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.

Inevitably, there are some scarily large numbers contained within. For example:

• BusinessLink, one of government's three super-sites, quotes a £35,000,000 spend on 'non-staff costs' - accounting for 27% of the total spend as outlined in the report.
• There's no hint of the super-sites approach leading to economies of scale. BusinessLink, Directgov and NHS Choices spent £4m, £5m and £6m respectively on 'design and build', way beyond the biggest-spending ministerial departments (FCO and DH).
• HMRC appears to have 111 people working at least half their time on its hmrc.gov.uk website, costing £7,500,000.
• Across all departments quoted in the report, we appear to be paying £23,840,000 per year for web hosting.

However, despite COI's best efforts, I'm still not convinced that the numbers are directly comparable. On hosting, for example, many departments quote £0 - but I'm pretty sure they're paying for it somewhere. I'm not aware of too many departmental sites built on Blogger, WordPress.com or Geocities.

Some of the most encouraging news comes from the customer satisfaction reports from certain sites - although it's a pity these numbers only cover half the departments in the study, with HMRC and BusinessLink being obvious omissions. The much-derided Transport Direct claims to have 1.2 million unique users in the average month, with a net customer satisfaction rate of +84%, scoring particularly highly for ease-of-use and design (!). DFID scores +79, Directgov scores +73, as does the MOD.

Other departments, sadly, don't fare so well. DWP and Transport both show negative numbers for net customer satisfaction: -8% and -1% respectively, with very high %s of people finding 'none of what I wanted'. I'm wondering if those measures are fair on them, though? - it seems odd with Transport Direct and (I'm guessing) JobCentrePlus, now a major part of Directgov, doing so well. And it must be a bit embarrassing for COI to rank so low in their own study, on an area where they are tasked with setting best practice (12% net satisfaction).

Like it or not, the raw traffic numbers are likely to be the main source of amusement. Predictably, the super-sites come top on all measures; but there's a suspiciously strong showing for The National Archives, whose opsi.gov.uk site appears to be claiming to have more than 1m unique users every month. Again, BusinessLink's numbers stand out, reporting much lower traffic levels than their fellow super-sites. There's also wide variety in the number of page views per visitor, and monthly visits per unique user, which might merit further investigation.

As with any dataset, it's a mixed picture. The biggest questions, I think, are over the £23m hosting bill - and that's unquestionably an understatement, when you consider the number of departments who quoted zero for hosting; and the value-for-money of BusinessLink.

But as with any dataset, there's a huge risk of misinterpretation of its contents - and I wouldn't necessarily guarantee that any of the above analysis is either true or fair. Data is good at asking questions, but rarely gives clear answers.

There's a press release from the Cabinet Office; but to be honest, I wouldn't bother with it.

Disclaimer: I do web stuff for lots of different bits of government. Many of the departments named above are past or present clients.

A bit of a tricky moment this morning. As you might have spotted, Downing Street has launched an initiative asking 'public sector workers' to help the government find ways to implement the massive spending cuts proposed in Tuesday's budget 'in a way that is fair and responsible'. And as has become the norm for such initiatives, there's a comment-enabled website dedicated to it, built on WordPress. A 'hooray' is obligatory at this point, although to be honest, that's getting a little predictable.

In fact, it's a return to an initiative launched by Nick Clegg last summer:

The people who are best placed to tell us where money is not being well spent are the teachers, nurses, social workers and other public servants who work so hard day and night on our behalf. Politicians should stop talking over the heads of public servants. We need to listen to the people in the know on how we can better run public services, making sure that every penny of taxpayers’ money is well spent. That’s what ‘Asking People In The Know’ is all about.

... but since it's all happening again, and since the 2009 website is now giving 404 errors, one must assume it wasn't especially fruitful.

Anyway... If you have a look at the new website, you'll note a startling resemblance to the Programme For Government site which I built a few weeks back. It's very obviously a derivative work, based on my code. I didn't build it, and I didn't get paid for it. My contract gives the Crown the right to reuse my work; and in fact, I'm very glad they did. It's entirely in keeping with the open-source spirit... not to mention the need to find cost savings.

But as anyone following me on Twitter may have spotted, there was one slight hiccup. By convention, WordPress themes include details of their author. The original PFG theme notes me as its originator - obviously. But the derivative theme didn't. My name had been deleted, and replaced with the names of two people I've never met or spoken to: at least one of whom appears to be a direct commercial competitor.

I was not best pleased. I sent out a tweet to that effect: and to the credit of one of the individuals concerned, he subsequently added a line of acknowledgement. My name is duly checked, and I'm happy again.

I am absolutely not suggesting there was any attempt to infringe my intellectual property rights, or deprive me of a deserved payment. I'm perfectly prepared to accept that it was a simple oversight. But I needed to make the point.

Acknowledgement is the currency of the open source movement. There are communities of developers spending their free time building these tools, not to mention businesses freely handing over the fruits of their labours, resulting in you getting phenomenally powerful tools for £0.00. Saying 'thank you' is really the least you can do; and it's often the only 'payment' that the open-source contributor receives. Don't forget.

Not for the first time, Steph Gray lays down a good model to follow. On every page in his Commentariat theme is an explicit credit for the Whitespace theme by Brian Gardner; and there's a note of thanks to my regular collaborator Simon Wheatley in its style.css file.

And in case anyone's interested: yes, I do plan to write something for the consultation - it's also open to 'private sector partners working within public sector'. Now, I wonder what I might propose?

• The new CMS 'requires further work before it can be said to function effectively for its users.'
• 'There are questions over the extent to which the FatWire CMS system was customised unnecessarily.'
• 'The system is currently viewed as unstable by the BCC Web Team and requires remedial action.'
• 'More needs to be done before the Council's stated [accessibility] policy is achieved.'
• 'requires a look more in keeping with the vibrant city which Birmingham is. Navigation and design could be improved as part of this process.'

All that time, all that money... and it still sounds like there are significant problems with the fundamentals. Ouch.

In the comments on Nick's post, Will Perrin makes a daring - albeit, I'd suggest, a bit impractical - proposal:

there has to be a strategic communications and business case case for the council to cut its losses, ditch the site, write off the contrators, publish all the inevitable embarrasing internal emails and adopt BCC DIY, the subsitutue site built by volunteers in a few days reusing the council content. this would gain the council and Birmingham remarkable credit around the web as a world first and most importanly, give citizens and staff an easy to use reliable website. could probbaly be done beneth the EU tendering limit. the council leaders could speak on platforms around the world about brimingham’s crowd sourced web miracle.

But it's not all bad news in Brum. The ultra-cheap WordPress-based BirminghamNewsroom.com site (covered here) was recognised this week at the Local Government Association's Reputation Awards. And rightly so.

Out of the blue last week, I got a call from COI: was I available for an immediate, rapid turnaround WordPress job? I was a bit startled, and detail was lacking; but since this was precisely the kind of rapid-response thinking I've been trying to foster around WordPress for a couple of years, I couldn't really say no.

As it turned out, the project in question was the Coalition Programme for Government: and the mission was to build a commentable version of it, by the next morning. COI's initial proposal was to use Steph's Commentariat as a base; but given the document's structure, it didn't feel like a good fit. Plus to be honest, I knew I'd be more comfortable working with my own code, as opposed to unpicking Steph's - and time was too tight.

The theme came together fairly quickly, helped in no small part by the source document's fairly plain design - which I basically mimicked, with a couple of tweaks for better web usability. Extracting the text from the supplied PDF was excruciating, as you'd expect. But by the time I got to bed at about 2.30am, having barely left the keyboard since lunchtime, the site was ready, and my part of the work was basically done. It went live at 9:30 the next - well, technically the same - morning.

Now... I'm going to skip over the next bit, because I'm not the right person to tell the story. Suffice to say, people came in their many tens of thousands. And although measures had been taken to handle the expected load, the platform wasn't ready for quite that volume of interest.

But now, a couple of days older and wiser, the site has been re-enabled: and the comments are starting to come in. This in itself presents some interesting challenges: the document is, by its very nature, more party-political than most, and the comments will be too. The civil service's usual get-out clause - about the government being democratically elected, on the basis of its manifesto (singular) - doesn't really work this time. Thankfully, applying the moderation policy is someone else's problem.

Of course it'd be nicer if things had gone perfectly smoothly on launch day. To some extent, we've missed the boat in terms of the immediate wave of interest; but arguably, the comments might be more considered, with the benefit of a weekend to reflect and cool off. (Well, not 'cool off' given the mini-heatwave, but you know what I mean.)

And regardless of what went wrong, there's still a great story to tell, in terms of what went right. An interactive document, designed and coded from scratch, and delivered by bedtime. That's why we love WordPress.

But one or two departments have taken advantage of the situation to revamp their web presences: and it's been our pleasure to assist with one of these already - with more, perhaps, to follow.

In the run-up to Polling Day, we were asked by COI to provide cover for any 'emergency' web building which might result from the arrival of a new administration. Steria provided a hosting environment, with WordPress MU pre-installed; and I worked with Zed1's Mike Little to develop a theme which could be deployed and managed centrally, ideally very rapidly - but still be easily customisable for each individual site which used it.

In the end, there weren't any major Machinery of Government changes which required it: but Defra recognised the opportunity, and are using it as a base on which to start rebuilding their corporate website. They've worked with Puffbox on a few WordPress-based microsites already this year, so it's familiar territory for them - and in truth, I think it's been coming for a while.

The theme is fairly plain, sober and generic: inevitably, given that we had literally no idea who might need to use it, or how. There's a rather nice homepage carousel, managed via the WP media library; a widget-ised sidebar and 'fat footer'; plus special page menus at the top and bottom. It makes for quite a nice little site: certainly enough to get things started.

But whilst the design itself might not win awards, the behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty smart. We've enabled WordPress's 'custom header' functionality on the theme: users simply need to create a graphic of predefined dimensions, upload it into WP, and it'll be used as a full-width banner across the top (with the search form and - optionally - department name overlaid). In Defra's case, they've gone for a fairly plain black logo on white; but it could have been a lot more creative if they'd wanted. When we've tried this in test, we've found it can produce quite dramatically different 'feels' to the theme.

And then there's the colour palette. The theme's style.css file avoids defining most of the colours used on the page. Instead, there's an options page in the WordPress backend, where you can enter the colours to be used for specific page elements: links, the 'blobs' in the sidebar and 'fat footer', and so on. These are saved in the database table of options for that specific blog only; and the custom CSS gets added to the top of each page as it gets generated. (It's effectively an evolution of the work I did for BIS on Science & Society, but it takes the concept to a whole new level, and opens up all sorts of possibilities.)

But of course, the most significant aspect is the centrally managed hosting environment, and the official recognition of WordPress as a suitable tool for the job. Precisely what I've been proposing on these pages for ages. And you know what? I think it actually worked.

All of which makes it a good moment for a blog post I've been meaning to write for some time now, on the subject of WordPress in government.

I've been banging the WordPress drum up and down Whitehall since late 2007. At first, it was small tactical builds: the Darzi NHS Review in November, followed by the Wales Office in February 08. From there, over the road to Downing Street, and thence to half of central government departments - thanks in no small part to Steph Gray's Commentariat theme, first published in February 09.

So what exactly is it about WordPress in particular, that makes it so attractive for government in particular?

Cuts out (the worst excesses of) procurement: In my experience, procurement teams are very good at explaining why their role is crucial, and why they need to be invited to all your meetings. But when the best available product is available free of charge, you can instantly cut out a large portion of your project schedule.

Cheaper and friendlier suppliers: So far at least, WordPress has been the domain of the small-scale agency, or even the solo operator. We don't have tiers of business analysts and project managers. We don't have CMS solutions we built at significant expense several years ago, from which our product executives are trying to milk every last penny of profit. Generally speaking, the guy you speak to is the guy doing the work. No intermediaries, and minimal overheads.

Speed of implementation: WordPress's finest hour in government circles surely came in June last year. One Friday, two departments - BERR and DIUS - were unexpectedly forced together by a Cabinet reshuffle. By the Wednesday, and for minimal cash outlay, the newly merged web team had built a WordPress-based site for the new department. An almost incredible achievement, given the usual glacial pace of Whitehall web development. It just shows what can be done.

Focus on content, not process: For me the key strength of WordPress is that, as soon as you log in, you're looking at an authoring screen. If you haven't seen many CMSes, that may sound odd. But believe me, most platforms would much rather you waded through several layers of menu before you even get close to writing some words. And that's what policy officials and press officers are paid to do: not worry about taxonomies or systems admin.

More than you bargained for: Time and again, I find new things WordPress can do, which I hadn't previously known about. Things I'd never have thought to request in a tech spec; but because someone else did, or because it was a happy bi-product of something else, or because a geek somewhere fancied coding a quick plugin to do it, it's in the package. And one day, you'll suddenly be very grateful.

And last, but definitely not least:

The 'open source' principle: Open source does mean cheap code, but its true merit lies in what comes next. When government spends public money on IT development, the public has a right to expect to derive the maximum benefit from it - and that can mean so much more than simply getting a prettier or more efficient website out of it. In the same way that taxpayers now have a right to raw data, the same can - and I'd say, should - apply to software development. The use of other people's code - in the form of themes and plugins - is fundamental to WordPress; and it provides an easy framework to introduce the notion of releasing HMG-commissioned code.

If you've ever wondered why I've pushed WordPress so hard all these years, the answer is encapsulated in that last point. It represents a gentle introduction to some potentially huge concepts. I've seen too many people trying to pitch the concept of open source in philosophical terms; it rarely works. WordPress makes it real, and has already delivered tangible results. And we've only just got started.

Footnote: this post was prompted by Dave Briggs's reference to this video of author and blogger Aaron Brazell talking about 'WordPress and government' - which doesn't really say anything specific to government. Still worth watching though.

For just about a year, we've been looking after the website for The Big Care Debate, the government's large-scale consultation on the funding of long-term social care. We've had a great relationship with the team at the Department of Health, and we've done some fun, innovative and highly effective things: commentable documents, Facebook activity, online questionnaires, even user-submitted photo galleries.

The consultation process is reaching its conclusion, with the publication of the government White Paper on the subject. (For those who don't know the jargon: a 'green paper' presents options or starts a debate, often leading to a 'white paper', which is a declaration of government policy.) Oh, and as you might have noticed, there's an election on the cards, and we've already had a few skirmishes on this very subject.

When we first met to discuss plans for the White Paper publication, one idea was to 'live tweet' the launch event on Twitter; but I've never been a fan of sudden, frantic bursts of tweeting by one of the hundred-odd accounts I follow. (And indeed, I've 'unfollowed' certain people for doing precisely that.) So we reworked the plan, taking as our inspiration the undoubted success of the BBC's 'live text commentaries' - seen at its best on the sports site on a Saturday afternoon, but used with increasing frequency on the news site, for set-piece events like PMQs.

So over lunchtime, we'll be supplementing our live video stream with a live text commentary - using ajax and some custom WordPress wizardry. It's a very simple concept at heart. A live commentary is just a chronologically-presented series of short text chunks... just like a list of comments on a post. So that's what we're going to use.

The site editor will be entering his comments via a hidden, ajax-powered comment form: and, as with any WordPress comment, he'll benefit from features like automatic text formatting, including conversion of URLs into clickable links. Meanwhile, users will see each new comment appended to the bottom of the list, with a cute colour highlight, but without the need for a full page refresh.

Naturally, this means a much increased workload for the web server, particularly if - as we expect - we attract a sizable audience for what looks like being front-page news. WordPress and its plugin collection can do a lot to help; but we've taken a few additional server-level steps to ensure all runs smoothly. All the credit for this goes to my regular collaborator Simon Wheatley, who knows a thing or two about these things, thanks in part to his work for Stephen Fry.

There are plenty of options for running live text commentaries like this, such as the excellent CoverItLive. But there are a number of benefits to running it within WordPress: not least the fact that afterwards, you'll instantly have a bullet-point summary of the key points at your disposal. And as we've been building the functionality, we've been getting quite excited at other ways we could use it.

If you're at a keyboard at lunchtime, please drop by, and let me know how you find it.

Following the apparent success, back in December, of presenting a leaked draft of the government's IT strategy for reader comments, the Conservatives have repeated the trick by laboriously scanning every page of the Budget book, and presenting them on commentable WordPress pages.

They aren't asking for email addresses on comments, and aren't posting the comments when they're submitted - citing a desire to protect the 'anonymity [of] those who have sensitive insights'. It turns WordPress into an inbox filtering application, in effect: recording people's submissions against the page to which they related, but not really doing anything more than that. Nothing wrong with that approach, just a little curious.

Again, I applaud the Tory team's ingenuity here. But... writing on the Conservatives' Blue Blog yesterday, Jeremy Hunt said:

We will be publishing it online in an easy-to-read format (not like the enormous PDF documents so beloved of the Treasury) as soon as possible after its release.

Now, there's a lot wrong with publishing stuff purely in PDF files - and there's a lot right about doing this site in WordPress. But PDFs have several huge benefits which this image-based site can't match. Copy-and-paste, search, screen-reading, search engine indexing... etc. Plus, without wishing to be too pedantic: if 'enormous' is a reference to file sizes, the Treasury's 3.5MB PDF file equates to significantly less than 230 JPG images of roughly 150kB each.

Leaving aside the technicals, this is a very interesting initiative on several levels. There's the 'crowdsourcing' aspect, of course; but there's also an underlying message - that Labour will be trying to sneak the nasty things through in small print on page 186. They do, after all, have a certain amount of form on this.

So is this a declaration that under the Conservatives, they'll tell it to us straight - good and bad? I sincerely hope so.

Gordon Brown's speech, describing a vision of Britain's digital future, is stirring stuff, with its pledges to make Britain a world leader in terms of digital jobs, public service delivery and 'the new politics'.

The announcements and commitments came thick and fast - from the £30m to create an Institute of Web Science, to be headed by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, to confirmation of the release of 'a substantial package of information held by Ordnance Survey ... without restrictions on reuse', to a 'Domesday Book for the 21st century' listing all non-personal datasets held by government and arms-length bodies, to an iPhone app for Number10, to an API on Directgov content 'by the end of May'.

And then there's MyGov - 'a radical new model making interaction with government as easy as internet banking or online shopping.' On the face of it, this seems - finally - like recognition that citizens' expectations have jumped ahead of government's delivery in the last decade. There wasn't much detail in the speech - but it sounds to me like the first hint at Vendor Relationship Management, where the citizen shares his/her data up to suppliers. That's certainly where the Times seemed to be pointing on Saturday, when it described the creation of a 'paperless state':

The aim is that within a year, everybody in the country should have a personalised website through which they would be able to find out about local services and do business with the Government. A unique identifier will allow citizens to apply for a place for their child at school, book a doctor’s appointment, claim benefits, get a new passport, pay council tax or register a car from their computer at home. ... Over the next three years, the secure site will be expanded to allow people to interact with their children’s teachers or ask medical advice from their doctor through a government version of Facebook.

As I've written here before, I'm convinced this has to happen at some point. We build up personal profiles on Facebook, and allow Amazon and Tesco to analyse our purchasing habits - in return for much improved service. I just don't think it's sustainable on any level for government to continue to demand that we fill in lengthy forms, whether on paper or online, to get what we're due.

But of course, that's a huge government IT project, isn't it? And by definition, that's doomed? Well, there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line which suggests things might be changing:

This does not require large-scale government IT Infrastructure; the ‘open source’ technology that will make it happen is freely available. All that is required is the will and willingness of the centre to give up control.

Blimey: recognition that open source is ready to deliver the most visionary of government policy.

And with my WordPress hat on - do I ever take it off? - I can't help smiling at his pledge that 'no new [government] website will be allowed unless it allows feedback and engagement with citizens themselves.'

Of course, the speech has to be seen in context. Without ever mentioning the Tories, the speech was quite unashamedly party political in places: portraying the differing views of broadband expansion, or trying to match or trump Tory pledges on data transparency. It was also the speech of a Prime Minister staring at a huge public debt problem: and with neither tax rises nor spending cuts being palatable, that really only leaves technology-driven efficiency savings.

And it's the context that's stopping me getting too excited about it all. We're probably a fortnight away from government pulling down the shutters for a month. In six weeks, Brown may or may not be Prime Minister, and may or may not be in a position to deliver on these promises.

Comparisons with the Tories' technology manifesto are inevitable. In this speech, Brown blended small-scale but symbolic measures, like a Directgov API within weeks, with big-picture principles such as VRM. It's both shorter- and longer-term than the Conservative document - attempting, perhaps, to outflank Cameron, Maude, Hunt et al on both sides at once.

But whilst they may differ on certain matters of implementation, both are heading - rushing actually - in the same basic direction. On the face of it, no matter who wins, we can't lose.