Puffbox

I'm glad my former Microsoft colleague John McGarvey reminded me of Conservative shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt's proposal of a £1m prize to develop 'the best new technology platform that helps people come together to solve the problems that matter to them'. That's what happens when you announce things over the Christmas holidays. The plan is [...] read on »

Today sees the launch of the latest little site we've built on behalf of - or more accurately, in collaboration with - BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. It's a pretty straightforward WordPress build for something called the National Student Forum: a panel representing HE students' interests, whose latest annual report was published [...] read on »

The BIS All-Stars have produced something relatively small-scale in support of their new consultation on credit and store cards: but it works remarkably well. Working with plain English consultancy Simply Understand, they've boiled the classic 80-odd-page goverment consultation document down to just 10 (and done a nice design job on it too). But then they've gone [...] read on »

One of my bigger projects this year has been the website for the Care And Support green paper, aka The Big Care Debate. Basically, the country is in desperate need of a new funding model for long-term care of the elderly and disabled: and in July, three funding options were put forward for consideration. And [...] read on »

A few months back, I helped the Department For International Development set up an online consultation site for their white paper on Eliminating World Poverty. We used WordPress (obviously), plus Steph Gray's Commentariat theme (with a few tweaks). The site was well received, and had close to 500 reader comments, many of them lengthy. So [...] read on »

The final version of COI's browser testing guidelines have emerged, and it's simply wonderful to see a shorter, tighter, more standards-centric document than the draft I reviewed back in September. In fact, looking down my bullet-list of specific recommended changes, all of them seem to have gone into the final document. Cool. The revised document is [...] read on »

Back from the Christmas break, and thoughts are turning to the second annual UK Government Barcamp at the end of the month. I'm told the venue is about to be confirmed; and already we're seeing people concerned at not being able to get a ticket, despite the fact 'tickets' haven't yet been released. Regardless, it's [...] read on »

Timely, given the release of Google Chrome, and the reopening of the Browser Wars: COI has just issued a consultation document, five months in gestation, on browser standards for public sector websites. Its 15 pages can essentially be boiled down to the following, based on an intriguing 2% rule of thumb: 17. Browsers used by 2% [...] read on »

There's no stopping Steph Gray over at DIUS. Last week it was a 'commentable' White Paper, driven by WordPress. Today, they've launched a remarkably deep consultation site on Science and Society. In his writeup, Steph is kind enough to quote my own work for the Ministry of Justice's Governance of Britain as an inspiration. But [...] read on »

I'm genuinely delighted to see the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills allowing itself some room to innovate. As DIUS social media manager Steph Gray explains, they've just published an interactive version of their white paper on innovation (published a few months back), using - wahey! - WordPress. Or more specifically, CommentPress: the theme which [...] read on »