Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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    Civil service blogging guidelines

    I guess you might see it as kneejerk; I prefer to see it as responsive. The Civil Serf affair has brought the matter of civil servants blogging to a head, and now is absolutely the right time to work out the ground rules.

    At lunchtime, Tom Watson publishes a ‘for starters’ list of bullet points on his personal blog. By 6pm, he’s had responses back from all the usual suspects, and a few others. And you can see things taking shape. A case study in itself.

    Point number one has to be the observance of the Civil Service Code. I don’t see anything in it which shouldn’t apply in the online world as in the offline. And if there are anomalies, the Civil Service Code needs to be reconsidered.

    As for specific rules on (personal) blogging, It’s hard to argue with Tom Loosemore‘s suggestion that we adopt the BBC’s policy as a starting point. It’s well worded; it’s been collaboratively developed by people who actually do it; it’s been through several iterations, with a new release out today in fact; communication is their natural territory; and they’ve been dealing it as an issue for longer than most. Besides, ‘it’s what the BBC does’ usually wins any argument in this business.

    But it’s official blogging which interests me most: use of the tools to engage your stakeholder audience in a rolling dialogue. Too often initiatives disappear the day after their announcement, sometimes never to be spoken of again. The job needs to be done, I’d argue; and blogs are the best tool for doing so. I’d like any official guidelines to actively encourage them, especially on long-running, sensitive and high-visibility projects. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking ID cards, Census, major public service reform.

    Do they need separate guidelines? Initially I thought so; now I’m not so sure. The BBC guidelines basically say if you use your BBC identity, you must do so responsibly. Official blogging is the very same scenario, turned up a notch. But we’ve got plenty of experience in doing blogs like these – FCO, Our NHS, the various Hansard Society pilots. It should be fairly easy to test any guidance against prior experience.

    My only thought is that any guidance will inevitably call for distance between personal capacity and professional capacity, opinion and fact. Where does that leave a Minister, who splits his posts between the Ministerial portfolio and the party-political? Tom?

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    Minister's 'regret' at Civil Serf affair

    Full credit to Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson for his extremely measured and well-balanced take on the Civil Serf story. Tom was speaking at Tower 08, a major CO-hosted conference on Transformational Government – and has posted his speech on his long-established (and often highly party-political) blog. For the record, the speech isn’t yet showing on the Cabinet Office site… which probably says something in itself.

    4pm update: in fairness to the Cabinet Office, it’s up there now. Kinda.

    Cabinet Office grab

    (Following evening update: they still haven’t fixed it. But anyway – back to our previously published story…)

    Tom said of Civil Serf:

    Yesterday I read with regret the story of an anonymous civil servant blogger by the name of Civil Serf. Her bluntly written blog about life in Whitehall was taken down, after it came to the attention of the national press. Now, I’m not going to say that we should tear up the civil service code it’s very important that civil servants play by the rules, nor do I agree with everything she says, but surely a truly transformed government would be one in which speaking engagingly about life our public services would be far from newsworthy, and far from career wrecking.

    Hear hear. But that’s not the end of it. Tom goes on to list a number of things happening ‘over the next few months’, some of which I’m getting unreasonably excited about.

    I see my job as helping you to accelerate the pace of change. Over the next few months, we will be

    • pushing through the closure of our hundreds of unnecessary websites.
    • improving our online content, including minimum standards for the content of remaining websites.
    • Ensuring that all content held on government web sites is fully accessible to the major search engines.
    • Embedding data mash-up into thinking across all of government not just the early adopters within departments.
    • Driving through the cultural change in all our communications that sees the internet, mobile and other new media as the norm
    • ensuring better innovation and much faster implementation. Build stuff small, test it out then iterate, iterate, iterate.
    • capturing the skills, talent and energy we need for change – from within the public service and from outside. Over the next few weeks I hope to say more on this.
    • using new media to engage more directly and more effectively with individuals and communities.

    And the most frequent question my civil servants will hear from me is, ‘Why not’?

    Yes yes yes yes yes. In all seriousness, I can’t imagine it getting much better than that. A rallying call, and a list of tangible actions from an e-government minister who knows first-hand what he’s talking about.

    Er… except for one thing. I say the Tower 08 conference was backed by the Cabinet Office. You might be interested to discover that the two-day event at the Tower Guoman hotel (formerly the Tower Thistle) was actually ‘hosted by the Cabinet Office in conjunction with Intellect, the trade association for the UK technology industry and is being supported by our sponsors Fujitsu Services, Oracle and Lockheed Martin.’ And it cost £995 ex VAT per head per day.

    I’m sorry, but there is something inherently wrong with ‘a range of public sector officials from chief executives and senior managers to customer facing staff’ paying that sort of money to hear their own bosses and colleagues talk.

    I’m informed that the conference was actually free for civil servants – although since the web page has now been updated to the past tense, the cost details have been wiped. Still a lot of money for a conference, though.

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    Tom Watson's 'mashed up' speech

    OK, I’m an idiot. The lengthy and fair-minded piece I wrote this morning about a speech by Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne at the RSA was a year late.

    Osborne made some interesting points about the need ‘to recast the political settlement for the digital age.’ And now today, there’s an email doing the rounds (see Nick Booth’s piece) pointing out similarities between this 2007 speech and the one made by Tom Watson on Monday. Amusingly, it condemns the Watson speech as a ‘mashup’. But hold on. Surely it’s entirely in keeping with the whole ethos of open source, to take good ideas and build on them? Didn’t you say mass collaboration was a good thing? 🙂

    OK, I’m being churlish. But this points to the biggest single hurdle in ‘politics 2.0’, or whatever we’re calling it. Inevitably, roughly once every four years, every politician’s worst instincts will come out as they fight for power or survival. You can’t blame them. That’s the adversarial, winner-takes-all political system we’re currently stuck with.

    And that’s ironically why we need the apolitical Civil Service to take a lead on use of these collaborative technologies.

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    Civil Serf: the Spartacus effect

    I was curious. In an idle moment on the train home on Monday night, I wondered how easy it could have been for Civil Serf to delete all trace of her now legendary blog. So I went to the blog.co.uk site she used, and set about registering my own blog with them. When it asked me what username I wanted, just for a laugh, I tried ‘civilserf’. Would it let me have it? Astonishingly, the answer was ‘yes’.

    And so, with the clock ticking towards 10pm, I took ownership of Britain’s most famous blog. I quickly bashed out an initial post, as I knew the story was going to feature in Radio 4’s The World Tonight, and on BBC2’s Newsnight, within the hour. By the power of Google, my post was indexed within a few minutes, and sat proudly atop the search results for ‘civil serf’.

    And the traffic began to come. In the first hour, I received 60+ referrals to my own website; I don’t know about the various other gov.uk-centric bloggers I highlighted. Bear in mind, this is hardly peak time for web surfing. (Well, maybe not this kind of web surfing.)

    Opportunities like this don’t come round very often. I can’t help feeling we should make something of it. Anyone?

    Oh, and by the way… yes, there is a big ‘delete’ button on the blog.co.uk control panel. But I’m certainly not planning on pressing it, to see what it does. I’ve had another dozen hits since I started writing this piece.

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    The inevitable tragedy of Civil Serf

    It’s most amusing to see so many journalists writing up the Civil Serf story for the ‘proper’ media… particularly since most seem to be lifting the key quotes from each other’s write-ups, rather than the blog itself (which was pulled, cached versions and all, by Sunday morning). Secondary sourcing at its worst.

    Steadily though, the Legend Of Civil Serf is building, in the secondary analysis and the ill-informed blog comments which build on it. That the blog was revealing state secrets, including the contents of Alastair Darling’s forthcoming budget. That it named individual Ministers and told endless tales of their incompetence. That she was wasting time blogging, when she should have been working. That it was a big deal. In truth, it was none of these. It was a modest affair, a handful of posts written over a three-month period by an intelligent young woman, describing what she saw in her workplace.

    There’s been an air of inevitability about each step, as the story plays itself out. Of course her anonymity was going to fail eventually. What else could she do when the truth came out, but delete the blog? What else could people make of it all? My worry is for the next inevitable, knee-jerk step: a Cabinet Office communique choosing to interpret the Civil Service Code in such a way that bans all such blogging.

    The Civil Service has a problem. It needs to recruit people with outside experience; and it does a pretty good job of that. The problem is keeping them, once they’re inside. I left under a cloud of frustration a couple of years back. Too few people interested in making things happen, too many people eager for a quiet life – and, I concluded, a quiet retirement. Or perhaps that’s harsh. Maybe just too set in their ways.

    More than anything, it needs people who really care about what they’re there to do. And when you care about something, you want to talk about it. You want to evangelise. You want to involve your friends. I’m really worried that this sends a message – join us by all means, but whatever you do, don’t start to care.

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    Independent review wants free ID cards, minimal biometrics

    I’m surprised how little coverage I’ve seen of the long-awaited report by Sir James Crosby (ex boss of Halifax/HBOS) into ‘Challenges and opportunities in identity cards assurance’, published last week by the Treasury. (See press release, full doc as PDF.) It makes a number of interesting proposals, none of which merited a specific mention in the press release.

    Absolutely correctly, Sir James says the potential of any such scheme ‘lies in the extent to which it is created by consumers for consumers.’ He points to a ‘fundamental’ distinction between ‘identity management’, where systems are built for the benefit of the database manager (ie government, in this case); and ‘identity assurance’, which ‘meets an important consumer need without necessarily providing any spin-off benefits to the owner of any database’.

    The national security aspect becomes a pleasant side-effect. As he rightly notes, ‘a consumer-led universal scheme would better deliver on national security goals than any scheme with its origins in security and data sharing.’

    Effectively, he calls for a ‘Chip and PIN’ card with a photograph on it: three independent factors – something you have, something you know, and something you are’. ‘It is the combination of such independent factors, rather than their technological complexity and individual strength,’ he writes, ‘which largely determines the resilience of the verification process.’ Well, it’s certainly got simplicity in its favour.

    He says explicitly that ‘full biometric images (other than photographs) should not be kept‘; that the scheme should be operated independently of Government; and that it should be provided free of charge. But no matter how welcome and compelling his recommendations might be, there’s little sign of the Home Office swaying.

    If you’ve got any interest in this subject, I urge you to read (at least) the executive summary of the Crosby report. It’s the most articulate and balanced review of the subject that I’ve yet seen. And it’s a subject we all need to care about. Nothing right now cuts as deeply to the heart of civil engagement – both in terms of what it is, and how it gets rolled out. And the signs aren’t yet good.

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    The rise and disappearance of Civil Serf

    It was going to happen eventually. I think Puffbox.com was the first to highlight Civil Serf’s excellent blog, back in late January. She started to hit the big-hitting political blogs a few weeks later – see Dizzy Thinks, the Telegraph’s Three Line Whip, The Times’s Comment Central. But it’s only when she hits the proper media, namely this morning’s Sunday Times and Telegraph, that it becomes a big deal. Big enough, it seems, to wipe the blog from the face of the web. (Wish I’d archived it for onepolitics now.)

    First off, there’s a lesson here about the relative importance of blogs in general, and the papers’ own blogging efforts in particular. If the Times and Tele were that fussed about it all, they sat on its existence for a remarkably long time. That’s assuming one desk in the newsroom is talking to another – one suspects not, on this evidence.

    It’s really depressing that the blog has been deleted so quickly. I don’t recall anything especially sensitive being disclosed – she never said enough to really confirm which department she worked in, even. (For the record, some of us reached a different conclusion to the Times.)

    The only controversy, and that’s already stretching the definition, was the fact that a civil servant dared to ‘tell it like it is’, and very eloquently too. It was provocative, but having been in a very similar position myself, I can say it was absolutely valid. Frankly, I think we’d be better off if there was a bit more of that.

    I have a nasty feeling this has set back the cause of ‘government 2.0’ by a good few months – just as it seemed the word ‘blog’ had shaken off its most negative connotations. It’ll be interesting to see if Tom Watson makes reference to it in his big speech tomorrow.

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    The problem with ID cards?

    For all the critiques I’ve ever read of ID cards (or more accurately, an identity database), I always find myself asking one question at the end. Are you against them because:

    1. it simply can never be done securely?
    2. the technology isn’t there yet?
    3. you just don’t trust the current government?
    4. you just don’t trust any government?
    5. you just don’t trust anyone?

    I don’t pretend to know enough about the ugly back-end technology (as described in this Dizzy Thinks post) to form much of an opinion on points 1 and 2. But I wonder if the majority of opposition doesn’t come down to options 3, 4 or 5.

    Better service in the modern world comes down to the exchange of electronic data. Think of that every time you don’t spend 5 minutes waiting at the checkout while someone writes a cheque. Or every time you order from Amazon. I can’t believe it isn’t possible to do this properly in the public sector too.

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    Standard behaviour

    I used to get really excited about the release of new versions of the big web browsers. These days the overwhelming emotion is worry, bordering on panic. What is it going to do with the HTML I lovingly crafted to work with its predecessor?

    I held my breath this morning as I fired up the first beta version of Internet Explorer v8 for the first time. And whilst there’s nothing catastrophic to report, I’m surprised how may things are ‘a few pixels out’, even things you never thought could be risky. If you’re reading this on the puffbox.com site in IE8, for example, you’ll see the ‘find’ button is out of line with the search box, and there’s an unexpected gap between the header and navigation strip. The Wales Office site adds a few (inactive?) horizontal scrollbars to various DIVs.

    There’s been a lot of talk about Microsoft’s Damascene conversion to web standards: effectively they’re saying ‘no really, this time we mean it.’ And Ray Ozzie appears to be thinking and talking long-term:

    On one hand, there are literally billions of Web pages designed to render on previous browser versions, including many sites that are no longer actively managed. On the other hand, there is a concrete benefit to Web designers if all vendors give priority to interoperability around commonly accepted standards as they evolve. After weighing these very legitimate concerns, we have decided to give top priority to support for these new Web standards.

    In other words, standards-compliance over legacy support. That’s the message web designers want to hear. As I’ve written before, I’m convinced the bulk of HTML coding effort is spent making the same design work identically across all browsers. An across-the-board commitment to universal standards would end that waste of our time, and clients’ money.

    So why am I looking at pages which are fine in Firefox, fine in Opera, fine in Safari, fine in Konqueror… but a bit off in the new standards-compliant, ACID2-passing IE8? (No browser hacks, before anyone asks.) Please, please, let this just be ‘a beta thing’.

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    Whitehall, WordPress, where?

    We love WordPress round here, and our passion is infectious. I’m currently talking to a handful of new people about possible WordPress-based projects: some small, some huge. The ‘yes we can’ message goes a long way.

    But the unknown in the equation is always: where to host it? You don’t have to look too hard to find ridiculously cheap hosting deals in the marketplace: £30/year will buy you enough disk space, bandwidth and support/monitoring for most modest projects, often including automated installation of WordPress and other ‘open source’ software. But in government, in the midst of ‘web rationalisation’, it’s inevitably a bit more complicated than that.

    So here’s my problem. At the moment I’m producing (on average) a new WordPress site every month – that’s just me alone. And I’ve got a steady stream of people wanting to do others. These sites have to be hosted somewhere. The normal consultant thing to do would be to buy some cheap hosting in the marketplace, then apply a massive markup. Government ends up paying over the odds, and we end up with countless disparate WordPress installations. Nobody’s happy, except greedy consultants.

    But we can nip this in the bud. A central server somewhere, offered free of charge to any departments who want to run a WordPress project. It would only cost a few grand a year; put two sites on the same server, and you’re probably already saving money. It’s not as if we don’t already have centralised hosting deals. And most importantly, you’ve ‘rationalised’ from day one. (Well, day two anyway.)

    This would make my life easier as a supplier. It makes ‘the centre’s life easier, cos they know where everything is and can ensure it’s properly maintained (security patches etc). It’s a single migration strategy, if ‘the central solution’ ever provides equivalent functionality. In every respect, it works out cheaper overall. Everyone wins.

    So here’s my plea to the Powers That Be. Stop me before I proliferate again. Make me an offer I can’t sensibly refuse. And save us all money and effort, now and later.