New Open Government licence

Way back in January, I noted OPSI’s commitment to replace the Click-Use Licence with something closely resembling the Creative Commons ‘by’ licence. Following its early introduction on data.gov.uk, it’s now been formally launched  – and already, departments are altering their terms & conditions to reflect it.
Officially named the Open Government Licence, it states in remarkably straightforward terms that ‘you are encouraged (!) to use and re-use the Information that is available under this licence … freely and flexibly’. It has been defined to be legally ‘interoperable’ with the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, sharing a certain amount of its language – and even bears a mild visual resemblance to it, which is a smart move in itself.
As I’ve mentioned before, it doesn’t legally move the goalposts very much, I don’t think: but so much of this is in the presentation, and the culture change that it hopes to deliver. ‘Crown copyright’ sounds a lot more scary and protective than it really ever is/was. Even just the name ‘open government licence’ changes the whole tone.
There’s quite extensive guidance on the National Archives website, which should help departments appreciate what it all means: including, I’m delighted to note, some sample copyright statements.
The implications are perhaps best demonstrated by the brevity of the first few answers on the FAQ page:

Do I need written confirmation to use information under the Open Government Licence?
No. The Open Government Licence is an implied licence. By using information made available under the licence you indicate that you have accepted its terms and conditions.
Do I have to register for an Open Government Licence?
No. There is no need to register or formally apply for a licence, unlike the previous Click-Use Licence. Users simply need to ensure that their use of information complies with the Open Government Licence terms.
Are there any fees for using information made available under the Open Government Licence?
There are no charges for using information under the Open Government Licence.
How long does the Open Government Licence last?
Unless you breach its terms, the Open Government Licence is a perpetual licence.

It’s precisely the kind of brain-dead simplicity we’ve needed in this field. Innovators simply don’t want to wade through pages/screens of legal-ese, just to know if they’re allowed to play with your material. (Instead, they’ll probably go off and innovate with someone else’s.)

WordPress as bug-tracker


We’re heading into the final furlong on one of the biggest projects Puffbox has ever been involved in. All being well, we should be able to talk about it in a week or so. Trust me, it’s significant.
The stakes with this job are higher than most; so I wanted to take testing and bug-tracking a bit more seriously than usual. I had the idea the other evening to use WordPress as a centralised bug-log: and my initial thought was to use the Twitter-style P2 theme, by Automattic themselves. To be honest I’ve never really liked it, but I can appreciate its extra functionality – front end authoring, ajax comments, etc; and I’m sure we could have made it work.
But maybe someone had done a proper bug-tracking application on top of WordPress? One quick Google later, I found that yes, within the last month someone had… and it’s truly fantastic. One of the most inspirational pieces of WordPress work I’ve seen in months.
It’s called Quality Control, and it does everything you’d want it to do. Installation is a little bit fiddly, but nothing too onerous; set up a page to act as the ticket creation screen, define a few ‘states’ and ‘milestones’, and you’re away. Once it’s up and running, you shouldn’t ever need to look at wp-admin: everything is front-end. And as you’d expect, it’s all comment-able and feed-able, with email notifications, etc etc.
There’s a live online demo – so rather than me explaining how it works, go and try it for yourself.

Stott announces retirement


Appropriately enough, Andrew Stott has announced his retirement from the position of Director of Digital Engagement via Twitter.
He’ll be leaving in December, to be replaced* by Katie Davis – who recently returned to the Cabinet Office following a three-year stint as Executive Director of Strategy for the Identity and Passport Service. In her previous period with the Cabinet Office, she was Director of the Government IT Profession.
* Update: interestingly, Kable reckon she’s taking over on an interim basis only.
I’ve never come across her personally; but looking at her background, it all seems to be in ‘big IT’ rather than the smaller, more agile stuff that you might associate with the digital engagement role.
For reference, I captured the role’s job description here. Stott will be leaving the position after only 18 months, so we can’t really assess whether he met the objective of seeing that ‘the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government’ within two years.

DFID's blogs feed new Guardian site


With the kind assistance of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (I think he used to be big in computing or something), the Guardian has launched a new (sub)site dedicated to global development. And quite remarkably, it features regular contributions by UK civil servants.
In fact, it’s feeding (literally) off the DFID Bloggers site, built by Puffbox nearly two years ago (!). It pulls in the latest handful of stories from the DFID site’s RSS feed, and displays them in a cute little animated box. Pretty much what the DFID homepage itself does…
… except that the DFID homepage does something a little bit cleverer. As you’ll see, it carries not only the title and description – typical of any RSS feed; but it also shows the author’s face and job title, neither of which are standard RSS elements. It also turns the blogger’s name into a link to their personal blogging archive. Cool, eh? – dead easy, actually.
We do this with the aid of a little WordPress magic. The author photo is uploaded into WP using a plugin called User Photo; but Simon Wheatley and I worked on a ‘meta plugin’ to ensure these photos would be square, and hence more predictable to work with. And before you ask, yes, the meta plugin was indeed made available at wordpress.org… and has been downloaded over 3,700 times as I write this.
(The job title is an additional field added to the user profile; at the time, we did that with a custom plugin, but now I’d probably use this code by WP guru Peter Westwood.)
We then call this extra info – where available – into the RSS feed with a custom function, using the rss_item hook. (It’s all formatted using the standard MediaRSS extension, originally by Yahoo.) And so, each time a new post is added to the DFID Bloggers site, the DFID homepage can extract all the data it needs from the RSS feed, and slot them into the appropriate box.
… which is a very roundabout way of demonstrating that, contrary to what you may have read lately, there’s plenty of life in RSS yet.

RSS is dead, long live RSS


As a long-time user of Bloglines, it’s been pretty clear that the veteran online RSS reader was suffering from a lack of love lately. More often than not, when you hit the URL, you got an error message: two or three refreshes each time wasn’t unusual. The ‘beta’ version of its next incarnation showed no sign of reaching a full release.
But even so, it came as a bit of a shock over the weekend to learn that Bloglines was being closed down.
I’ve moved almost my entire online life to Google products – and yet, I never abandoned Bloglines for Google Reader. Hard to put a finger on why, really. I never really warmed to Google Reader, with all its bells and whistles… whilst Bloglines stuck doggedly to what it was good (enough) at. I particularly liked its stripped-back mobile interface, which allowed for ‘one click to download everything’ reading: perfect for long train journeys through patchy 3G coverage.
The justification comes on the blog of its parent, AskJeeves.com – which, yes, is still going.

The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. … Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.

I’m not sure how to feel about that. You see, before I became obsessed by WordPress, I was obsessed by RSS. Indeed, its approach to RSS was one of the reasons I fell for WordPress in the first place. Yet I still don’t think the usefulness of RSS is widely appreciated.
I don’t agree with the Ask.com blog, which says its place has been taken by Twitter and Facebook: that seems a very individual-centric perspective. That may be true for blogs specifically, person to person; but I don’t think it holds true for larger-scale publishing – website to consumer, or indeed, website to website. I always wondered if the name Bloglines was holding the product back: perhaps this is proof.
So, farewell Bloglines. It was fun while it lasted. I still don’t want to switch to Google Reader – but I need a solution which works seamlessly across iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, everything. I’m not sure there’s any serious alternative to Google Reader now… but the immediate plan is to experiment with the various platform-specific clients which sync with it. Recommendations, anyone?

A ‘WordCamp’ for Whitehall

If you’re a civil servant working in UK central government, and you’re using WordPress (or seriously considering it), I’d like to invite you to an all-day event I’m coordinating for mid-October.
Each January, we have the UK government Barcamps, bringing together civil servants and external enthusiasts to talk about ‘web 2.0’, social media, or whatever it’s calling itself at the time. And for the past three summers, we’ve had WordCamp UK, a gathering of the UK’s WordPress developer community. Both have been excellent fora for idea sharing, and contact building.
In the meantime, we’ve seen steady growth in the use of WordPress within government – to the point now that it’s the natural choice for interactive applications, the expected solution for small-scale sites, and a serious option for larger-scale development.
And so, with WordPress maturing, departmental budgets tightening and Ministerial demands increasing, it feels like the right moment to mash the two together: an opportunity for those of us already using WordPress in government to show off our latest creations, float some new ideas, and share our experiences – good and bad.
With the generous support of the team at BIS, I’m organising a day-long WordCamp-style event for the extended family of government – civil servants and gov-centric consultants, plus a WordPress VIP or two.
It will take place on Wednesday 13 October, at a government office in the St James’s Park area, starting at 10.30am and finishing at 4pm – giving you enough time to clear your inboxes before and after. We’ll have room for around 30 civil servants – so please, a maximum of 3 attendees per department. There will be no charge for attending, and we’re hoping to provide a decent (off-site) lunch.
Like Barcamp, we’ll want the day’s programme to consist primarily of volunteers providing 20-25 minute presentations / demonstrations about projects they’ve been working on. So if you’re working with WordPress, please do take a slot to tell us all about it – even if it isn’t quite ready, even if it didn’t quite come off. Unlike Barcamp though, we’ll be doing our best to arrange the programme ahead of time.
In addition to the usual suspects on the consultancy side, we’ll also be joined by a few specially invited guests – including Peter Westwood, one of the core developers of WordPress (and soon to be working full-time for Automattic).
Book your place via Eventbrite – but please, do think about that three-per-dept limit. We’d like all interested departments to have the opportunity to send someone.
We’ll be coordinating the planning of the event using a group on the UKGovCamp.com site, built by Steph and Dave, and running on WordPress/BuddyPress 🙂 – so if you haven’t already registered for that site, please do so. Membership of the event group will be restricted to attendees (at least to begin with).
If you’re a supplier and you’d like to be involved, please contact me (with details of your WordPress and/or government experience). Be warned, strings are attached.
Any other questions, feel free to get in touch via the website, or leave a comment below.

Back in business

Thanks, everyone for going easy during the month of August. I haven’t said much about why I took the time off, and don’t propose to: trying to maintain a distance between my private and professional lives. But one word of advice: don’t, under any circumstances, ask me if I enjoyed my ‘holiday‘. Totally the wrong word.
I haven’t been able to tear myself away completely from the technology: to do so these days would be almost impossible, especially when you run your own shop, especially when you’re its only employee. But putting ‘proper’ work on hold has allowed me to play with various things I wouldn’t otherwise have found time for.
Primarily to keep my pre-school daughter entertained one wet afternoon, I splashed out on a Polaroid Pogo mini printer. For £25 or thereabouts, you get a little unit roughly the size of your hand, which prints little colour stickers via Bluetooth. The quality’s so-so, the pictures are tiny, and like old-school Polaroid photos, the blank media is far from cheap… but there’s just something cute about it. I’m seeing plenty of potential uses in the business, not least printing my own custom laptop stickers. 😉
I’ve accepted that my first-gen Asus Eee netbook is now effectively disposable, and have started doing dangerous things with it. I’ve had two or three different flavours of Linux on it in the past month: currently trying Jolicloud. Its blurring of the lines between on-board and cloud-based apps doesn’t feel quite finished; but it’s a nice netbook-friendly front-end on Ubuntu, prettier than the official ‘remix’, and that’s good enough for the moment.
I’ve recoded the puffbox.com theme, although I doubt anyone else will notice. I’m planning a more thorough redesign of the site at some point, and the shift to the same CSS framework I’m using for all my client work these days will help, when the time (finally) comes.
And after much deliberation, I’ve switched my TV and broadband from Sky to Virgin. For roughly the same price, the Virgin package gave me 2-3x faster broadband, HD telly (although I remain to be convinced by it), big-screen iPlayer (etc) and the ESPN family of channels – worth having, as an ice hockey fan. But so far, it’s the 4000-odd music videos on demand which have been the unexpected pleasure of the package.
The work wheels started turning again a couple of days ago, and I’ve got a few very interesting projects in the works. Watch for a significant announcement early next week.