The Jeff Beckham Weblog

I posted an item today over at Austinist about the city hosting a series of town hall meetings to hear what folks in the community would like to see as part of the new City of Austin website. City officials have already done a web survey, and they plan to share the results of those at the town halls as well as talk about best practices that have been gathered from other cities. And, of course, they’d like your input on the site as well.

I don’t doubt the city’s sincerity in gathering this info and hearing what people would like to see in the new site, which is part of an open government initiative called AustinGO. But, as a commenter over at Austinist pointed out, getting too much of the public’s input may not necessarily be a good thing.

Certainly from a design perspective, too many cooks tend to spoil the broth. As Seth Godin puts it in Rule #1 of How to create a great website: “Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a dealbreaker.”

But as I read the city’s press release more carefully, I believe they’re on the right track. I believe they’ve hired web professionals for the design and structure of the site, along with the strategy for what should be there. Hearing from the citizens about what they’d like to see is like a giant focus group - perhaps a nugget or two of inspiration will come out of it, but it’s really an information-sharing process.