Microsoft thanks WordPress for dropping IE6 support

As I noted here a while back, there could be bad news on the way for government people running WordPress sites: the next release of WordPress, version 3.2, will discontinue support for Internet Explorer version 6. Here’s how the new WP dashboard will look, courtesy of Automattic’s Jane Wells:

Ouch. Now, Microsoft has published its official reaction on the Exploring IE blog – and it might come as a bit of a surprise.

Last week, WordPress dropped support for IE6 and joined the hundreds of other web sites that are working to move enterprises and consumers alike to a modern browser platform. Thank you! … The additional developer work supporting IE6 and even IE7 is something we would love to see be a thing of the past. More than that, however, is the security concern.

Of course – and I say this as someone who used to work there – it wouldn’t be Microsoft if there wasn’t a sales message dropped in somewhere; and the blog post turns into a pitch to upgrade to Windows 7 on security grounds. But the point about developer effort is still entirely valid – trust me.
Out of interest: are any government readers facing a crisis next month, when the upgrade happens? Anyone running websites on WordPress, with only IE6 available to them? (Feel free to contact me directly.)

WordCamp UK tickets now on sale


Tickets have just gone on sale for this summer’s UK WordCamp, to be hosted by the University of Portsmouth in mid-July. If you fancy coming along for two jam-packed days of chat, code and creativity, and you fancy saving yourself a few quid, head over to the site and buy your tickets before 3 June – the price goes up by a tenner after that.
We’re delighted to confirm that Puffbox is continuing its sponsorship of the event; we’re the only sponsor to have been there since the very beginning.

Guardian man is government's new digital director

I have it on very good authority indeed It’s now been confirmed that the new (£142k pa) Executive Director Digital, filling the post currently held by Chris Chant on an interim basis, and advertised back in April, is to be Mike Bracken – digital director at The Guardian until last week.
Computer Weekly makes some interesting – and quite exciting – observations about the management culture he built up:

While GNM has outsourced some IT roles, the company has brought in information architects, analytics and product development managers as a discipline. GNM uses an agile environment for developing web applications and has scrapped project management and business analyst roles to replace them with product managers.

In fact, he sent a tweet to Steph Gray yesterday which seemed to suggest he sees a similar role for ‘product managers’ in government:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/MTBracken/status/71234171762262016″]
To get a flavour of what to expect, fasten your seatbelt and watch this five-minute breakneck presentation on innovation, which he gave to a WPP event last year:

… or this slightly more corporate presentation on deriving benefits from social media, at a Gartner symposium in October. (Fast forward eight minutes to skip the extended intro.) You’ll like what you hear.
Interestingly, in both presentations, he uses the same quote from Simon Willison. How exciting is it to have a new digital director who actually appreciates that:

You can now build working software in less time than it takes to have the meeting to describe it.

Those who know Mike are very complimentary about him: I note William Heath’s description of him last week as ‘one of the UK’s very best new-style CIOs’. On the downside, though, he’s a Liverpool supporter.
Mike’s personal website is at mikebracken.com – and he’s done a post formally announcing the appointment. He runs a couple of Twitter accounts: you’ll probably want to follow his ‘work’ account, @MTBracken.
He starts on 5 July.

BIS gets a blog


A fairly soft launch today for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’s new corporate blog: built by Steph Gray (obviously), using WordPress (naturally).
Taking a quick whizz round the Cabinet table, the departments now running formal, properly-designated corporate ‘blogs’ are:

Additionally, of course, there are a few corporate sites which are actually running on blog technology, but choose not to present themselves as blogs – notably Number10, Defra, and the Wales Office; plus various blogs for teams and projects, too many to list here, and occasional Ministerial contributions to the Tories’ Blue Blog.

Top Of The Blogs (says Wikio)

I discovered something rather disturbing in my website referrer data this afternoon; according to the otherwise reputable Wikio, puffbox.com is now ranked in the top 50 of UK technology blogs, and has been since last November. In fact, it’s been as high as no31 in previous months.
This either means the site is much more popular than I ever realised; or Wikio’s algorithm needs work. For now, I’m assuming the latter.
I’m almost certainly going to regret this in due course: but here’s the Wikio widget, proudly declaring the site’s current position:
Wikio - Top Blogs - Technology
Currently listening to: Phil Lynott’s Yellow Pearl, unquestionably the best TOTP theme tune. (Discuss.)

Skunkworks® building new e-petitions system


Well done to Richard Parsons at edemocracyblog for extracting (via FOI) the proposal submitted by Directgov to the newly created government ‘skunkworks’ for building the new government e-petitions system.
The project’s objective is ‘to allow UK citizens to submit petitions to Government, and particularly to be able to petition for parliamentary debates on any subject they chose, subject to the overall governance arrangements required by No 10 / Cabinet Office.’ With the commitment to debate any petition attracting over 100,000 signatures in Parliament, they’re expecting traffic levels to be ‘much higher’ than the Downing Street e-petitions site that went before. They’re proposing a development cost ‘upwards of £55.2k’ (at a £600 day rate, I note), and annual running costs of £86.2k for ‘light touch moderation’.
On the technical side, they’ve explicitly specified that it should be ‘developed using Open Source technologies’ – specifically a LAMP stack of Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, and PHP – although there’s no explicit commitment that the petitions code will then be open-sourced itself. Hosting is to be ‘in the cloud’, with a passing reference to Amazon S3 and the existing (‘underused’) Cabinet Office setup.
I can’t add much to Richard’s further analysis of the document’s contents; but I will note that it’s one of the first public airings of a full-on skunkworks ‘brand’ – which doesn’t appear to credit the name ‘skunk works’ as a UK registered trademark of Lockheed Martin, only to be used with ‘prior written approval‘. Hmm.

Beth Noveck 'recruited' to lead on open source policy making

From George Osborne’s speech this morning at the Google Zeitgeist conference:

We want to remain at the cutting edge of open source policy making.
So I’m pleased to be able to tell you that we have just recruited Beth Noveck, who used to work at the White House running President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, to help us take this agenda forward.
I can’t think of a better person to help us with this. After all, Beth literally wrote the book – ‘Wiki-Government’ – on how policy making needs to change in the internet age.
She’s a genuinely world class recruit, and she’ll be working alongside the likes of Martha Lane Fox, Tim Kelsey and Tom Steinberg to harness new technologies to make government more innovative and accountable.

She’s on Twitter at @bethnoveck, and has a blog at Typepad which has been updated within the past two years, no matter what its header claims.

Alphagov 'real deal' (with added local) to go live 'in about a year'

Some interesting comments from (interim) government digital chief Chris Chant, speaking at the SOCITM spring conference this morning:

(Alphagov) is not perfect and it could be significantly different when we go live with the real deal, which will probably be in about a year… We want to make clear the infrastructure we put in place is available for local authorities to use.
Guardian Government Computing

We will work out what the appropriate branding is in due course… We won’t ask for any money from departments and we’ll still save money… (Local authorities would be invited to use the infrastructure) probably at no cost or marginal cost… (The permanent head of digital will be appointed) in the next couple of weeks.
ukauthority.com

I’m only going by the quotes in those articles – but that seems like much more than ‘let’s see how the alpha is received’. But for those who were asking if it would be a replacement for Directgov – no answer yet, but definitely maybe.

Ten things Alphagov gets right


Late on Tuesday night, the password protection was lifted from http://alpha.gov.uk – and the most eagerly anticipated web project ever produced by government, arguably the only eagerly anticipated web project ever produced by government, was finally revealed. And it’s… well, it’s quite a shock to the system. Or rather, ‘The System’?
It’s important to recognise what Alphagov is, and what it isn’t. It is an illustration of how the ‘experts’ think government should present itself online. It is a pre-pre-release product: they aren’t just saying ‘you might find problems’, they’re more or less guaranteeing it. It is not a finished product – in terms of information content, browser compatibility, accessibility, etc etc. It isn’t a live site: much of the content is a snapshot in time. And it’s not a definitive blueprint of how things will be: it’s a challenge to the status quo. Some of it won’t be workable; some of it won’t be palatable. But it’s time to ask some difficult questions.
Rather than pronounce one way or the other, here’s my list of the ten things Alphagov – as a product, and as a project – has got right. (That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a complementary list of 10 mistakes, by the way.)

  1. The fact that it happened at all.
    Don’t lose sight of the achievement it’s been to get this going in the first place. Those involved haven’t been working for free: my guess is, the project will have cost several hundred thousand quid (update: pricetag of £261k ex VAT confirmed via Twitter), at a time when jobs and services are being cut (although of course, there’s a view to long term savings). It’s been shielded from the Civil Service: more of a skunkworks, probably, than the ‘official’ skunkworks. It’s been staffed by a phalanx of individuals and small operations, working with open source tools and technologies, and hosted ‘in the cloud’. This is not how ‘we’ do things.
  2. Delivery 1, Perfectionism 0.
    The team were brave enough to publicise a go-live date in the mainstream media. And to within a day or so, they made it. Sure, it was rough round the edges, probably rougher than they actually intended. But they were absolutely right to get it out the door, and worry about the fine detail later. That’s the luxury of being an alpha, I suppose: the opportunity to concentrate on what really matters.
  3. It challenges the norm (while it can).
    You know what they say about the ‘first 100 days’? That’s roughly how long Alphagov had – and they’ve used it to good effect. They’ve shown healthy disrespect for ‘the way we do things’, as they should. They’ve pushed boundaries, broken rules, and thought the unthinkable. But that grace period can only last so long: in fact, this public release probably marks the end of it.
  4. Focus on search.
    For many people, Google is the internet. Alphagov recognises this on two levels. One, it presents itself primarily as a search engine – with the sophisticated ‘auto suggest’ function being a particularly welcome addition. Two, it’s very search engine friendly, with very clean HTML markup, and meaningful and keyword-loaded URLs. It’s also nice to see them indexing other government sites in their own search, although the results are frankly a bit patchy.
  5. Tools not text
    Perhaps the greatest leap forward demonstrated by Alphagov is its preference for online interactions, as opposed to text documents. So for example, instead of a maths textbook explanation on calculating holiday pay, you get a web page which asks a couple of questions, and gives the answer. The page listing bank holidays doesn’t just give you a written list of dates – it gives you a link to a .ics file, which can be imported into your calendar (Outlook, Google, iCal, etc).
  6. Location based services
    On similar lines, it’s fantastic to have a geographic lookup function built in. So for example, instead of telling you to contact your local police station, then chucking you at a list of every police station in the country, it points you to the only one you’re actually interested in. (Well, near enough: the data for where I am seems to be a bit off.)
  7. Jettisons the old, embraces the new.
    Alphagov is surely the first government project to revel in its (very strongly-worded) disregard for government browser guidelines. Whereas ‘proper’ projects are effectively obliged to spend time ensuring things look and work OK in Internet Explorer v6, they’ve used that time more profitably – demonstrating how the use of more modern features, such as geolocation, could really be beneficial. How many times, I wonder, have great ideas for on-screen interaction been killed by the Lowest Common Denominator?
  8. Single government view.
    From a user perspective this one’s a no-brainer, but it still remains the most potentially explosive: absorbing each departmental web presence, and putting a common identity across them. They’ve handled this beautifully, albeit rather cynically. The departmental ‘sites’ retain a certain individuality, if only through the use of a defining colour – red for the Treasury, blue for BIS, and so on. And the Ministers, whose vanity could kill the whole idea, get great big pictures. But for most people, these departmental presences simply won’t be there, until you go looking for them. And that’s how it should be… as long as we can trust the team and the technology at the centre, to be responsive to departments’ needs and desires. (Sadly, the ‘alpha’ won’t tell us that.)
  9. Straight talk.
    I love this page: Does my child need a car seat? You get your answer at the very top of the page, in extra-large bold letters. The sentences are short, decisive and jargon-free. And there’s no missing the safety advice at the bottom, with its mock highlighter-pen effect.
  10. Transparency throughout.
    From the very start, Alphagov has been active on Twitter, picking up well over a thousand followers. They’ve given cute little insights into the team’s activity, they’ve answered questions, they’ve generated a bit of excitement. Shortly before launch, they launched a blog (with our help), pro-actively announcing and explaining some of their more radical approaches, and posting in their own names – not to mention direct links to their personal Twitter accounts. They’ve had (more or less) an open-door policy for people inside government wanting to visit, and see what was brewing. And now it’s live, they’re taking feedback via public routes: comments on the blog, Twitter / Facebook responses, and a Get Satisfaction account… and acting on it, too. Truly exemplary.

So what happens next? It’ll be fascinating to watch. The geeks have thrown down their gauntlets. It’s time for the civil servants to consider how their information and services could fit into the new mould. And for the public to compare the Alphagov approach with the established Directgov/departmental model. Which is better? There’s only one way to find out.

New look for WordPress admin side: bad news for IE6 users


WordPress takes the ‘open’ in ‘open source’ very seriously: discussion of functionality and design changes happens in public, and it’s always possible to download and play around with the next version in its current form.
Development work on version 3.2 (set for release at the end of June) is approaching completion, with a couple of significant additions in the last day or so: namely, a bit of a design refresh on the admin side, and a new default theme – named Twenty Eleven, but actually it’s the Duster theme which was added to wordpress.com in February.
I’ve played around with the new admin design for a bit this morning, and there’s really not much to report. It’s instantly familiar, and everything’s in exactly the same place (more or less) – but it does feel just a little bit more modern, and I suppose it’s good to keep driving forwards.
But there’s an issue which government folks may need to note: this release marks a conscious step away from IE6 (on the back end).

We probably can’t drop much CSS, as IE7 shares a lot of the issues. This is mostly symbolic, and reduces the platform combos we need to test. This also means any security issues that are shown to only affect IE6 only can be lowered in priority.
– Mark Jaquith, March 2011

This won’t affect what IE6 users see on the front end, as that’s dictated by the theme rather than WordPress itself. And it doesn’t mean the admin side will instantly become unusable in IE6. But the security warning alone should be enough to force remaining stragglers to upgrade.

Oh – and one more thing. There’s a really beautiful new ‘distraction free’ authoring view in 3.2. In WordPress currently, there’s an icon on the toolbar which looks like a blue monitor screen. When you press it, the text-editing box goes ‘full screen’, with a row of buttons along the top… just like Word. Well, 3.2 takes that a few steps further, and it’s gorgeous.