The Local Digital team in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is beginning to develop a wiki platform for councils.
Head of the Local Digital programme Linda O’Halloran has said it is aimed at making it easier for local teams to build and iterate services, and to support the adoption of common technical and design standards.
Writing in a blogpost, she says: “We want make it easy for cohorts of problem-solvers all over the UK to solve common digital problems once. And we want to make it easy for everyone to learn about the work of these teams, to feed into their work, and adopt their standards or best practice when it’s ready.
“In other words, we want to create the conditions for the sector to wiki-solve its shared local public service problems.”
O’Halloran says that MHCLG does not want to replace any existing online communities such as the Knowledge Hub or Slack channels, but to provide ‘light touch’ navigation to help people find the communities they need.
It is also aiming to produce a ‘how to’ toolkit for managing common projects.
Hiring and sprints
MHCLHG is now hiring staff to support the development, and running web development sprints during the summer. It is also working on how to use a fund to deliver common solutions to common problems.
The move follows the recent publication of the Local Digital Declaration, which includes five principles for the development of digital services in local government.
The blogpost says the Local Digital team is building a sign-up service for the declaration as part of the next web design sprint.
Image by Segundo Guaman, CC BY-SA 4.0
