The publishing director of the government's central web portal has said the public sector needs to remove the barriers between policymakers and website technicians.
Guy Ker said this would help to improve the government's online operations, as well as play an important role in the creation of more efficient and effective public services.
Speaking at Kable's Public Sector Online conference, he said: "Actually, this is a partnership and a cooperation, and it is just not good enough where policy is handed down on high and expected to be translated into this new medium."
Many government services are too complicated, Ker said, and in an age where people are used to high-quality services, such as those the provided by the BBC and some private sector organisations, complexities will become increasingly obvious.
"The great institutions created after the war in health and social service; they have done extremely well for this country," he said. "But our challenge is to take that legacy into the digital age."
Trumpeting the success of Directgov, Ker told the conference that usage figures went up from seven million hits a month in January to 20 million hits a month this summer. "But we still have a long way to go," he added. "Our challenge is to offer a pain-free experience of government."
David Pullinger, the Central Office of Information's head of digital policy, told the conference of plans to make job ads and consultations available on Directgov in semantic markup to make them more easily reusable by other organisations.
"If you are interested in electrician jobs, you should go to a site that specialises in electrician jobs — whether they are in the public or private sector," he told public sector delegates.
"The same with consultations: the British Chambers of Commerce are always commenting on various bits of consultations. Wouldn't it be better if they gathered everything relevant to them on their website, have all their members comment and then feed back?"
Consultations that affect local areas will be treated in the same way. Pullinger said making data available in this way will create community- and subject-based services that combine public, private and user generated content.
The thousands of public sector websites will be replaced with a smaller number of "key channels", with a focus on Directgov, Business Link and the NHS.
Pullinger added that in recent experiments, the government had been "very successful" at using blogs for RAF and British Army recruitment, including one from an army officer in Helmand province. It is also using a virtual bus on Bebo and other social networking sites to teach teenagers about contraception.
