Puffbox

I couldn’t help feeling slightly underwhelmed by the new Prime Minister’s statement on constitutional reform. I have fond memories of the rollercoaster week or so which immediately followed Labour taking power in 1997. I expected a grand gesture: instead, all we got was a ‘route map’. But he did make an explicit reference to ‘encourag(ing) this House to agree a new process for ensuring consideration of petitions from members of the public’. David Cameron said something similar a month ago, so I guess this one is a goer.

Congratulations to Jimmy Leach, a very deserving winner of this year’s New Media Age award for the greatest individual contribution to new media. If you aren’t in government circles, you may well not have heard of him; he’s the Head of Digital Comms at No10, and is arguably the man responsible for the e-petitions website, Tony Blair on YouTube, and various other unexpected innovations from Downing Street direction.

But I can’t help feeling the official citation misses the key reason(s) why he deserves it. As I’ve hinted before, Jimmy’s single biggest contribution has been in setting precedents. He has (or rather, had?) a direct line to the most important man in the country, and if TB said it was OK to do something, there’s really nobody ‘higher up’ who could overrule him. So Jimmy is free to do all sorts of radical things which most Ministries (with maybe one honourable exception) would typically strangle at birth.

Standard Whitehall mentality is that it’s only acceptable to do something innovative if someone else has already done it. (Which, of course, is a contradiction in terms, but anyway…) And if the ‘someone else’ happens to be the almighty Downing Street, all reticence disappears. Suddenly there’s no need to fear a call from the most powerful office in the land, asking what the hell you thought you were doing. If you post your Minister’s stuff on YouTube, in the same way that No10 posted theirs, what can go wrong? (And if it does go wrong, at least No10 will probably be stuffed too.)

Plus of course, don’t lose sight of an incredibly important part of Jimmy’s work: it hasn’t included a relaunch of the main No10 website. Most of it is just well-produced content, dropped into whatever CMS they have to hand. The video stuff uses external resources – a commercial supplier, and YouTube. (The petitions thing, admittedly, was a special case.) It’s all doable, no matter how bad your existing CMS is.

PS: Quick note on that other digital pioneer, new Foreign Sec David Miliband. Guido reckons he will be continuing with his blog. No surprise there: as I wrote here nearly a year ago, it was always a Miliband thing rather than a departmental thing. But I haven’t seen any signs of movement just yet, and it certainly isn’t something the FCO was factoring into its immediate plans, ahead of his arrival.

Gez Smith makes a fair point about the new DIUS (that’s the Dept for Innovation, Universities and Skills – obviously) website. Getting something together so quickly is quite an achievement… especially when you know how appallingly organised DfES used to be. (I think I’m safe to say that, now it no longer exists.) Sadly though, Gez, it isn’t built in WordPress. If only…

I read through the comments from the Cabinet Office, issued last week, accepting virtually all the conclusions from the ‘Power Of Information’ report by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg. Twenty pages of accept, accept, accept. So why did I feel so underwhelmed? In several places, the response seems to be saying ‘yes, we know all that, and we’ve started doing something about it already.’ (But if this were true, wouldn’t we have seen some results?) In others, the answer is the classic ‘let’s form a committee to talk about it’ response. By which time, of course, things will have moved on. Where I felt quite inspired after reading the original Mayo/Steinberg paper, this just feels like another pamphlet full of platitudes. Sorry.

I’ve also just spotted a new Better Regulation Executive report on ‘informing the public in a multi media age’ (PDF), concentrating mainly on statutory notices – planning, traffic orders, licensing, bankruptcies, etc. It seems to conclude that publishing notices in the local paper is expensive and ineffective, whilst lots of people are starting to use this new-fangled internet. Er, it is 2007, isn’t it?

This was presumably the final act of Pat McFadden’s time as Minister for E-Government; he’s now moved over to the former DTI. I can’t immediately see any indication of who’s taken on the e-gov portfolio: the new junior ministers at the Cabinet Office, under Ed Miliband, are Gillian Merron and Phil Hope.

A final posting on Miliband’s Defra blog. ‘The new mechanisms for political engagement and dialogue represented by this blog are needed more than ever,’ he writes. ‘It may take some time for new service to be resumed, but please watch this space.’ Strangely reminiscent of the last time he signed off… he was up and running again before the day was out.

I’ve a feeling David Miliband may prove to be a very good fit with his new department.

The Foreign Office was actually my first employer: I spent five years there in the mid-to-late 1990s, through what we should probably call the ‘web 1.0’ phase. I took it from a one-man effort (the one man being yours truly) to probably the most highly respected (and certainly the most trophy-laden) in Whitehall.

The promise of free, instant global communication naturally went down well with the Diplomatic Service – although I have to admit, most of my best work was done in the early days, before the whole internet thing came to senior management attention. FCO’s Travel Advice information is something UK citizens, at home and abroad, really do want and need; the daily supply of speeches and transcripts are an important ingredient of international diplomacy.

So now we’re into ‘web 2.0’, and by happy coincidence, the FCO will be headed up by someone who (as catalogued here continuously) ‘really gets it’. I do know that FCO is working on plans for a site relaunch early next year; they recently bought the Morello content management system ‘in a deal worth £1.47m’ over five years. They received a specific mention in Tom Steinberg’s recent report, naming them as a department which should do more in terms of information sharing and audience engagement, and I know they’re considering how to respond.

Miliband’s instinct for a more transparent and inclusive approach will sit well with FCO’s concept of ‘public diplomacy’. Foreign affairs is much more about persuasion and negotiation than most ministries’ activity.

So what fate awaits his ministerial blog, currently housed at Defra? With more UK casualties in Iraq this morning, he probably has more pressing concerns this time than website migration.

PS: Miliband just arrived at King Charles Street, and spoke of being ‘patient and purposeful, listening as well as leading’. And so it begins.