Usability, council websites and the obligation to promote democracy

Local democracy: Not being pitched very hard on council websites

It seems that The Electoral Commission have decided that it is a basic human right for us to have ballot papers that make sense to us. Usability – not just regulatory box-ticking is, it seems the key here (I posted on ballot design here a while ago)

Measuring usability may also be the key to ensuring that a big opportunity on the horizon is taken seriously.

As I mentioned the other day, the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill (pdf) (text version) is likely to get royal assent in the not-too-distant. I covered the question of petitions the other day (and I’ll come back to this element briefly in a moment), but there is a bigger – even more interesting question about how far local authorities may thwart this obligation by a resort to box-ticking.

In summary, councils have to promote an understanding of…

• the functions of the authority and other local authority bodies that are connected to it
• the democratic arrangements that govern it
• how members of the public can take part in those democratic arrangements and what is involved in taking part
• how to become a councillor
• what members of the principal local authority do
• what support is available for councillors
• the functions of authorities which are connected with the principal local

It’s something of an indicator of the level of self-confidence within local government that such a role should be mandated by central government, and I suspect that – when we look back on how these obligations have been implemented in a few years time, we may see just how enthusiastically local authorities actually embrace this opportunity.

As every civil servant knows, you can either give your political masters what they want, or what they say they want. You can understand their aims and seek to meet them, or you can tick the boxes that they put in front of you.

A glance at many local authority websites will give you some idea of this. Here’s a way of looking at it:

Give some schoolkids a look at their local council website. Then ask them to do a comprehension on it – and see how enthusiastic they are about getting involved in local democracy at any level.

OK. This is a big ask. But I’m certain that some council websites would get much better results than others – so to check this hunch, I had a look at a few:

Here’s the first three I looked at – purely randomly (I picked the local council of the last three people I spoke to on the phone – choose your own method and pick three of your own?)

Colchester Council: ‘There’s a council meetings and decisions’ occupying one of the less prominent parts of the website. If you click on it you’re offered a range of unstructured unprioritised pages in alphabetical order. If you know what you’re looking for, you may click on the Your Council link, but even then, there’s no attempt to offer any structure, any narrative or to persuade visitors that there is a worthwhile democratic process in place. Information on Councillors is poorly laid out and hard to navigate. If there is a postcode search that allows you to find out who your councillor is if you don’t know the name of your ward, I can’t find it. If you click on the ‘how to become a local councillor’ page, the result can best be described at regulation-speak. 3/10

Broxtowe Council: If anything, it’s a good deal worse. None of the language matched what I would expect to look for if I was trying to find out about my council decision-making processes. The front page has a link to ‘Cabinet and Committees’ but you have to dig around in the ‘About Us’ section to find any reference to councillors. The information provided is sparse and grudging (I suppose that the small amount of info is as good as Colchester’s site which offers more info, but renders it almost useless by it’s structurelessness) 2/10

Camden Council: Much better. There’s a ‘Council and Democracy’ link in the main menu and it takes you through to a not-bad set of information that has plainly been written for purpose, rather than patched together in a document-management-system-to-content-management-system way (information techies will know what I mean here, and what shortcoming I’m alluding to. Once you’re in, there’s a big webcasting link that shows you how to view council meetings and reasonably well-written content on how decisions are made. It could offer more of a sales-pitch, but the intent is there. You are left with the definite impression that Camden wants to promote it’s democratic practices and that the forthcoming bill may even get them to raise their game further. 8/10

These are, admittedly, snap audits. But in many cases, perhaps there is a case for the provision of this content – the information – it’s structure, layout and language – to be taken out of the hands of permanent officials at local authorities. I don’t want to re-open the question of whether it is in the interests of council officers to do anything that increases the prestige of elected members, but…. maybe it could be done better by schoolkids who have looked at Camden’s site than the people who were paid to write content for Broxtowe?

Finally, on the question of petitions: The take-up of these e-petitions (and the measurements of how many people arrived on the ‘petitions’ page and how many completed the process), will provide us with metrics. Comparative metrics. We will be able to see which councils have used all of the resources at their disposal to drive up interest in local democracy. I wonder if anyone will pull this information together?