I’m working up a proposal to do something truly radical with a Whitehall website. Given the impossibly tight timescale, the only approach is to adapt some existing (open source) software… and inevitably, my first thought is WordPress. But hang on… WordPress is all about blogs, and its interface uses words like ‘blog’, ‘post’, ‘comment’, ‘trackback’. These are scary, unknown terms to those who have never dabbled; and they’re enough to put many a public sector person into an early grave.
Then it strikes me. There is one way we could replace all the scary jargon with something a bit more Civil Servant friendly: create a foreign language translation from English to Civil Servant. WordPress has the necessary functionality, and the tools are free. It isn’t a trivial task, with literally hundreds of system messages to review and potentially ‘translate’, but I’m certainly considering it.