Earlier this week we had our neighbours from Birmingham City Council pay us a visit. It gave them a chance to find out about Umbraco - our new Content Management System (CMS) - and how we were getting along with it, and also give them a deeper insight into Project WIP.
The visit was interesting for us all here. Primarily it brought us up to speed on Birmingham City Council's plans for their website, and it also highlighted the common goals/issues we both face when trying to determine our target audience whilst also bringing about a culture shift internally to make our services realise how useful our websites are for them.
Simon Gray, Corporate Web / Self-Service Development Officer, from Birmingham City Council says:
"Building on connections we’ve made at UKGovCamps, LocalGovCamps, and the wider local government social media community we went to see our friends and colleagues from Coventry City Council and Shropshire Council, learning from their experiences of how their content management systems – Jadu and Umbraco respectively – help them in their work, issues that have arisen from fast migration plans, and specifically in the case of Shropshire learning from their own Project WIP activity, which was in fact the inspiration for us in creating this very project ourselves!
"We’re immensely grateful to Alison from Coventry and Lorna, Louise, Mark, Dale, and Lewis from Shropshire for the amount of time they let us spend with them during their own busy days, and the information we got from them has been invaluable as we move forward in our own work."