Commenting is not crowdsourcing
I've noticed a lot of people getting quite agitated by this Guardian piece about how the Programme for Government 'crowdsourcing' (sic) exercise has ended 'without a single government department expressing a willingness to alter any policy'. Now, I'm speaking for nobody but myself here - but what the Guardian piece doesn't fairly reflect is that [...] Read on »
Open source policy: back where we started
It's good to see the coordinated publication of departments' responses to the Programme For Government exercise - including the Cabinet Office's reponse on government transparency, which also covered the use of open source software: We are committed to the use of open standards and recognise that open source software offers government the opportunity of lower [...] Read on »
NHS kills Google advertising
I noted back in February that NHS Choices had spent £2.7m in one year on pay-per-click advertising. Well, that's all changed now: a PQ answer reveals that the Adwords budget has been cut by 100%. In line with Government policy, NHS Choices no longer has any arrangement, or pays for any search engine activity. No [...] Read on »
Directgov’s £28m/yr to be cut by a third
For those interested in the move of Directgov, and its 172 FTE staff, back to Cabinet Office control, there's loads more detail in an explanatory document published on the Parliament website. I say 'published': it's been slipped out as a PDF on the little-known deposits.parliament.uk subsite. The note confirms that 'Directgov funding will be reduced [...] Read on »
New project adds iCal feed to WordPress 3
I've been working with well known LibDem blogger Mark Pack, whose day job is with PR company Mandate, to migrate the website of the Cancer Campaigning Group over to WordPress. It's a fairly modest little site, and I was under orders to keep the design broadly as-was. But it's got one specific feature I'm very [...] Read on »
Constituency maps in under a minute
Opening up geographic data is beginning to bear fruit. MySociety's Matthew Somerville has just unveiled MaPit, 'our database and web service that maps postcodes and points to current or past administrative area information and polygons for all the United Kingdom.' What that means in practice is, postcode lookups and boundary data are now just a [...] Read on »
Directgov returns to the Cabinet Office
I couldn't help smiling at the news of Directgov going back to its original home in the Cabinet Office. Funny how things go full-circle: launched from within the Cabinet Office in April 2004, to COI (an 'ideal location') in March 2006, to DWP in April 2008, back to Cabinet Office in July 2010. The Cabinet [...] Read on »
WordCamp UK: the camaraderie, the controversy
I spent the weekend in Manchester at the annual WordCamp UK, which Puffbox was again proud to have sponsored. It brought together 150 people from all over the country - plus a few from further afield, much further afield in one or two cases. Not everything went well, but we'll get to that in a [...] Read on »
Coalition brand identity
Back in May, I wrote a piece about consistent government branding. Given the benefits in terms of cost savings and strengthened identity, I suggested: 'it's an idea whose time has come, and will not come again for some time.' A couple of months later - after several web projects, a print item or two, and [...] Read on »
Websites under £20k dodge Maude’s gateway
There's an intriguing mismatch between the answers to two PQs tabled by former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson today. In one, he asks 'what criteria have been set to govern the creation of new Government websites', to which Francis Maude replies: I am determined to reduce the number of Government websites and so the creation [...] Read on »