Further to a recent post about e-government portals vs information services, Alan Mather has covered the launch of Directgov and linked to some comments about the service, whilst the service itself seems to be shaping up as one of the better e-government portal projects of recent years.

Elsewhere, Tom Raggett has discussed trying to offer whitelabel local authority services through Directgov as part of the LAWS project, which seems eminently sensible. He is obviously thinking about RSS more widely as well, offering a primer on the use of newsreaders and a helpful suggestion about using the widely recognised protocol as a wrapper for the more verbose variants of XML that will be required to deliver a full range of local government services.

Also, the Register recently reported on the first UK council to offer a local connection through to the government gateway, Shepway, using an off-the-shelf Departmental Interface Server from Sun/AG.

Clearly, the future lies in two-way syndication of information services, with local government sharing services upstream through the government's own portals (as Tom suggests) and central government making available its services downstream to local government (as Shepway are doing). The question is: why stop there? What prevents central and local government alike from simply wrapping up information services with their associated metadata and markup and offering it for use by community organisations, local NGOs and other interested parties or intermediaries?

The portal approach is possibly trying to do too many things for too many different types of people. That is one of the main reasons - above and beyond basic issues relating to usability, accessibility and marketing - that they have so far failed to achieve anything like the usage required to make e-government a success.

The focus going forward must be on wrapping up and delivering services and information in a way that others closer to the ground can adopt. Both government and civil society have a mutual interest in devolving the provision of information services to the lowest level possible. The two biggest vested interests standing in the way of this are the commercial interests of the big vendors who want to maintain the culture of unwieldy centralised IT procurement, and the political interests of an executive that places more emphasis on the form of communication than its content. Don't ask how you can communicate "your message" better - just give civil society standards-based, syndicated information services (minus the design and the 'lifestyle' content wrappers) and it will show you how to engage people in participatory e-government.