WRITTEN ON June 16th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, What do we want?

Remember our hypothesis that indy feedback sites will always beat official government ones, and our prediction that Patient Opinion will rock and rule the world while the Patricia Hewitt/Dr Foster Healthy Choices will end up in front of the PAC and in Private Eye?

Well, I’m forwarded a note by school governor Feargal Hogan who writes about forums.ukgovernors.org.uk ….

setup by one ‘Jack Black’ because the DfES efforts were so poor. They (the DfES) have a governors site at www.governornet.co.uk and a teachers site at www.teachernet.gov.uk. They also manage the www.parentscentre.gov.uk as well as a host of other education related sites. About 18 months ago, they announced a new all encompassing
www.schoolsdirect.gov.uk and many of us contributed to an initial consultation on the project. None of us were very impressed. There had been an ongoing discussion on the Governornet discussion board about setting up an alternate site. There were 2 main drivers for this:

1) The user interface on the discussion board was/is atrocious and naïve.

2) The moderation/intervention by the department was unhelpful to put it politely.

The board spent a couple of months on pre-moderation – which would close at the weekend – making it nigh on impossible to use sensibly, and was closed for the entirity of the last general election campaign. Schools didn’t close, neither did governance cease. Just the site closed down. Jack had been a proponent of a move and although there seemed to be a consensus that a move might split the community which could prove to be a problem, he announced one day that he had setup www.ukgovernors.org.uk and its associated forums and the rest of us were welcome to join him or not as we saw fit. The result is that today the governornet community is small and quite transitory whilst the UKGovernors community is vibrant, growing and healthy. The schoolsdirect initiative seems to have ground to a halt.

GovernorNet is regularly neglected by the DfES when announcing important initiatives – even those with significant governance implications (see Janette Owen’s latest piece in the Guardian http://education.guardian.co.uk/governor/).

I believe this is a good example of a small group of motivated people (actually JB on his own) putting “the efforts of large (and probably well-meaning) organisations to shame”.

Me too. I think the core issue is that better design and ease of use always wins online. And government seems not to care about design or have any interest in ease of use. Someone else will always show them a clean pair of heels.