Volunteers build rival version of Birmingham City Council website
A group of volunteers is building a rival version of Birmingham City Council’s website which they believe improves on the £2.8 million official site pilloried by the internet community on its launch earlier this month.
And they are hoping Birmingham residents will join in with their do-it-yourself ethos by submitting ideas and getting involved in building the website – www.bccdiy.com – at a special event on Friday.
The council’s official website www.birmingham.gov.uk, delivered by private sector partners Capita, was slated by the city’s web community when it was unveiled for being difficult to navigate and little changed from its previous version.
The council immediately reacted by defending the site, saying the comments came from people who did not appreciate the size and complexity of the city council and maintained that its £2.8 million price tag was reasonable given the task of checking and transferring thousands of pages.
But a band of technical experts as well as non-web savvy volunteers, spurred on by the decision to do something constructive instead of complaining about what is wrong, are creating an alternative which they believe is easier to navigate and more accessible to users with disabilities.
The impetus for www.bccdiy.com came when internet entrepreneur Stef Lewandowski was waiting for a train and decided to use the time to set up RSS feeds – updates which let people know when something new has been posted on the site – for the official council website.
He said: “When the website arrived there were some pretty scathing comments flying around and a lot of people were quite unhappy that so much money had been spent on a website which seemed to be in a lot of ways a copy of the content of the old site just moved into a new system.
