Any advice? please help

iwanttosavemoney2008

I have recently become a local councillor for my town. I am the youngest ever member in my town and want to bring it up to date, the council did create a website but the company that created it has now gone bust and i can't get help from them.

Basically I want to create email addresses for each member of the council from this site and also to create a shared calendar to make it easier to see what each member is up to and to also manage meetings more efficiently as the calendar can act as agenda settings etc. Also I want to add items and update the whole site as it is about 2 years out of date.

how do i go about this without the original developer?

paddyrg

Google apps is cheap and self service and will do all this

iwanttosavemoney2008

I need to use the current website, it has the address of the council and we need it all to link up . thank you though am looking now to see if anything on there could help me

Savvy_Sue

While your enthusiasm is commendable, loud alarm bells are ringing.

The council is responsible for what's on its website. I'm astonished to think that they could or would allow a volunteer councillor to change what they've already got in place. I'd have said they had a responsibility to keep it updated either by using in-house staff or outsourcing it, but there would need to be a clear contract in place as to what was to be done, how, by when etc.

I'm also fairly astonished to think that they'd have paid a developer to do this without making sure they had control of the code in case of going bust.

Thing is, I thought councils were 'encouraged' to enable us to do more and more online: my own council lets me pay parking fines, council tax, rent etc etc etc online. And of course I can contact a councillor. All of which needs a robust and highly secure system. If I thought for one moment that anyone other than a paid professional team had access to it, I'd never use it again!

iwanttosavemoney2008

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

While your enthusiasm is commendable, loud alarm bells are ringing.

The council is responsible for what's on its website. I'm astonished to think that they could or would allow a volunteer councillor to change what they've already got in place. I'd have said they had a responsibility to keep it updated either by using in-house staff or outsourcing it, but there would need to be a clear contract in place as to what was to be done, how, by when etc.

I'm also fairly astonished to think that they'd have paid a developer to do this without making sure they had control of the code in case of going bust.

Thing is, I thought councils were 'encouraged' to enable us to do more and more online: my own council lets me pay parking fines, council tax, rent etc etc etc online. And of course I can contact a councillor. All of which needs a robust and highly secure system. If I thought for one moment that anyone other than a paid professional team had access to it, I'd never use it again!

I am an elected member of my local council, and they did have all this in place however the person who used to 'run' the page left the area a couple of years ago, and the councillors who were in power then did not fully understand (some still don't) how it works ('it' being the internet lol). This person didn't explain/show anyone how to update the site, rather just gave basic info on how to retrieve emails.

My district council website is completely upto date and is looked after by an outside company, and you can do everything you have mentioned up here and is secure,however this is just a town council, and the website is for information only, we don't have any format to take details from anybody and all I need and want to do is to be able to update the minutes of meetings held, update groups/ services info, and set up councillor email addresses so people can click a link to email one of us, and to set up a calendar to schedule meetings.

I would like to try to do this without spending any of the councils money which would be better spent else where, supporting user groups or improving the town according to the towns needs.

steve1980

I assume you are a parish council member? If so then all websites are normally built and maintained by the same person/company as they have the access to the .gov.uk domain suffix. I'm going to have a similar issue shortly with one I'm doing.

Not sure if you can post the current domain name but if not then send me a PM and I'll look into it as much as I can.

paddyrg

I know you may feel you're supertechnical compared with the old buzzards you're dealing with, but it doesn't sound like you are technical enough to be doing this. Websire, calendar and email are loosely coupled, and a couple of small DNS tweaks and you are up and running with whichever parts of the service you want to host with a service provider like Google Apps. Indeed, even if you keep the same website it would be prudent to outsource the management of the email/shared calender unless you want to spend half your life applying security patches and learning to manage an IMAP server.

Now I will go one further - you want to use the same website, but say it needs changing. This means you either learn HTML by hand, or use the same software the "gone bust" (never a good sign) company used to design and maintain the site. Or the site is CMS-based. Only the last of those options is good news for you, and then only if you know the CMS and have the keys to be able to manage all the publishing roles etc. This is an important consideration, unless you want to either a) get calls from everyone else to make tiddling updates to the site the whole time or b) give them the opportunity to wreck the live site with their updates. A) is better than b), but means a lot of dogsbody work for you. Or you use a system like I suggested (with good reason) which is designed exactly for this kind of scenario with users roles being defined for what they can update (eg their own profile webpages, using simple online tools, within your managed colour scheme/template) and what they can't (the main pages, etc).

I have architected and consulted for some multi-million dollars per year systems and was designing CMS's for the publishing sector back in the 90's, when powerful and rich CMS's were not available off the shelf. These days you're lucky that they do, but you can go one beyond and use a SaaS provider like Google Apps which is designed for people in *exactly* your position!

pinkclouds

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

I'm astonished to think that they could or would allow a volunteer councillor to change what they've already got in place.

Sorry to disappoint you, Savvy_Sue, but I was a parish councillor for 3 years and this is par for the course. It's all unpaid, voluntary and done on a shoe-string.

iwanttosavemoney2008 wrote: »

this is just a town council, and the website is for information only, we don't have any format to take details from anybody and all I need and want to do is to be able to update the minutes of meetings held, update groups/ services info, and set up councillor email addresses so people can click a link to email one of us, and to set up a calendar to schedule meetings.

Town council is equivalent to parish council. This is the sort of stuff I used to do, as councillor for "communications". I used Google apps to do the email accounts and mailing list. We publicised our information via the local parish "magazine" and the village noticeboard. The district council eventually gave us a page on their website for hosting agendas and minutes online. And we had an archive file of printed minutes in the back of the local church, for people to read if they wished.

Frankly, hardly anyone was interested in anything we did. We were very lucky if we got one or two villagers turning up to our public meetings. We were only ever contacted for the occasional complaint - usually about parking problems or potholes. The level of apathy in the village was huge. Quite a few of our councillors were co-opted. Elections were a non-starter.

I sincerely wish you good luck with your new role and hope you are able to mobilise interest in council activities. Don't feel that your age is an issue - I was the youngest too.

iwanttosavemoney2008

thank you everyone Am going to work out what the website is doing and see what i can do, if i can only update all the meeting minutes it will be a lot and may have to park the adding of emails until i know how many email addresses they bought in the first place etc.

paulwf

Be careful not to create things that the members aren't going to use. For example there is nothing worse than creating an email address for someone, members of the public using it to try and get in touch and then no one checking it and sending out replies. The online calendar could also be a nightmare unless EVERYONE checks it regularly.

In the past I've given up using online shared calendars and gone back to a paper diary due to not everyone being on board. I now use an amazing online rota system that can be accessed using a broad range of ways (iPhone app, mobile web, Facebook app etc) but even then some of my tech savvy 18 year old staff don't all use it and some just check the print version *sigh*

Savvy_Sue

OK, I have no experience of councils at this level because I've always lived in a town / city which didn't devolve power to that level: we have wards, but services are centralised.

So presumably your website doesn't have the facilities I get from my council website, and doesn't need secure payment facilities etc.

However, you say

iwanttosavemoney2008 wrote: »

they did have all this in place however the person who used to 'run' the page left the area a couple of years ago, and the councillors who were in power then did not fully understand (some still don't) how it works ('it' being the internet lol). This person didn't explain/show anyone how to update the site, rather just gave basic info on how to retrieve emails.

And that is precisely why I said what I did earlier. Whatever is done, there needs to be 'succession planning', from the beginning.

What happens if the person twiddling with the website falls under a bus / trips over a recycling bin / has a blazing row with all their colleagues and resigns in disgust / is removed from the council for dishonesty or scandal / isn't re-elected?

More to the point, what happens when any of those last 3 happen, and the person twiddling with the website uses it to publish 'the truth' as they see it about what's really going on?

I quite take your point that there are many other ways to spend the limited money available, but I'm not sure this is something you can afford NOT to spend money on, IYSWIM.

However, others have given far better technical suggestions than I can!