Community Portals – The UK Experience A False Dawn Over the Field of Dreams?

This paper considers the attributes of community portals; questions the sustainability of such portals, and suggests a likely direction that portal evolution may take. The context is that of UK local government portals, over the period from 1999-2004.Research has been undertaken to investigate the extent to which locally deployed UK community portals are capable of supporting citizen services interactive with local government departments. The study finds that few existing portals enable on-line access to back office systems thus enabling self-service interactivity for citizens. Also, along with problems in joining-up technology there are also problems with joining-up people. Current activities are analogous with a False Dawn for Community Portal development, due to gaps and current inadequacies in portal capability. This ”Field of Dreams” future suggests an alignment between the emerging development in Enterprise Portals in the commercial sector; Grid Computing emanating from the eScience community; and the need for Community/Civic Portals in the Public Sector. The paper concludes that sustainable development will only be achieved when joined-up people and joined-up technology become a reality. Suggests are given of solutions for remedying the present situation which could result in a joining-up of technology systems along with a joining-up of people.