Puffbox

If you just can’t wait to get Tony’s response to the 1.8m signatures in opposition to road pricing, you can get all 1257 words right now from the Downing Street website. Good to see more of a focus on the next step this time, with onward links provided ‘to take it further’… but still far too long in my book.

The language used is balanced, plain-spoken and actually quite persuasive. And for a politician, it’s remarkably candid in places – ‘I fully accept,’ he writes, ‘that we don’t have all the answers yet.’ It closes with a commitment to ‘further consultations… The public will, of course, have their say, as will Parliament. We want to continue this debate, so that we can build a consensus around the best way to reduce congestion, protect the environment and support our businesses.’

I don’t think this ever was a PR disaster, as some have claimed. But by accepting the opposition, and responding to it in a measured and quite constructive manner, Downing Street deserves considerable credit. They didn’t have to do that; it would have been very easy to point to the many frivolous petitions on the system, and declare the whole thing a failed experiment in consultation.

It’s too early to declare this a new era in civic political engagement, but we’ll look back on this moment fondly. The next step is going to be fascinating. How will the public have its say, I wonder? Is an open approach to policy-making to be Blair’s ultimate legacy?

According to the BBC, we’ll get Tony Blair’s response to the road pricing e-petition from 6am tomorrow (Wed). How convenient, just in time to catch the Today programme. If it weren’t covering the big breaking story of the evening, the (apparent) announcement of a withdrawal from Iraq. (Good time to bury bad news, and all that.)

The email that went out on Monday about ID cards is available in full from the No10 website. And the first thing to strike me is, er, how long it is. Well over 1000 words, which pushes the limits of any guidelines for good online writing. To its credit, it’s all in the first person, and clearly has the personal touch, when it could easily have simply been another op-ed article. But for the few who get to the bottom, there’s no obvious call to action. It just leaves us ‘agreeing to disagree’, which doesn’t really help much.

I’m quite impressed by the new ‘big issues’ pages on the No10 site, incidentally. A nice way to package up all the related material, and clearly done with the casual reader in mind. There are a couple of headaches though, with inconsistent use of iconography, and a few not-checked-in-Firefox HTML issues.

Some great analysis from Heather Hopkins of the traffic (and by extension, the 1.7m signatories) to the now legendary e-petition on road charging. Heather notes that the Daily Mail website is the fourth largest provider of traffic to the petitions site (behind Google, Hotmail and the No10 site itself).

Further demographic analysis shows that almost half the site’s visitors are aged 55+, and living in southern England, with particularly strong representation for the South West and South East (not including greater London) regions. I don’t think this necessarily undermines the value of the signatures – but you have to admit, this is precisely the demographic you’d expect to be most naturally hostile to the plans.

I knew there were comments by Tony Blair about the (in)famous e-petition in Sunday’s Observer… but I hadn’t realised it was a full piece solely about the e-petition itself.

It’s a sign of just how fast politics has changed in the last decade that, while I once was criticised for being a control freak, I now find myself under attack for allowing dissenting views on my own website. And there is no doubt it used to be accepted wisdom, which I too accepted, that politicians needed to frame the shape of any debate and only engage with issues on their own terms.

But I don’t believe this is possible any longer. We have to remember that No 10’s new e-petition service has not generated the views against road pricing that have been expressed by more than a million people. They were already there and it’s not possible, wise or healthy for politicians to try and sweep them under the carpet.

What it has given us is the ability, which was simply not there before, to engage with those who have signed the petition and with everyone else in the country on what are the options for tackling congestion on our roads and, indeed, the other long-term challenges facing our country.

Over the next few days, I will be sending out a response to everyone who has signed the petition against road charging, explaining the problems the country faces and why I believe road charging is surely part of the answer here as it is in many other countries.

I’m not sure I can add anything to that. Only to advise anyone in the e-government business to keep this article bookmarked for future quoting… at least until the summer. For obvious reasons.

(I haven’t signed the petition myself… but if anyone reading this did, and receives the response, I’d be very interested to see it.)

The new post-Stellent website for the Department for Transport has now gone live… and somebody has clearly been reading the Web 2.0 style guide. Big table-free layouts, gradient backgrounds, reflections, drop shadows… actually very pretty. And I don’t think I’ve said that too often about government websites.

The most striking aspect of the site is its reliance on search as the principal navigation method. The huge photo-buttons at the top of the homepage lead you into pages of search results, showing the latest 500 items on your chosen mode of transport, rather than any particular content structure. It looks like everything is categorised by mode of transport, ‘subject area’, UK geography and audience (plus date, obviously) – allowing for some very rich filtering of results. (I’m not sure about ‘audience’ as a filter though… the categories inevitably overlap, and people don’t always categorise themselves as you’d expect.)

It’s possible to leave people feeling overwhelmed with this kind of approach: but Transport have done a good job in making it all feel fairly manageable. If I come here knowing exactly what I want, I’m fairly sure I’ll be able to get to it. But on the flipside, if I don’t know precisely what I’m here for, I’ve got problems.

Like, for example… say I want to find out exactly what has or hasn’t been proposed in terms of road pricing, as stories of a million-plus people signing an e-petition hit the front pages. There is official information on road pricing in there: but you’re just not going to find it unless you search for the right keyword. The petition itself refers to ‘the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy’: but ‘vehicle tracking’ yields zero results on the DfT site, so you’d better guess right. You have 1.5 million internet users taking an active interest in this developing policy: why isn’t it splashed all over your front page?

And inevitably, the ‘jargon’ term isn’t the term used by mere mortals. As a search term, ‘road tax’ is five times more popular than ‘road pricing’ (Overture data, Jan 07) – and guess what, ‘road tax’ only pulls up ten documents at DfT, none of which is relevant to the road pricing debate.

Plus, I’m genuinely quite shocked to see zero use of RSS. Surely it’s mandatory on any major new site build now… with IE7 and Windows Vista a reality? There’s a What’s New page which is crying out for RSS; the press releases and/or speeches are ideal candidates; and frankly, for a site driven primarily by search, I’d expect to see a ‘saved search via RSS’ option similar to the recent addition to BBC News.

I’m just so behind the times… it turns out that e-government is dead. According to Helen Milner, the managing director of UK Online Centres (yes, apparently they are still going), writing in the new Development Plan for her network:

The time has come to reposition the network, building on its strong foundations of community learning and social inclusion and developing its role to support transformational government (‘t-government’, formerly known as e-government), a major programme to modernise and transform the way government interacts with the public and delivers its services.

So from here on in, it’s t-go….. actually, no, forget it.