Bristol digitals can cash in on new council website
By 
Digital creative businesses in Bristol could cash in on part of the £800,000 set aside to build and develop the new website for Bristol City Council.
Last week, Bristol24-7 was exclusively told that the council had decided to use an ‘open-source’ system called Drupal to base the new site – which attracts 300,000 visitors per month.
A decision over who will develop the site will be made at the end of January, with the changeover from the existing web pages made in June.
However, local businesses will be invited to develop and maintain new sections of the site over a five-year period, in an attempt to promote the city’s digital sector to the wider world.
Speaking exclusively to Bristol24-7, Paul Aragoni from the council said he hoped Bristol creative industries could become firmly involved with the council over the years.
“Of course, Bristol is known as a centre for digital skills, so we want to be able to promote that and utilise these skills,” he said.
“While we are about to announce who will develop the initial site, we will be looking for local businesses to develop new features for the site and maintain them.”
He revealed that the open-source software would halve the costs to the city, make the new site more accessible for users and easier to integrate with other government websites.
“When we first put the contract out to tender, the costs were around the £1.6million mark. We were always interested in looking at the use of open-source software, and we tested many of the systems on the internet.
“We found Drupal was the most useful, had the most support and was used on a variety of government-style sites around the world. We felt this was the best option.”
Open-source content management systems, such as Drupal, are used as the base for websites and are created, supported and developed by communities online. They are normally free of charge for users and can be downloaded by anyone. Other major systems include WordPress and Joomla which – along with Drupal – are used by tens of millions of websites including major media, political and business organisations.
Mr Aragoni added that for the city’s citizens, the new websites would make searching for information easier and more intuitive.
“People are already using the website to pay bills and search for information. However, there are about 8,000 pages on the city council websites, and we want to make it easier for people to access that information.”
To back up Matt (and well pointed out Woodsy
), it's a sign that we need to really be much more connected up as a city in terms of being aware of the technical strengths within it. Plone should definitely have been a contender alongside Drupal as a CMS framework for the BCC site.
On an aside, well done for bringing the Plone conference to Bristol practically single-handedly. Hopefully next time there will be far more supported should it come around again.
[...] Bristol City Council has chosen Drupal for its new website build, read more here – http://www.bristol247.com/2010/12/27/bristol-digitals-can-cash-in-on-new-council-website/ [...]
I'm glad they have finally made a decision. It is interesting to see how far away the chosen system is from their original RFP, so good to see they listened to the local community. It was however a shame that they felt the need to ban any local companies who had expressed an interest in the original RFP from joining in the further discussion and consultation.
It's also a shame that despite the fact the Worldwide Developer Conference for Plone, one of the other major Open Source Content Management Systems, was held in Bristol two months ago with developers from 33 different countries attending, the council did not see fit to accept an open invitation to attend. There were a number of case studies of government around the world using it, yet the council deemed it not appropriate to attend during their evaluation. This was (to my knowledge) the largest IT conference to have ever been held in Bristol, and for a council that proclaims it's support of Open Source, they missed a chance to learn a lot about the Open Source community first hand.
You may have been told 'exclusively' by BCC of their intended use of Drupal. BCC's intentions with Drupal have nevertheless been openly discussed and no great secret on Twitter for a couple of months now.