Open standards underpin many of the digital services we use on a daily basis and are recommended by the government as a way to reduce the overall cost of a service – so why aren’t they used as standard when it comes to local government fault reporting, asks Angela Dixon, director at mySociety.
As channels of communication continue to diversify, local authorities face a choice. They can shepherd reports of civic problems like potholes and fly-tipping from a vast array of different digital sources, or close off routes to engagement and restrict how members of the public can contact them.
From a form on the authority’s own website, to social media, to third party services, people have come to expect to be able to choose a method of contact that works best for them.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there is often a complex web of different systems in operation, each pointing in different directions, and covering different service areas.
So how can local government as a whole balance the need to embrace modern citizen expectations for engagement with the need to respond to civic service requests in an efficient and cost effective manner?
The answer is easy: don’t turn your back on open standards.
Why are open standards essential to local government?
Open standards remove barriers to communication between civic services and systems. They enable you to provide the flexibility of choice that members of the public expect without sacrificing resources or getting locked into contracts with suppliers.
There is nothing new about open standards. Open311, for example, a free, international open technology for the reporting of public realm problems originally developed in the USA, has been enabling interoperability between civic services for 15 years.
Open standards have also been responsible for some of our most well-used transformation programmes. The government’s 2018 Open Standards principles policy paper highlights their many benefits, from avoiding vendor lock-in, to being able to reuse components of software built by others and reducing the overall cost of a service or programme.
An open standard is a way of communicating, that anyone can implement, without paying any money for permission to use the technology. The good thing about open standards is that once several technology systems start using the same ones, different systems from different manufacturers can talk to each other.
When you phone someone else’s telephone, you are using an open standard – this means you don’t have to have the same brand of phone as the person at the other end.
What this means for a government is that if you can make your database of fault reports speak to the outside world, then you don’t have to worry if reports are coming from two, ten or a thousand different websites or apps. You run one system and it copes with all of them.
Local government call centres don’t worry about what telephone network people are phoning from, or what brand of phone they are using, so why should your digital systems be inflexible?
Standardising interoperability
As a civic technology charity, we at mySociety have been advocating for interoperable, open source civic services for two decades. Among the services we run is FixMyStreet – a third party service that citizens love using to report local problems.
Modern local authority websites have come a long way since the days when FixMyStreet first launched in 2007. Created in response to many authorities not offering an easy to use digital reporting service (if they offered one at all), FixMyStreet enabled members of the public to go online to report a problem that needed fixing in their community without any prior knowledge of council boundaries or responsibilities. It then emailed a report, including all routine information required for responding to a problem, to the best available contact address at the authority.
A few years later in 2011, we established an Open311 API for FixMyStreet to enable local authorities to receive reports from FixMyStreet directly into their backend system(s). The Open311 API also provided authorities with the ability to update report-makers and tell them when work is completed.
Councils across the UK and abroad have used this Open311 API to connect FixMyStreet to their own systems, receiving reports to the right place in the right system, transparently displaying existing problems on the map and keeping anyone interested in the outcome of problems updated.
Open standards are everywhere, so why not in fault reporting?
Despite being a free, accessible and equitable option, open standards like Open311 are still relatively unknown and underused within local government. As the public and private sector work more closely together, an increase in the procurement of proprietary, closed systems risks the decline of interoperability in civic fault reporting processes, among other services.
At mySociety, we see open standards like Open311 as a solid foundation for building local government services. After all, many of the digital services we use every day are built upon open standards and APIs, from email to emoji, from public transport journey planning to the protection of your online payments.
Open standards offer an ever more important level of transparency, allowing everyone to see how they work and providing trust in exactly what data is being sent and received.
We’re not alone in this thinking; scaling the use of open standards is also being explored by The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) Digital (previously DLUHC).
When it comes to civic fault reporting, we believe that a joined-up, open system is the best approach, with everyone working together to remove barriers to successful engagement for citizens.
Whether it’s FixMyStreet or another third party service, where open standard principles are in place, local authorities should feel confident in leaving the door open to such channels of communication without worrying about compromising on efficiency or resources
Find out more about the free FixMyStreet Open311 API, or speak to mySociety’s SocietyWorks team at any of the below events for a chat in person!
Strictly Highways 1 - 3 October, Blackpool (stand 38)
Highways UK 16 - 17 October, Birmingham (stand 281A)
LGA Conference 22 - 24 October, Harrogate (stand Q59)
GovCampCymru 8 November, Cardiff
mySociety is a registered charity pioneering the use of online technologies to empower people to take their first steps towards greater civic participation. https://www.mysociety.org/
