Puffbox

Is there really a 1-in-3 chance of a general election in three months, as Charlie Beckett’s insiders claim? If so, webmasters in the fields of both news and government really should be spending some time over the summer, working up a contingency plan.

This is the first election in the ‘web era’ where a change of government is a serious possibility. I remember the changeover from Tories to Labour in 1997: websites were smaller and much less important. Frankly nobody was going to bat an eyelid if large chunks of ‘old regime’ content disappeared overnight – which, if I recall correctly, is precisely what happened. I’m sure there were ‘changeover plans’ for the ’01 and ’05 general elections, but I bet nobody put much effort into them.

In principle, of course, the right thing to do is ensure that all material remains available, but is marked as being from the previous government. In practice, that may be pretty tricky. I’ve worked in one major Whitehall department which couldn’t even do a ‘find and replace’ on its pages’ headers.

Charlie’s article muses on the likely impact of email and social networking in politics. We’ve talked about this a lot over the past couple of years, and there’s been plenty of experimentation, in terms of voter engagement and mobilisation. Now I’m wondering if Facebook might finally be a vehicle to make it happen.

It’s much less effort, and almost certainly less binding, to join a group on Facebook in support of a particular cause or party, or to register a candidate as your ‘friend’. But in doing so, you’d be inviting a stream of campaign messages, which (crucially) would sit alongside the updates from your ‘real’ mates. Inside the personal firewall, if you like, in a way that mass email just isn’t. Plus of course, all your contacts will see your new affiliation, spreading the word without any manual effort.

So well done to the LibDems for getting a big Facebook button on their site’s homepage; this may be a factor in them having twice as many members for their ‘Ealing Southall Liberal Democrat Campaign’ group as the ‘Ealing Southall Conservatives’. The Greens have a representation of a few dozen in their ‘Sarah Edwards for Ealing Southall’ group. But Labour? – nothing. And frankly, a diabolical constituency party site.

A word, though, for the Tories’ CampaignTogether site. A nice idea: launched early this year, or perhaps very late last year, its aim is to get the party grassroots to help out in any neighbouring by-election campaigns. But it was clearly conceived before Facebook’s emergence. Doesn’t Facebook do largely the same thing, only better?

Who knows – by the time the general election finally happens, Facebook may well have been superseded. But if I ran a political party’s web effort, and if I was drawing up a contingency plan tonight for an autumn 2007 general election, Facebook would feature heavily.

I haven’t seen any official statement, but I have it on good authority from a Cabinet Office insider that the new ‘minister for e-government’ (or whatever we’re meant to call it these days) is Gillian Merron. But it doesn’t exactly sound as if she’s especially hot on the subject. Mentioning your responsibility for all government websites on your own government website would probably be a good place to start.

This was going to be a blog post about ‘permalinking’ in government. But as I started to research it, I came across something quite shocking.

I was told today that 50% of the web links quoted in Hansard are no longer functional. The standard excuse that ‘ah well, you know how it is’ doesn’t really stand up when you’re talking about the official record of parliamentary proceedings. Of course, it presumably isn’t the fault of Hansard itself. But if it isn’t their fault, it’s certainly their problem. I’m told there are early discussions involving the people like the Cabinet Office and National Archives, about trying to establish some kind of permanent referencing system to stop this happening. Not before time, if this is how bad things already are.

Of course, we can take it for granted that URLs were at least accurate when they were initially published, can’t we? Er, no. Brace yourself.

I thought I’d count up how many URLs were quoted in the last published day’s written answers. (The answer was eight, incidentally – and they were all fine, although the Foreign Office‘s lengthy addressing looks really ridiculous in this context.) In the course of doing so, I came across the following which actually, genuinely got through, in a written answer by Mike O’Brien. I don’t count it among the aforementioned eight URLs, for what will be immediately obvious reasons.

This detailed publication can be found in the House of Commons Library and on the Pensions Regulator’s website at: [email protected].

Yes folks, that’s a website address quoted with an @-sign in the middle of it. Must be some special kind of website that I’ve never come across. You’ll also note the domain ‘pensionsregular‘, not ‘regulator’. But it gets worse… the officially quoted email address for the Pensions Regulator is actually customersupport@thepensionsregulator.gov.uk Now it may well be that thepensionsregulator is just an alias of pensionsregulator – but at the very least, you’d think they’d pick one and quote it consistently. So we have a web address quoted which isn’t a website, isn’t spelt properly, and is either inaccurate or inconsistent. Fantastic.

(See the original in all its glory here – it’s at the very bottom of the page. It also made its way through to theyworkforyou, incidentally, but that’s hardly their fault.)

I’m stunned that this was signed off at all appropriate stages by (presumably all three of) the Pensions Regulator’s office, DWP and Hansard. And I don’t think it’s acceptable or excusable. It certainly makes me wonder how much attention people actually pay to their PQ responses.

The National Audit Office reckons government is spending £208m on websites each year, but that there’s only been ‘little improvement’ in the last five years. Nine recommendations helpfully listed in the executive summary, but mostly fairly predictable – and the good guys are probably doing them all anyway.

It’s a good idea to ‘help departments and agencies to judge the correct level of investment in websites and transactional services’. Unless you know how much something should cost, you can’t really assess those tender responses properly. (And of course, these days, so much of it should be free anyway. Like, er, WordPress.) I’d be stunned if departments aren’t looking in depth at their usage data, but I guess some still don’t.’Ensure websites meet accessibility and usability criteria’? Well, duh.

The suggestion of extra marketing to push the Directgov brand is a bit of a surprise, and would be controversial if taken up. But I’m most interested by the suggestion of publishing ‘revised, up-to-date standards expected of all government websites’. The existing standards were (mainly) written five years ago, and a lot has changed since then. (Intriguingly, they no longer feature on the ‘live’ Cabinet Office site, but they are available in an ‘archive’ area.)

Sir David Normington, top civil servant at the Home Office, has a blog of sorts on his department’s intranet. He’s not the only senior official to do this: it’s a natural extension of the ‘letter to staff’ you see in every internal newsletter.

But somebody put in an FOI request to see the contents… and the man/woman at the Home Office said yes. So here’s a first wad from last month, and a further wad published yesterday. I’m actually quite encouraged by it all: frank admissions of where the problems are, and freedom to express some personal opinion. Traits a good blog should have.

Of course, this was probably all done on the (always mistaken) assumption that it would remain within the Home Office. If this can be retrieved each month by someone lodging an FOI request, you almost wonder if it would be more efficient to publish it in the open. Indeed, couldn’t someone just lodge a regular request each month, then copy-and-paste it into a publicly visible blog him/herself? The genie just found a way out of the bottle.

Credit: BBC Open Secrets blog.