Earlier in the year, Bristol City Council invited a wide range of people from the local digital community to come along to an event to discuss the Councils web presence. At the time, BCC were part way through a procurement exercise to buy a new web platform – an all in one package with the necessary support to build the site, and integrate it with the Councils back office systems.
Unfortunately this approach failed to find a supplier that could meet the specification at an affordable price.
As a result there is an opportunity to take a fundamentally different approach. The Council are looking to meet up with Bristol’s digital telent and discuss the advantages of buying the best (and most affordable) open standards platform (if not also open source) – and going to the market separately for build and integration jobs.
This discussion will take place at the Watershed on 10th September between 2-4pm. Places are strictly limited so all attendees will need to register in advance at the Eventbright page.
If you can’t make it to the event we will be trying to webcast parts of it here on this page using the free webcasting platform Bambuser and an iPhone. It’s something of an experiment but it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out.
If you want to join in the online debate you can post a comment at http://bccwww.wordpress.com or twitter with the hash tag #bccweb
AGENDA
2.00 – Introduction – Stephen Hilton, Connecting Bristol
2.05 – Welcome – Dr. Mark Wright, Executive Member for Transformation and Value for Money
2.15 – The Story so Far, Peter Holt, Communications Director
2.25 – Our Current Thinking on the New Council Web Platform – Luke Smith, Web Project Manager
2.40 – Ideas for Channel Shift & Migration – Tracy Dodds, Insight and Design Manager
2.55 – Q&A with Council Team
3.25 – Sum Up and Next steps – Stephen Hilton
3.30 – Coffee and Networking
3.45 – Overview of Council Procurement, Elaine Ashley
4.00 – Close
**Update**
The event has just wrapped up and seemed to go very well. As we hoped and expected there were some excellent and practical suggestions from the digital community, who attended in very good numbers. I’m sure that the Website Project Board will be looking at these in detail and responding on the http://bccwww.wordpress.com/.
The webcasting experiment went reasonably, although next time we may need to look at a way to get an external mike hooked up to improve the sound. I have a tip for anyone intending to use Bambuser to webcast free from their iPhone- bring some blutac; it works brilliantly as a makeshift tripod.
