Puffbox

I’ve always been inclined to agree with the view expressed by Downing Street recently (no date given?), ahead of a seminar yesterday: ‘Overzealous data sharing rules may be an obstacle to improving public services… Laws and procedures that prevent different public services from sharing their customers’ personal details should be reviewed to bring customer care in the public sector up to the best private sector standards.’

The only catch which seems to stand up is that any joined-up system has to be very, very, very good on security and reliability. When it’s all held in one place, you only have to crack one system to compromise everything… and that certainly isn’t an appealing prospect. But it’s a trade-off like anything else. Risk vs reward.

I’ve been trying to find the provenance of a quote which – I think – is attributed to Jerry Garcia. It goes something like: ‘I used to worry about the CIA until I met them.’ (If anyone can give me chapter and verse on that, I’ll be very grateful!) Whoever said it, and whatever they said, they were spot-on. If you think the evil Civil Service is ready, willing and able to build a super-snooping megacomputer to track your every move, you’ll be disappointed.

If you’ve ever wanted to calculate the value of something in real terms, removing the effect of the inflation rate over time, it can be a real pain. So I finally got round to building a little web app which does precisely that – for prices as far back as 1750. Why? Because I fancied the challenge.

You can use it in two ways. One is the ‘Time Machine’, taking the price of an item for a given year, and calculating the equivalent price for a different year, based solely on the effect of inflation. So for example, I remember CDs costing 12 quid each in the mid-80s. If they had kept pace with inflation, they should now be costing nearly double that.

To calculate the ‘real terms’ movement in an item’s price, removing the effects of inflation, there’s also the ‘Up or down?’ tool. Type in a ‘before’ year and price, and an ‘after’ year and price, and the tool tells you the percentage rise or fall over that period.

It’s all relatively simple, I suppose, but I’ve used it as an opportunity to experiment with some exciting new technologies: namely Scriptaculous, Prototype and a bit of Ajax. It uses some basic PHP to do the various data lookups behind the scenes, rather than any database. I’m especially pleased with the slider controls to let you select a year (with conventional text boxes if you don’t fancy that). The design is a bit old-school, but it wasn’t meant to be a design challenge. 🙂

Update: It’s entirely coincidental that this should be on the same day that ONS launches its own interactive personal inflation calculator, with the aim of ‘(allowing) individuals to see how differences in spending patterns affect inflation rates.’ It’s all done in SVG, but I’m having real trouble using it in Firefox. Surely plain old HTML (souped up with ajax goodness), with a dash of Flash if necessary, would have been better?

There are a few documents explaining all about it available from here but be warned, you’re going to face usability issues, with or without documentation. (Simon’s first law of usability: if it needs instructions, it’s too complicated. A two-page PDF is a pretty spectacular breach of this law.)

I wasn’t very nice about the new MI5 email alerting service thing… but it was even worse than I thought. According to a BBC report:

Campaigners’ ‘found that data gathered was being stored in the US leading to questions about who would have access to the list of names and e-mail addresses… The activists discovered that the whole system had been contracted and some of it was being run by a company called Mailtrack that specialises in handling large e-mail mailing lists. More worryingly when people signed up to use the alert system, the standard encryption software had been disabled. This would have scrambled personal data, such as name and e-mail address, to stop others eavesdropping.

Even the US company operating the service admitted: ‘we would always encourage people to move it to their own country.’ Whoops. There’s even a suggestion that ‘one of the digital security certificates used in the scrambling process between the MI5 site and a user’s browser while they sign up was only issued two days after the mailing list was unveiled.’

The next tranche of English school league tables has been published today, covering secondary and post-16 performance. As with the primary school league tables beforehand, they are blessed with Google Map goodness. And yes, for the record, the user-centric redesign and the web-2.0-ification was a project I led. I said more about this in a post last year.

The Guido Fawkes rumour is confirmed: the BBC reports that ‘hundreds of government websites are to be shut down “to make access to information easier” for people. Instead government information online will be streamlined through two main sites – Directgov and Business Link.’

The Cabinet Office press release describes just how tough a line they’re now taking: ‘only 26 of the websites examined so far are certain to be retained by Government, while 551 will go. Information of continuing relevance from closed sites will transfer to www.direct.gov.uk and www.businesslink.gov.uk.’ Grr. But if you take the time to read the full report (available in PDF format from here), you’ll see on page 15 that the headline-grabbing figure isn’t as concrete as it might seem:

In the first phase of departmental reviews, 951 websites were considered across 16 central government departments. Decisions have already been taken to close 551 (58 per cent) of these websites; 90 sites have already closed. Decisions have also been taken to continue with 26 websites – although some of their current content will move to Directgov and Business Link – and decisions on the remaining 374 sites will be taken in the next six months. Further discussions will take place over the next few months in order to produce detailed implementation plans, confirm the role of departmental corporate sites, extend the review to executive agencies and nondepartmental public bodies, and encourage further collaboration between departments. This will be completed by June 2007.

So, taking these numbers at face value, more than a third of the 16 departments’ websites remain to be reviewed; and of course, this is only phase one. There’s a long way to go yet.

No argument from me with the principle of consolidation, incidentally. I’m just shocked at the number of new sites which have popped up in the 14 months since ‘Transformational Government’ was first published. This announcement of a cull can’t possibly have come as a surprise to anyone. Can it?

Guido Fawkes passes on the rumour that ‘an official report on “transformational strategy” will confirm that of the 951 state-run websites, 551 in total will be closed.’

I’m not sure where either figure can come from. Certainly it’s the first time I’ve seen a count of 951 ‘state-run’ websites; the most usually quoted figure is usually several times higher than that, although I always felt it was an over-estimate since (I understand) it was based on gov.uk domain names. And I can’t entirely understand how we end up with 400 sites after this cull. I’m pretty sure the Transformation Government strategy (PDF) had a much lower figure in mind.

Mind you, it’ll be interesting to see what ‘closed’ means in practice. Sure, the overall number of stand-alone sites will probably be slashed. But I don’t imagine the content will disappear overnight. It’ll just end up somewhere else.