A new site for London

This first post to the City Hall Blog marks a turning point in the life of www.london.gov.uk with the launch of london.gov version 2.0.

We’re not saying this new site is perfect, it’s not, that’s why this is a soft launch. But it is a good first step towards achieving our goals of using digital channels to engage with Londoners, give Londoners access to our work and enable conversations to happen that just wouldn’t have been possible before the advent of Web 2.0.

This is just a stepping stone for the GLA and the direction of travel is well marked out by two of our other big digital projects that we’ve been working on in parallel: Climate Change Adaptation (download your aquamask here) and the London Datastore, a first step to freeing London’s data.

All of these sites are built on Drupal, a free open-source content management system which is cheaper to develop on than proprietary systems and has a huge community of users with whom we will be able to share resources. We're committing to 'open sourcing' any applications or modules that we develop on Drupal so that anyone who wants to can take the code and use it for free - including other government bodies who we hope will follow our lead!

We’re not going to spend lots of time telling you about what you’ll find on this site but we do hope you will browse around and see for yourself. And if you find any broken links or worse still any nasty bugs, please drop us a line and we’ll fix it.

The City Hall blog is going to be updated weekly. The Mayor, his Advisors, Assembly Members and the GLA team will all be starring over the weeks to come.  We hope you’ll check back soon. In the mean time, happy surfing.

The Web Team: webteam@london.gov.uk