From TechCrunch:
Directgov.com, the UK government’s one-stop supersite for citizens, has opened up idea generation by allowing developers around the country to share ideas on how to build a word-class online hub for all national government services. The Directgov site, which launched in 2004, reportedly receives more than 11 million visits a month.
Unlike President Obama’s digital initiative Change.gov (now Whitehouse.gov), which solicits ideas from citizens of all backgrounds on a range of topics, Directgov is recruiting ideas from the developer community for a specific challenge: how to make Directgov itself more innovative.
From the Sunlight Foundation blog:
U.K.’s Directgov.com rises to the occasion
Leena Rao at TechCrunch reports on how Directgov.com, the British government’s online portal providing information and services from across government, is asking developers to help them think of ways to make the site more innovative, responsive and open to input from citizens.
Yesterday they had such an opportunity. Much of the U.K. was hit by a rare major snowstorm, crippling pretty much evertyhing. U.K. Cabinet Office Minister and Member of Parliament Tom Watson reports that, as a parent, the only thing on his mind Monday at 7:30 a.m. was whether his son’s nursery school was open or closed. So he purchased a domain name (SchoolClosures.org.uk) and then twittered a challenge to the folks at Directgov.com, “Fancy rising to the challenge for tomorrow morning?” They quickly built http://schoolclosures.org.uk/, a working prototype of an online service to provide an open and easy way to report the status of local schools. “It is an amazing thing,” Tom wrote on his blog, “not just the tool but the way in which they have turned things around in about 28 hours.”