Information about developments on the site.First off, apologies for any of you who wanted to pay for anything or complete a form online over the weekend. We had contractors in to do some essential wiring work in our server room that should see an end to the recent electrical supply problems we've been having. As a result of that work two of our servers (those dealing with payments and forms) did not restart correctly and there was no-one in on Sunday to bring them back online. This may raise the question of whether we should be providing true 24/7 support for our online services. I'm sure there are some of you who were affected by the downtime and who would advocate having support staff on call for just such an eventuality. However, given the low numbers of people potentially affected I think the Council can find other areas to spend its dwindling budgets more effectively. When online services become more heavily used and central to the way the public interacts with us we can think again about the level of support we can afford to provide for our maintaining web services outside business hours. We do try our very best to minimise disruption to online services (our services availability figures show high levels of uptime) but in this case the work was essential and downtime unavoidable. Once again, I apologise for the fact that two key online functions were unavailable for longer than we had planned.http://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=131Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:15:28 GMT20101515091528Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:15:28 GMT20101515091528Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:15:28 GMT20101515091528We have recently started using YouTube to stream video content. Mindful of the need to make sure that people with hearing problems can access that content too I added closed captions using the captiontube service. All seemed to go well until a colleague noticed that the captions on our first video weren't appearing. Today I have uploaded three more videos from the students of Ullswater and QEGS with closed captions but it seems that the captioning still isn't working. There are complaints being posted on various forums across the Internet relating to the same problem so it's no isolated. We do care and I do take this seriously. There should be captions but it seems that YouTube have some unresolved issues at their end. Apologies on their behalf. Obviously if this looks like being a long term thing we'll have to look at another way of providing the text for you. In the meantime, if anyone would like a transcript of any of our video content please email web.admin@eden.gov.uk and I'll be only too happy to send you what you need. Update (04/03/10): it appears that the captions have returned - let's hope it's not a temporary fix.http://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=129Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:00:29 GMT20100003010029Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:00:29 GMT20100003010029Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:06:21 GMT20100604100621Today saw the publication of Better Connected 2010, the latest in a series of annual reviews of local government websites by the Society of IT Managers (SOCITM). To get the headline stuff out of the way first, we have been rated as a 3 star site (maximum is 4 star) which builds nicely on our 'Transactional' rating last year. The rating system has been changed and there is no direct comparison but the old Transactional rating broadly covers the new 2 and 3 stars so we have been confirmed as being at the higher end of last year's rating. Of course, the devil is in the detail as they say and work will now start on analysing the reviewers' comments to see where we could have done better. It is apparent that the areas where we are seen to fall down are to do with content not technical aspects which is heartening (if only because that's easier to fix). It is equally clear that the new mapping and A-Z have been well received which is great considering the amount of work that was put in at the back end of last year to get these up and running. Better Connected also allows benchmarking with other authorities so for those of you who like to know that sort of thing here are the ratings for the other Cumbrian authorities: Allerdale 4 Barrow 2 Carlisle 2 Copeland 1 Cumbria County 2 Eden 3 South Lakeland 3 Despite its critics (mainly web managers it has to be said) the Better Connected report continues to be a major source of structured feedback for us and will be used to help inform our web strategy for the coming year. Of course, regardless of what is in the report, I'd actually still rather hear what you real-life users have to say about our site ...http://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=127Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:57:13 GMT20105701015713Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:57:13 GMT20105701015713Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:05:10 GMT20100501020510First off, I have to say I think Freedom of Information (FoI) is a wonderful concept - the provision of information, by request, to the public in order to increase transparency and accountability to the electorate can only be a good thing. Any FoI requests received here are taken very seriously and every effort is made to ensure an honest and open response. However, there appears to be a trend emerging of businesses using FoI to obtain Business Intelligence - information about our systems, suppliers and costs that is gathered in the hope that it can help the company develop a strategy for selling services. The worrying thing about these requests is that businesses are using FoI to get public sector workers to provide their business intelligence for them. A nice trick if you can pull it off but is it a practice that should be encouraged? Should it even be allowed? Fulfilling an FoI request is a time consuming activity; the last one I did was for an organisation that allegedly was going to use the information to highlight overspending on local government web sites. A noble cause you might think but their website is completely password protected now with no public access at all. In what way did that help make local government spending more transparent? That request took over a day for me to fulfil and required the time of other council employees, all of whom had other things to do that would undoubtedly have benefited our residents much better. The request I have to deal with now is going to take just as long. Presumably this company sent the same request to every local authority (I know of many web managers that are making the same complaints as me) - lets round it down to 400 for the sake of easier calculations. That's 400 days of public sector worker time used so that some company can have a bit of an edge over its competitors - more than a year of national public sector man-hours to help a single company make some private money. Far from the spirit of FoI in my opinion. To reiterate, I have no problem at all with requests made that are designed to further public understanding of how their local council is using their taxes. I do, however, have a problem with commercial organisations blanket-requesting large numbers of geographically widespread councils in order to obtain information to help inform their business strategy. In order to cut down future non-productive time I spend with these FoI request here is the information we were asked for in the latest request. By the requestors own admission, the information they receive would not even have been put into the public domain thereby benefiting a wider audience. <FoI response starts>Domains under our ownership------------------------------------------- eden.gov.ukvisiteden.co.uk Wesite traffic for the past 12 months-----------------------------------------------------http://www.eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/site-statistics/website-traffic/ Content Management System-------------------------------------------Name: Easysite (EIBS Ltd)Length of time in use : 1.5 yearsCost of purchase & implementation: &163;22620Ongoing maintenance and other associated costs: &163;3120 Other products relating to web content---------------------------------------------------------Idox forms: provider - Idox purpose -online forms in use - 2 years purchase costs - &163;5000 implementation costs - &163;800 maintenance costs - &163;0 site(s) used on - eforms.eden.gov.ukParis: provider - Northgate purpose -online payments and forms in use - 5 years purchase & implementation costs - &163;10000 maintenance costs - &163;1500 p.a site(s) used on - payments.eden.gov.uk Council Tax Online provider - Civica purpose - secured access to Council Tax account details in use - 4 years purchase & implementation costs - &163;15800 maintenance costs - &163;1755 p.a site(s) used on - payments.eden.gov.uk iShareMaps provider - Astun purpose - web mapping and local information in use - less than 1 year purchase costs - &163;15000 implementation costs - &163;6000 maintenance costs - &163;4500 p.a site(s) used on - my.eden.gov.uk Paperless Direct Debit provider - Accountis purpose - setting up direct debits online in use - 3 years purchase & implementation costs - &163;995 maintenance costs - ad hoc site(s) used on - payments.eden.gov.uk Google mini provider - Google purpose - search in use - 5 years purchase costs - &163;3100 implementation costs - &163;0 maintenance costs - &163;0 site(s) used on - search.eden.gov.uk BenCalc provider - OvalTech purpose - online benefits calculator in use - 4 years costs - &163;250 p.a site(s) used on - www.eden.gov.uk External sites providing content on our behalf-------------------------------------------------------------------OpinionSuite purpose - consultations in use - 1 year purchase & implmentation costs - &163;8.5k maintenance costs - &163;200 p.a site(s) used on - www.opinionsuite.com/eden/ reason for external provision - local implementation not possible. This will soon be superseded by a pan-Cumbrian solution. Destination Management System purpose - accommodation, events in use - 5 years costs - &163;7.5k p.a site(s) used on - www.websites.thedms.co.uk/cu-eden/thedms.aspx reason for external provision - costs of consuming web service are prohibitive Visit Eden purpose - originally an external Tourism site - now used as redirect to information held on main Council website in use - 5 years maintenance costs - &163;12.50 p.a site(s) used on - www.visiteden.co.uk reason for external provision - historic Readspeaker purpose - text to speech provision in use - 2 years costs - &163;250 p.a site(s) used on - www.eden.gov.uk reason for external provision - cannot do in-house Number and type of servers---------------------------------------1 externally hosted server which runs our main website.4 servers in our DMZ , 1 is a search engine, the other three have a shared role of application/database All servers run Windows 20031 server is virtual (vmware esx) All servers are owned by the Council.All servers are of a sufficient specification to do the job they are doing. All have RAID 1 as minimum and most have RAID 5.We have a nominal 8Mbps connection to the Internet provided by Thus Ltd. Programming languages and databases used-----------------------------------------------------------------All databases are SQL Server 2005 apart from our mapping which runs off PostgreSQL with PostGIS spatial extension. Programming languages are mainly C or VB asp.net. We also have applications runnning PHP and Python but these are maintained by the software providers. Departmental structure for the web team--------------------------------------------------------Web manager: grade J (&163;29,236 - &163;30,851)Web co-ordinator: grade F (&163;19,621 - &163;21,519) At any one time, we also have anywhere between 30 and 60 active content providers/approvers spread across the authority. Population of Council area---------------------------------------Can be found at http://www.eden.gov.uk/your-community/profile-of-eden/ Costs of websites--------------------------Note - the following exclude staff costs. In a highly devolved content provision model it is nigh on impossible to provide accurate staff costs and would take too long. Approximate figures for full time staff can be reached from the web team information above. 2005/6Licensing &163;6345.00Hosting &163;10332.95Development & Design &163;5120.66 Total &163;21798.61Unique visitors 532,681 2006/7Licensing &163;5286.62Site monitoring &163;4406.25 Total &163;9692.87Unique visitors 625,855 2007/8Development &163;3201.41Licensing &163;3525.00Hosting &163;11204.80Site monitoring &163;1473.45Security testing &163;9588.00Changes & updates &163;26578.51 Total &163;55571.17Unique visitors 843,469 2008/9Licensing &163;3319.24Hosting &163;4809.28Site monitoring &163;3949.91Security testing &163;7050.00 Total &163;19128.43Unique visitors 807,569 Connectors/apis/additonal modules to integrate systems into our website.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Any work of this kind is done in-house or in collaboration with neighbouring authorities or is provided by suppliers as part of their software. <FoI response ends>http://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=124Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:35:03 GMT20103509013503Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:35:03 GMT20103509013503Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:51:46 GMT20105122015146Happy new year! Finally, the nail-biting is over (no, not the test matches, the SOCITM Better Connected testing). This year has been worse than normal as I watched the remarks of several reviewers on Twitter. I'm not sure why it made a difference but it did and to the extent where I seriously considered unfollowing the people concerned. So why is SOCITM Better Connected important? For those who don't know, it's a national review of all local government websites based on a series of repeatable tests and user-based scenarios. The results are published in March (ish) and provide a means to benchmark improvement in web sites and progress relative to other authorites. It has been argued that since it's all largely subjective and there is no penalty or reward for a good/bad score what's the point in worrying, just get on with it and ignore the review. That's all very well but I happen to think that the sorts of things they test are important and, although they occasionally get things wrong, by and large the sites they rate highest are actually pretty good. And, when it boils down to it, we all like a bit of recognition and praise for things we do. Which brings me to the real point for blogging. I received an email from a member of the public this afternoon. We had been bouncing emails back and forth for a while to try and resolve an issue he had discovered on our new web mapping. With the help of the software suppliers (big thanks to Astun) we got the issue resolved. Upon telling the resident that it was fixed he replied to say "I've just looked at the planning information etc and this is now very impressive. Thank you very much. The speed of your response is incredible!" That made my day! You'd think that positive reinforcement wouldn't work on someone my age but as a local authority worker I spend a lot of time reading of people's problems and complaints. Last week it was mostly gritting and missed refuse collections - when the snow finally goes it'll be back to parking fines). To hear that something you've done has been appreciated by a member of the public is about as good as it gets in local government. Even if the feedback isn't that good it's still vitally important to us. We rely on your feedback to tell us when we've got something wrong or could improve it. It doesn't have to be big; small things such as making a comments section longer in a form or pointing out a typo or telling us that you don't understand a page so we can rewrite it in clearer language all help improve the site for everyone. So, don't be shy, tell us what you think about the site. We're about to start redesigning it and any ideas you have, however trivial you may think they are, will be considered. It's your Council and it's your website - make sure that you tell us what you want it to do. Feedback form Report a problem or email the Web Teamhttp://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=123Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:15:52 GMT20101511101552Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:15:52 GMT20101511101552Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:15:52 GMT20101511101552The EU Services Directive project to enable online licensing applications has struck us hard. I can see the benefit in broad terms and welcome the push to get licensing forms electronically enabled (even if it does take me back to the early days of e-Government!) What worries me is the fact that it will mean large expenditure for local authorities (either in terms of money or manpower) for very little tangible benefit to our residents. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has taken responsibility for producing centrally maintained online forms which is great for small authorities as they won't have to spend disproportionate staff time keeping up with legislative changes. However, in order to use those forms payments must be handled by the authority concerned. This is allowing a small number of suppliers to charge substantial amounts for integration work. In order to use the forms developed and maintained centrally by BIS we would have to spend around &163;10k to get our payments system enabled. Needless to say that's not going to happen and we're having to look at other solutions that will demand a lot more officer time - and those solutions still won't be free because they still have to be integrated with our payments sytem. I'm not blaming the payments software suppliers - they have to make a living and it's a market opportunity but for central government to force local authorities into that position is far from helpful. So what could have been done better? There have been precedents set in this field. The Planning Portal has been a great example of a centrally provided service that has found great uptake within our area. Nearly 40% of our planning applications are made online and it costs us nothing. Why? Because the Planning Portal takes payment on our behalf and passes the money on to us. Why can't the EU Services Directive forms be handled in the same way? I'm sure that small local authorities, such as we are, that receive very few applications (let alone electronic ones) would have been willing to pay a small fee for each payment handled on our behalf. If something like this isn't put in place the cost per application for this project is going to be exhorbitantly high for us. So, how long before you can expect to submit an electronic licence application to us? We think we will not be alone in saying openly that we will not meet the December 2009 deadline. We are, however, comfortable that we have made the correct choice. Hopefully 2010 will see BIS take on responsibility for collection and distribution of payments too and thereby enable us to use their forms.http://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=121Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:41:47 GMT20094115084147Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:41:47 GMT20094115084147Tue, 15 Dec 2009 08:41:47 GMT20094115084147Finally! We've replaced the clunky, unreliable system that used to pass for mapping on this site! We had numerous complaints from you about that system so I can't tell you what a weight this is off my shoulders. At last we have something that can be used and, hopefully, you'll find useful. As with all these things there are still one or two tweaks needed but it's up and running and it's a vast improvement on what we had. It's also integrated with a My House functionality that lets you find information relevant to where you live. Type in your postcode or street name, choose your house and a variety of information is available for you. Come back later and it will have remembered your settings so you don't have to type them in again. A high priority for us for 2010 is to extend the range of information we show geographically and, in light of the recent announcement to make Ordnance Survey maps freely available there is now hope that next year will see an end to the 'derived data' issue that has stopped local authorities from providing geographic data for public re-use. We'd be interested to hear your thoughts and any ideas for improvements. See our new online maps at My Edenhttp://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=120Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:42:39 GMT20094220084239Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:42:39 GMT20094220084239Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:57:44 GMT20095720035744Last week I read a thought-provoking blog, 'Building the &8220;Local&8221; website, not a council website' by Carl Haggerty at Devon County Council. In it he raises the idea of moving community and local information away from Council sites and over to those sites that have been developed specifically to serve local needs. By and large the provision of local information by local government has been patchy and consumes resources that could arguably be better used doing other things. Two things strike me: 1) On the one hand there is a need for a feeling of confidence in any online transaction or consumption of information. A .gov.uk domain provides that level of confidence. You know that you are dealing with the Council. You might not like them and you may not trust them to get things right but at least you know that the site you are looking at is the right one and you know where accountability lies. Moving presentation of information and service consumption out of that .gov.uk domain introduces a level of uncertainty that many will find unacceptable. The last thing we want to do is to discourage use of our website. 2) On the other hand, previous experience tells me that people don't want to do their online social and community-type things anywhere the Council site. Many well used and excellently developed community sites exist in our region. These are the places where people will want to consume services and discuss issues with a local context. And the majority of them won't go elsewhere. So, what do we do? Of course, there is, as usual, no simple answer but I think the first step is to get local councils and other major service-providing organisations in the area together - an exploration of where we are now and where we want to be in the coming years in terms of online services.We all have things that have a higher perceived priority but from where I'm sat provision of trusted data for use by community sites must be a prime topic of conversation in the public and voluntary sector. Those initial conversations may not lead to anything. We may all decide that it's not worth it, the risks may be too high and costs too great. But we may also find that this is a common thread running through the thoughts of web managers across the region - unless we start the process we&8217;ll never know. And these conversations shouldn't be held behind closed doors. If this is going to work we should also include the people who run community sites and those organisations delivering services on behalf of the Council.http://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=119Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:39:05 GMT20093916103905Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:39:05 GMT20093916103905Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:39:29 GMT20093916103929This page could have been like so many other landing pages, providing signposts to deeper content. As I thought about it I realised that this page should reflect the changes to our site and strategy. So, a blog it is. Having spent so long trying to convince colleagues and councillors to maintain interesting blogs I now find myself in the same position. 'Hoist' and 'petard' spring to mind! Cumbrian A-Z, partnership working and open data. We have just gone live with a joint A-Z of services covering all Cumbrian councils and other public sector organisations as well as various national and regional third sector organisations. This is something we've been thinking about for a while and came about because of some close working between District and County councils. It's still in its infancy and needs a tweak or two but already I think it's made a huge difference on the findability of information from a public point of view - suddenly the whole question about who (County or District council) becomes transparent. And, of course, we've got it in XML format so we will make that available to LocalDirectGov via an automated feed and to the public for... well, whatever you want. It's open data .. you choose. If you do something interesting with it please let us know - we'd be really interested to see some Cumbrian mash-ups. XML feed of Cumbria A-Z of services (refreshed nightly. This file is usually over 1Mb in size)http://eden.gov.uk/about-this-site/?blogpost=115Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:29:09 GMT20092905112909Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:29:09 GMT20092905112909Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:24:02 GMT20092409102402