The Cluetrain doesn’t go to Mobhaile
Mobhaile is Irish local government’s vision of how it will provide electronic access to services for its citizens.
It strikes me as a luddite’s vision of what the information age is; it’s the vision of someone who does not use the internet in their everyday lives but who at the same time enthusiastically embraces it as the solution to everything.
Even the name is confusing. Not only is it in the minority language and difficult for non-Irish speakers to spell, remember, and pronounce ( muh-wal-yah is close) , but it’s not even consistent in itself. It uses the modern spelling in the url and the old-style spelling (where the séimhiú replaces the ‘h’) in the logo. The meaning of the phrase mo bhaile is not strictly what they say it is either. Sometimes it means ‘my town’ but not always. It may be a trivial point but it says a lot about the mindset of the designers. Ease of use is not high on the list of priorities.
The implementation strategy is a variant of the well worn ‘boil-the-ocean approach’, attempting to deliver the whole wide world of local government services to your desktop, filtered through a one-size-fits all information model. It’s bound to fail. All the knowledge and money in the world will not give you the ability to predict how a service as complex as this will be used by the various service providers and end users.
Somehow I don’t think they’ve read the Cluetrain Manifesto. Small pieces, loosely connected is the only way to manage the level of complexity inherent in applications of this type.
The Mobhaile Developer Blogs don’t offer much hope either. Seems like they’ve all taken a long holiday. Go figure.
Mark Waters marked time at 9:37 am on March 2nd, 2005 .
