The value and accuracy of a campaign which claims many council websites are “riddled with waste and inefficiency” has been called into question by local government practitioners.
The ‘WebThrift’ site (
http://www.webthrift.co.uk/ )
is run by a small group of volunteers, who are using the Freedom of Information Act to ask local authorities and government departments to give details of their spending on web services. The site aims to build up ‘league tables’ of these figures, basing the total cost of each organisation’s website against the number of unique visitors, creating an apparent figure for “cost per visitor”. It claims this money would often be better spent on “frontline services”.
However, so far, only six local authorities have released figures to the site. These include Limavady Borough Council in Northern Ireland, which spent a ‘total’ of £30,863, with an amassed cost of 37 pence per unique visitor, and Hastings Borough Council, who spent £39,899 on a website which attracts 5,558,328 unique visitors, or an apparent ‘cost’ of just one pence per visitor.
The site has attracted a great deal of criticism from council practitioners and analysts on its own open blog, mostly claiming the methods used to calculate cost do not give a true picture of website value. Angela Frodin, web manager at Gloucestershire County Council – who stressed her views given are personal opinions – told E-Government Bulletin she agreed with the critics.
“[Webthrift is] not an even-handed piece of research,” Frodin said. “Websites are service delivery vehicles and channels for customer services, they’re not just publicity vehicles. It’s not considered what the cost of providing that access to services would be if we didn’t have websites. [WebThrift says] we should be using open source software because it’s free. Technically it is, but it costs a lot of money to implement.”
WebThrift itself says it is not “against the principle of e-government” or “critical of any one individual who works in the public sector”, saying its aims are to identify and highlight good and bad practice, and “provide a platform for the public sector and members of the public to discuss how costs can be reduced.”
It’s clearly someone with an axe to grind, perhaps a spurned contractor, or an open-source zealot.
It’s interesting that a lot of attention is paid to open source, ignoring the fact that while a lot of open source software is great (Wordpress for example), it’s not a one size fits all situation. There is no open source software that works ‘out of the box’ for local government (apart from the abysmal APLAWS, which, while a good idea in theory has collapsed through lack of a real community) and any solution that’s taken on is going to need heavy customisation, something which costs money, money which could be much better spent on procuring a commercial solution.
It seems as though this campaign has been abandoned though. There have been no updates since June, and we put our FOI response in a few weeks ago.
@Stuart
Wouldn’t count on it being abandoned. When we got in contact with the chap behind Webthrift some while ago, he told us the campaign would be launched in August – probably once they’ve got most of the FOI responses back from councils – so there’s still yet. He apparently has a day-job to deal with as well, so perhaps that explains the lack of updates.
Look who’s in their blogroll:
# Adam Smith Institute
# Burning our money
# Campaign for Freedom of Information
# James Bartholomew
# TaxPayers’ Alliance
Lgov webbies need to get their act together ‘cos if those lot get behind them a PR disaster awaits – never mind the facts.
There’s a very thoughtful blog post from Peter Barton at Lincolnshire County Council that turns this on its head. They have attempted to estimate the cost impact of turning the web OFF at the council.
See http://thewaistline.blogspot.com/2009/07/lets-turn-off-web.html
Hi Stuart, I really have to disgaree with your ‘abysmal APLAWS’ comments.
Our site (Camden) has run on APLAWS for over five years and while not perfect (which CMS is) it has proved to be reliable and relatively easy for our web authors to get to grips with.
We could do better, sure, but we could also do a hell of a lot worse.