The £250,000 Council Website

The news that the Conservative administration has rubber stamped a £250,000 budget for a new Council website will stun members of the public and Council tax payers.

The Conservative administration is even being lambasted by its own membership for the cost. One Conservative campaign blogger called "£250,000??? You're kidding. That's ridiculous" whilst another Alan W Collins summed up the view of most "Why is the Council website costing £250,000? I wouldn't pay £25,000 for that abberation - over any timescale!"

It seems the administration is not only lacking financial sense, but also control of its message.

The party of good financial sense?

Not according to the self-declared statements of the Medway Conservative membership.

What is frustrating is that nobody seems to have stood up in the Cabinet meeting and said: "You know, there's lots of very good open source content management systems (CMS) out there - indeed one called Wordpress which is free and eminently customisable." This is peculiar, as Wordpress was available (and as solid as any CMS) in 2005, runs on MySQL and PHP (which are both free products used by some of the largest companies in the world, such as airlines and Yahoo). And there are pots of programmers around with MySQL and PHP skills

It seems that there's a prevailing mindset amongst the ruling Conservatives on Medway Council that thinks that if taxpayers aren't paying through the nose, then you're not getting value for money.

Not true, of course; ask Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or any of those other big sites that rely on free software.

There is a very interesting report looking at attitudes among local authority IT managers and staff to open source products in government. It's encouraging, though also scary: software licensing can be 30%-40% of a council's budget; cost is the reason for going with OSS for 75%; and 64% think their council will increase its use of OSS.

It will be interesting to see if Medway Council is using OSS in its project.

Also of note for Medway Council; there's a huge open goal as Windows 7 uses OpenOffice for most tasks rather than Microsoft Office, with potentially large cost savings.

Whether this has been examined no one knows - the process for cost attribution on this project is not easily accessible online.

How ironic!