I’ve spent part of the day working on Microsoft OAS and was looking around for some content to put in there while I learn how to use it.

I found this article at the Guardian e-public by Heather Brookes . The gist of this is that people are putting in FOI requests for staff directories. One line of argument is that this makes local authority staff more accountable, the other is that there are issues about personal safety.

One problem with ‘individual accountability’ is that there are plenty of instances where individual members of staff are not actually responsible for making the decisions that they have to implement.

There are plenty of local government staff who have to put up with considerable grief from a minority of the public (front line housing workers, teachers, social workers etc). Does it help if they can be phoned up or contacted via email to get yet more aggravation?

The people who make the decisions should have their names and contact details in the public domain - in particular councillors, but they tend to do this anyway.

In my experience, councils which put lists of people on their websites with job titles and individual contacts are much harder to deal with than those which have a single phone number.

I’ve done various pieces of research over the past 12 months where I have had to try and find things like ‘who in the council is responsible for metadata?’ or ‘who in the council is responsible for e-government?’ or ‘how many staff work in the council?’. In some cases I have given up after phoning half a dozen people that I thought *might* be able to help but who have not been able to answer my questions (and I bet most councils get asked harder ones).

Oh well, my opinion against someone elses. I can feel some usability testing coming on. Take a dozen councils - six with single number, six with multiple numbers and named staff and see which can answer a sample of 12 questions the most quickly, accurately and effectively. Would be a good little research project.

That’s assuming they answer at all as yet again, the SOCITM Better Connected Survey has revealed that 25% of councils sent an email…never replied.