A couple of weeks ago, it was surprisingly quiet in the office as Sigurd Magnusson and Lee Middleton were in Wairakei representing SilverStripe Ltd at the Association of Local Government Information Management conference. Once they got back, I thought it would be a good idea to get a debriefing from Sig as to what went on.
1. What is ALGIM? Who goes to it?
ALGIM is a 30 year old organisation that serves the ICT sector within New Zealand's city, district, and regional councils. ALGIM do a lot of things, but they are well known for their main conference held annually in Wairakei, near Taupo. The event runs for several days and is attended by a couple of hundred people. You'll find two groups of people at this conference: 1. CIOs, IT managers, and other IT staff who work within our country's councils. 2. Folk from a wide variety of web, software, hardware companies, and consultants who work with local government.
2. Why were we there? Do we have a lot of local government clients?
Councils are really now beginning to shift away from their first generation of websites, which were large, unwieldy, and brochure-like, and which often contained a few small online services - for instance you could check your rates or property boundaries. Councils are now increasingly looking to replicate on the website all of the services you can get when you ring or visit a council, and really lift the usefulness of their websites to the public. Our company and our CMS began life focussed on good-looking, easy to use, interactive websites, so we're good at helping councils make this transition; in just two years working with councils we've become the second most popular platform to run council sites.
3. How did you spend your time at the conference?
My colleague Lee Middleton and I held a expo stand along with about 40 other companies. This gave us a good home to which our existing clients could come visit us to chat, and provided us with an opportunity to talk with others about their plans, challenges, and questions. The conference has a busy line-up of speakers, and this gave us good insight into the issues and opportunities in the sector, so we made sure we attended a number of those sessions. The conference is held out in the countryside, meaning everyone is held together from breakfast to after dinner - this means long days filled with lots of interesting conversations.
4. What issues do you see facing local government web people?
Individual councils currently struggle to gather the time, skill, and money to build awesome websites that serve the public really well. Four million people divided by 80 councils means each has relatively few resources - and this is true even for Auckland because they have such a large and diverse population to manage. The issue is that while councils all work under the same legislation and have the same responsibilities, they approach their work differently. This prevents them from easily sharing investments. We've begun helping our council customers by stating ideas and code we do for them can be shared and reused openly, however this is hampered by the fact councils work in subtly different ways, meaning there is still a cost to customise the work.
5. What was the highlight of the conference for you?
The video presentation of the history of ALGIM. In the early 1970s, the very first mainframes and programmable calculators were being brought into New Zealand councils. ALGIM's roots were in a user group of the first few councils to use computers, and by 1980 the user group had grown up and become a legal entity. It was great to see how far we've come since then, and yet, consider how much more computers (and the web, in particular) still have the potential to make councils work more effectively. For example, there's heaps more that can be done to allow rate payers to have more say and visibility into the governance of where they live.
We'll see you next year at ALGIM of course, but if you're interested in finding out more about our work with local governments, just get in contact with us.