The British state has long lacked a decent portal to the myriad sites put up by Whitehall, councils, the NHS, quangos and agencies and the launch this week of www.Ukonline.gov.uk is a stab in the right direction.
It is a lot more user-friendly than the existing Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) site www.open.gov.uk, which is little more than an alphabetical listing of departments and agencies. But if you no longer need a degree in public administration to make sense of government online, you probably still need a GCSE in politics and a diploma in civics to make much sense of the information offered.
The new site is being presented as a test version. Ian McCartney, the Cabinet Office e-minister, said it was iterative - civil servants would monitor the way it will be used and improve it accordingly. It offers links to 1,000 or more other public sector sites. An effort has been made to organise its home page intuitively For example a bunch of links have been pulled together under the label "life episodes". This turns out to cover "going away", "dealing with crime", "having a baby" and so on.
The trouble is that a lot of the information accessed via these links is text based - imagine a frightened 16 year old having to plough through pages detailing NHS policy when what she really wants is specific information about doctors and clinics. Some sort of "Ask Jeeves" system for inquiries about public service is needed.
UKOnline is interactive. Four clicks under the crime rubric and you get to a page allowing you to report any internet site you have found offensive or potentially illegal. You can get information on how to report a crime or where to go for victim support.
This is useful but if you have to work hard to get solid information, especially data on local areas and services. Like most government websites, Ukonline persists with a hard and fast division between "central" and "local" government, assuming people know which services belong in which category, which they often do not.
Ukonline has been born with a handicap, which is that a private ISP had already bagged the title UKOnline at www.ukonline.co.uk
