Should the government build web sites?

Now that the Department of Health has decided it will be spending £60-80m over three years to develop the NHS Choices web site, it's worth having a rethink about how our cash might best be spent.

In both the UK and the US, new thinking is rapidly emerging on how governments should be on the Internet. Some are arguing, to put it bluntly, that governments shouldn't be building web sites at all. Instead, the first priority of government should be to make its data available on net in ways which are open, standards-compliant, and re-usable by third parties - whether they be commercial or third sector organisations - because others will innovate around the data far faster and more freely than government ever can.

And if governments do find a need to build their own web sites, they should do so using these same data services that they have exposed for public use (providing a nice incentive to make sure they work).

Interestingly, this view seems to be striking a chord with our own Power of Information taskforce, which has recently succeeded in opening up more public sector information for public reuse (great work!).

Not wanting to be left out, and in an enlightened spirit of public service, Patient Opinion has itself "mashed up" the public feedback which government publishes on NHS Choices, with public feedback submitted through our own site. Why? To make it easier both for patients and staff to access all the feedback about their local services, and to increase the chance that public feedback will generate real improvements in services.

So, coming back to that £60-80m about to be spent on "a web site"... wouldn't it be interesting to discuss the possibility that, first, they build a set of data services for public use. (This thinking is already underway in government.) And only after the data has been shared, build the government site (on top of the data services) to present it. Or, at that point, save the taxpayer some money and just link to sites which are already doing a good job with the same data.