1. APLAWS+ A platform for the development of electronic systems & services by local authorities

2. Who are we?

3. 52 elected representatives 200,000 resident population 800,000 during the day 2 nd biggest knowledge economy in the UK 500+ services to citizens 1.3 billion Euros of annual budget

4. e-Government in brief Top 5 website (SOCTIM Better Connected) 9,000+ pages of content Online payment for 90 different services 10+ million Euros online payments 100,000+ unique visitors each month Web team of 5 people!

5. e-Government in brief

6. How did we get there? “All services online by 2005” - Office of the deputy prime minister (ODPM), 2001 In 2001 we had an award winning website with just under 2000 pages of content We had a web team of 5 people!

7. What happened next? 25 Path finder Projects funded by ODPM Camden entered a project in collaboration with four other London Boroughs The APLAWS project sought to create –standards for content management system for local government –Freely adoptable by local authorities –System that could deliver the standards

8. Why open standards are important Maximise access to resources Long term access to resources (digital preservation) Application- and platform-independence Avoidance of vendor lock-in Interoperability

9. How were the standards created? Selection of appropriate standard Ratification of decisions Quality assurance Learning from experience

10. What happened next to the standards? The APLAWS category list was handed over to the Improvement and development agency (IdEA) and was refined to become the “Local Government Category List” (LGCL). Almost all municipalities in England use the LGCL as a basic navigation structure for their websites Other CMS vendors have implemented it as an open standard, as a result of the open source competition

11. What happened next to the standards? The LGCL was taken on by another ODPM funded project called the local e-government standards body (legsb) It then became the “Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary” (IPSV) Legsb was disbanded at the end of March 2006

12. What happened next to the standards? Local Government Category List BVPI 157 Consulted organised local authority list Local authority processes:indicates local authorities processes (on average 600 processes/services)

13. Why an Open Source CMS is important? In 2001 no local authority had a CMS Very expensive, costing 500,000+ Euros Proprietary vendors were unwilling to adapt their systems to incorporate e-government metadata standards Freely adoptable by local authorities Sustainable

14. What is the APLAWS CMS? It is a J2E based CMS built on Red Hat’s technology It can hold content in any language It can display information across any device, mobile phones, digitv etc It is semantic web compliant and completely interoperable It is free

15. What happened next to the CMS? APLAWS used by 6 municipalities APLAWS+ released in 2004 3 code releases since 2004 with a 4 th due in July this year 30+ APLAWS+ users, including 19 municipalities in the UK and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Sustained by the user group

16. What have we learnt? That standards can develop a life of their own. –Don’t release a standard and then change it any more frequently than once every 2 years. It takes that long to get everyone on the first version That agreeing standards early allows for more interoperability between systems later –Creating a front facing standard allowed vendors of back office systems to provide local government standards for their own software. Such as CRM or EDRM

17. What have we learnt? That CMS systems require a different skill set to configure and maintain –Not all municipalities have such expertise in house which makes an open source system difficult to implement APLAWS+ can create multiple sites –If we did the project again we would invite the smaller municipalities to utilise this feature to save costs and to share content production. East Riding county council have used it to provide sites for more than 70 schools.

18. What have we learnt? Government projects need to survive beyond initial funding –Having a open source CMS meant that the user group can further develop the product themselves Companies of various sizes are involved in the APLAWS+ project –Open source and open standards enables small local companies to compete with the big international companies

19. What will we share? Everything All project document is online Join the user group - potential users or interested parties are always welcome Join the discussion groups online Let you techies loose at http://sf.net/projects/aplaws/ Contact us Come and see us in Camden!

20. www.aplaws.org.uk www.aplaws.org.uk info@aplaws.org.uk Thank you for your attention Ainga Pillai ainga.pillai@camden.gov.uk