Peter Barton explored in his blog a while back), but they need to improve the way they run them and part of that may be admitting there is specialist knowledge involved.