What is The Responsive Council

This chapter describes a journey through e-enabled local public services. We start with the familiar local government Web site and contact centre channels to the citizen. We then move on to stage 2; how leading local governments are now mining the flow of data through these channels to develop “insight” into citizens’ service use and future needs. Next, we explore stage 3 and the role of performance measurement systems and virtual online communities in raising the citizen’s voice. Finally, stage 4 combines the parallel journeys of e-government and e-citizen and describes a co-produced future that may at last put the citizen centre-stage in the design and delivery of local public services. We use innovation theory to identify characteristics of an innovative local government and identify a need to extend this theory to accommodate the key themes of citizen-centric e-government: transparency, trust, rights, and obligations.