Archive for June 2010
Gov websites to use open source ‘whenever possible’
In the response to a pretty innocuous parliamentary question from Tom Watson, new Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude makes a statement which could, on the face of it, be of monumental significance for UK e-government.
The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges - and that this should be achieved efficiently and, whenever possible using open source software. Any future development of websites run by the Cabinet Office will be assessed and reviewed against these criteria.
We've heard the 'hubs for debate' line before, in the Conservative tech manifesto, but the other part is quite startling. Open source software 'wherever possible'. An unqualified statement of policy. No caveats at all; not even financial. That takes us far, far beyond the 'level playing field'.
Directgov unveils syndication API
In one of his final speeches ahead of the general election campaign, Gordon Brown announced plans to offer Directgov's content via an API 'by the end of May'. And whilst other announcements in the same speech, such as the Institute of Web Science, have since faded or disappeared, the commitment to a Directgov API didn't.
Bang on schedule, the API has been launched - and it looks quite marvellous. You'll need to go here to register - but all they ask for is an email address. Once you've received confirmation and a password, you're away.
Pretty much all Directgov's content is available, and in various formats. So you can request (for example) articles by section of the website, or by 'keyword' (tag); or articles which have been added or edited since a given date, optionally restricted to a given section. You can pull down contact information for central government organisations and local councils. Data is made available, dependent on the query, in XML, JSON, Atom or vCard. (There's also a browsable XHTML version, from which I've taken the screengrab above.)
This stuff isn't child's-play; but to those who know what they're doing - and despite a few successful experiments this morning, I don't really count myself among them - the potential here is huge. Reckon you can do a better job of presenting Directgov's content, in terms of search or navigation? Or maybe you'd prefer a design that wasn't quite so orange? - go ahead. Want to turn it into a big commentable document, letting the citizens improve the content themselves? - well, now you can.
There's quite an interesting back-story to it all: I had a small matchmaking role in joining up the ideas people in Downing Street with the delivery people at Directgov. And whilst I'm told Directgov did have it in mind for some time this year, the Brown speech on 22 March rather forced the pace. Six weeks (so I'm told) from start to finish isn't half bad. And whilst I've certainly had the odd dig at Directgov in the past, I'm happy to say a hearty 'well done' on this one.
It's a potential game-changer in terms of how the content is presented to the public; but it may also have implications for those producing it. A quick look at the nearly 15,000 'keywords' reveals, perhaps inevitably, a rather chaotic picture: bizarre and inconsistent choices, typos, over-granularity, and so on. My guess is, it's not been used for front-end presentation before, so it hasn't had much editorial attention. However, now the data is out there, it has to be taken seriously.
Minister (not) warned for (not) tweeting at 1am
For the last week or two, I've been trying to draw together some thoughts on Ministers and blogging / tweeting, particularly as regards former Opposition figures now finding themselves in government, and a coalition government at that. Truth be told, I still don't have a great conclusion to share, only that it's a bit complicated.
One MP who hasn't let the transition to Ministerial office stop her blogging is Lynne Featherstone. She's been as prolific as ever, with posts on constituency matters, party affairs and her new Home Office equalities portfolio. This caught the attention of the Daily Mail, who published a story at the weekend entitled: 'Minister warned over 1am tweets'.
There were only two problems with that headline:
- The tweets weren't at 1am. As Mark Pack explained at Lib Dem Voice, the default timezone when you look at Twitter.com is San Francisco: so those '1am tweets' would actually have been 9am UK time... if that even matters.
- I've been in touch with Lynne directly, and she confirms to me: 'no [Home Office] mandarins have told me off at all!' And the next bit won't come as any surprise: 'Nor did the Mail check any details with me.'
The extent of the warning appears to have been a proactive call to the Home Office press office, with a 'spokesman' being quoted: 'The Minister is well aware of her responsibilities under the Ministerial Code.' You could call that a warning; I'd call it a statement of fact.
It's a pathetic character assassination piece, with so many holes in it that I can't face picking it to pieces. Even a blog post highly complimentary of her 'boss' at the Home Office, Conservative minister Theresa May was depicted as a controversial expression of her doubts. So it's not a bit of wonder that the ensuing comments react with horror at how someone so divisive and clearly deranged should be a government minister. Even if the Mail were to correct or withdraw the piece - which, so far, it shows no sign of doing - it's too late; the damage, such as it is, is done.
But at least the 'proper' newspapers wouldn't print something so shameful, would they? Sadly, they did. Later the same day, the Telegraph basically re-wrote and re-published the Mail piece, minus (to give them a tiny amount of credit) the embarrassing timezone thing. The Sun did pretty much the same thing, the next day.
You know, you'd almost think they're more interested in inventing controversy than reporting facts.
First they came for the Permanent Secretaries…
Some excitement this morning at the publication of names, positions and salary bands of the civil service's top 172 earners. A few names familiar to anyone reading this blog - Matt Tee, John Suffolk, Vanessa Lawrence, Alex Allan (one for the old-skool there!) - but mostly, it's departmental Permanent Secretaries, and very obviously senior staff. The MoD and Cabinet Office have the most people on the lists: the former mainly 'top brass', the latter mainly lawyers. In truth, I'm not sure there's an awful lot to get excited about.
The real fun will come in September: it was stated in the Programme for Government, and has now been confirmed in a letter from the PM, that:
Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants and NDPB officials with salaries higher than the lowest permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale to be published from September 2010.
And according to the Civil Service website, the bottom of the SCS band 1 payscale is £58,200. That's going to mean the full salary details of many mid-level managers - quite a few of you reading this blog, I'd guess? - being published in full. Brace yourselves.
We're getting a new committee - to include Messrs Shadbolt, Berners-Lee and Steinberg - tasked with 'setting open data standards across the public sector and developing the legal Right to Data'; and a promise that full departmental organograms will be published in October.
But perhaps the most intriguing line is the one buried near the bottom of Cameron's letter: 'From July 2010, government departments and agencies should ensure that any information published includes the underlying data in an open standardised format.' Open? Standardised? Would one expect Microsoft Office formats to meet those criteria? I'm not so sure.
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