One of my biggest inspirations, Tom Steinberg, has a post up about governments trying to duplicate the fantastic services that mySociety built, but failing miserably.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm really pleased to see government trying to build services that are useful to citizens. On the other, I'm disappointed that they're doing such a poor job of it, and that they're leaving user experience almost completely out of the mix. This is a great example of why I think classic enterprise service providers are in trouble.

Check out mySociety's FixMyStreet, which makes it dead simple to report a problem:



Fixmystreet.com


And now check out the local government's own solution, built in Java (I think?) and completely borked:



medwaycouncil.png

Which would you rather use?