ALGIM 2011 Web Symposium, Wellington, New Zealand
I was lucky enough to be invited for the second year to present at the Association of Local Government Information Manager's Web Symposium, a conference similar in format and spirit to our LGWN conference.
This year, I managed to spend a couple of extra days of my own time exploring Wellington, and it's spectacular cultural history museum Te Papa Tongarewa and of course it's fabulous food!
But the main reason I visited was of course, the conference.
There was a heap of interesting content that I was looking forward to, in particular all the presentations by award nominated councils. Of particular note in this category were Best Redevelopment of an Intranet: nominee Invercargill City Council introduced us to "Kermit" their new intranet, that provided a fascinating insight into the workings of their council. The result of it's introduction? Increased social engagement, a single authoritative source of information and an active "classifieds" page. Morale was boosted and and more information shared instead of silo'd. Excellent work. As one person pointed out, no one gets to see other people's intranets, it's like asking to see someone's underwear!
One of the other council presentations that I really enjoyed was the recounting of a campaign; Taranaki Blowout; run by Peter Ledingham of Taranaki Regional Council, which involved unrolling a Mt Taranaki eruption scenario over the web over the course of six weeks. The aim being to help people prepare themselves for a possible eruption, and the dissemination of information around such a scenario. With minimal experience and investment, Peter got the campaign off the ground but also managed to reach a very wide audience including local business and schools.
One of the most fascinating presentations came from David Brem and Kate Ferriman about their work in creating the web presence for the new Auckland Council. Last year, a Royal Commission into Auckland Governance recommended that 8 councils be abolished and a new "super council" be created with 6 "local councils" operating underneath. The rebranding alone was a huge project, but attempting to navigate, audit, account for and then redesign the web presence for this new organsation was a massive task with "drop dead" deadlines. This was an amazing story of organisational change writ large.
Of the Day 2 Workshops, my favourite (and I believe the most useful) was from Rowan Smith, from the Department of Internal Affairs who ran a session on the WCAG 2.0 standards. Excitingly, Rowan's team have put together a plain english guide to the standards and how to test to see if you've met them (PDF 1.6MB). This 28 page guide simplifies the goobledygook and jargon laden language of the web content accessibility guidelines into an easy to refer to set of standards that can be achieved. In addition, Will Huthnance, also from the Department of Internal Affairs, gave us a run down on how to create accessible PDF's. Easy, straightforward tips that can dramatically improve the quality of your documents. The New Zealand Web Standards website is a treasure trove of absolutely useful and practical information. But I highly recommend that you download the pdf and go through it step by step to see if you've met the basic criteria (obviously excluding the NZ specific criteria) and to find the gaps in your site.
Probably the most exciting thing to come out of the conference was the awarding of the Web Professional Development Award, where this year the recipient was given a choice of attending Webstock 2012 or attending our LGWN 2011 conference. This year, the award winner, Jenni Cochrane of Matamake-Piato District Council has chosen to visit Sydney! Jenni has a particular interest in council use of Joomla! so if you use Joomla! at your council, please get in touch so we can arrange a visit while she's here.
Once again, I'd like to thank ALGIM, Marion Dowd, Jason Dawson, Rebecca Swansson and Jenny Cullinan-Nevell for once again inviting me to attend and present, and putting on a superb local government web conference.
