2009 – Puffbox

21 Dec 2009

politics

atheistbus, donations

The puzzle of political donations
Just over a year ago, we had the startling success of the Atheist Bus Campaign, which raised over £150,000 to put the message ‘There’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life‘ on the side of London buses. And, given the surplus funds, buses up and down Great Britain. An online-orchestrated grassroots campaign, with individuals chipping in a few quid for a political gesture.

Fast-forward to this weekend, and the least festive Christmas Number One Single ever, with Rage Against The Machine’s foul-mouthed tirade seeing off a sweet Geordie teenager – solely on the back of download sales. Again, a large number of people, orchestrated online, chipping in their 29-99p for a political gesture. Of sorts. Well, political in the widest possible sense.

I’m talking to a few MPs at the moment about improving their websites ahead of next year’s election, and one recurring subject is political donations. On the face of it, they’re being most optimistic. The biggest news story of the year has been the way MPs have fleeced the public purse to fund their moat-cleaning and duck-houses. I don’t see queues of people outside constituency offices, all eager to hand in their campaign contributions.

But it seems it can work. Iain Dale observed at the weekend that Tory candidate for Bristol East Adeela Shafi is successfully raising funds through the MyConservatives.com site: over £1,000 towards her notional target of £1,500, apparently within 3 days. How? Iain suggests:

I suspect most of the donations were in the £5-£20 bracket. If you make it easy to donate, people will do so, if you give them a reason to.

…which is probably true; but he also hints at the significance of #kerryout, a Twitter-orchestrated attempt to unsettle, if not unseat, Labour’s ‘Twitter tsar‘ Kerry McCarthy. It’s supposedly independent; but that’s somewhat hard to justify when its hastily produced website includes a huge link to Adeela Shafi’s MyConservatives page for donations. And I wonder how the concealment of the domain name’s ownership sits with election imprint rules.

So anyway, what can we learn from this?

Getting detailed data on RATM’s sales breakdown or MyConservatives donations wasn’t going to be easy; but helpfully, virtually all the donations to the Atheist Bus Campaign were listed on the JustGiving website: so I did some hasty number-crunching. And here’s what I found:
- The campaign raised just over £148,000 from 9,744 individual online donations.
- Two £3,000 donations accounted for 4% of the total; 12 of £1,000+ accounted for 14.4%.
- 162 donations of £100+ – or 1.7% of the donations – accounted for 30.8% of the total sum raised.
- Half the money was raised by just 10% of the donors.
- Roughly 76.6% of the donations were in Iain’s £5-20 range: but they accounted for less than half (49.7%) of the amount raised.
- 14.5% of donations were £5 or less, making up just 10.6% of the total raised.
- 81% of donations were £10 or less, representing 35% of the total contributed.
- The mean donation was £15.19; the mode and median were both £10.
- 36% gave exactly £10; 26% gave £5; 12% gave the minimum £2; 11.5% gave exactly £20.
- 49 people gave exactly £6.66. Very amusing.
So that’s a very small number of very large contributions representing a high proportion of the total raised; but still, over a third – that’s well over £50,000 – coming from donations of £10 or less. (Not that it’s any kind of sensible comparison: but the Obama campaign raised 38% of its funds from donations of $200 or less; the Atheist Bus raised 78%.)

But for me, the two uniting factors across these three success stories are as follows:
- they were negative campaigns – in the sense that they were based around someone or something that people didn’t like: religious advertising, Simon Cowell, Kerry McCarthy; and
- there was a specific, measurable outcome: the sight of a bus with a poster on it, the announcement of the Christmas chart, the result from Bristol East on election night. If enough of you support me, we will get ‘X‘ – and we will know if/when we have won.
If you were hoping for any tangible conclusions, I’m sorry to disappoint. But there’s definitely food for thought in there.
18 Dec 2009

e-government, technology

dfid, foreignoffice, wordpress

Wireframes? Specs? Ha.
I’ve added a lengthy comment to Stephen Hale’s recent blog post about preparations for a much-needed redesign of the FCO’s blogs.fco.gov.uk site. Unfortunately, the FCO’s platform did horrible things to the formatting, so even if it’s only to make it legible, I thought I’d echo one of the more controversial points I made in that comment.

Specifically: my point that, for a project like that, the days of spending weeks and months honing wireframe diagrams and/or lengthy functional specifications should be behind us.

A blog platform is no longer a start-from-scratch, blank-sheet-of-paper kind of project. Wipe away the surface layer, and there’s a very limited range of web page layouts these days. The functionality of a blog platform is even more standardised, with only a handful of serious candidates. Virtually all the functionality you’ll need will be ready, out of the box, within a matter of minutes.

Having done this very regularly for several years now, I strongly believe that if you have a fairly good idea of the functionality you want, and a fairly good idea of the platform you like, you should look to force the two together at the earliest possible opportunity, rather than spending ages and £££ refining your wireframes and technical spec to perfection. Why waste time and money dreaming of what you might like, when you can have it in front of you within minutes, and know?

It’s like when you buy a new car. Cars are a mature technology. They all feel a bit different, and come with slightly different features, but they all do broadly the same thing in the same way. If you want a new car, you don’t sit down and design your dream car. You don’t recruit your own team of engineers, designers and mechanics. You make a list of the few things that are important to you; then you go to the local showrooms and test-drive a few.

In writing my comment for the FCO site, I went out of my way to avoid using the word WordPress. But my blog, my rules. So here’s the slightly less diplomatic version of what I wanted to say.
- In a world of instant zero-cost availability, it’s ludicrous to consider functionality and platform in complete isolation from each other. It just is.
- WordPress’s status as the world’s leading blogging platform is now, I’d suggest, undisputed. So if you want to run a multi-author blogging arrangement, it should be on WordPress. If you don’t believe me, maybe you could ask the Telegraph: they tried a bespoke platform, then tried a commercial product, then finally saw sense.
- DFID are already running a multi-blogger platform, based on WordPress, and have been doing so most successfully for the last 15 months. It can do everything that you’d expect any such site to do – and more. It’s unquestionably a better system than the FCO’s. It ticks all the boxes on the FCO’s future wireframes; and if there’s anything it can’t already do, it can almost certainly be grafted on: that’s the beauty of WordPress. And we’ve proven that with them numerous times.
- The DFID code is open source. Some of the key plugins are already available to the world on wordpress.org; I’m happy to explain and share any lower-level stuff within the templates.
So…
- If FCO come up with a reason why they can’t use the world-leading and lowest-cost solution, in conjunction with code already proven within government and also freely available, I sincerely look forward to hearing it. And I imagine Parliament will too.
14 Dec 2009

e-government

dcsf, wordpress

DCSF joins WordPress trend

It’s now two years since DCSF published their Children’s Plan – I know – and Ed Balls wants to know what impact it has had on you. They’ve published a progress report, and launched a commentable website… based on, guess what, WordPress. Not the first time they’ve gone down the open source route: a year ago they launched their National Strategies website on Drupal. But I think this is their first WordPress-based site.

Hold on a second though. What’s going on with that URL: gscdevelopment.com/wpsample? Well, gscdevelopment.com is simply an account at Bluehost – a very low-cost shared hosting provider. Nothing wrong with that at all; I use them myself for experimental hosting space, although I’m not sure I’d host a government site there. Google has literally nothing about a web development agency called GSC Development. And that’s a bit of a problem. It may look like a DCSF website: but without a gov.uk address, and no way to trace who exactly is its source, how would you know it isn’t some kind of elaborate phishing scam?

Update, 16/12/09: It looks like they’ve now moved it to a .dcsf.gov.uk address, and to a different hosting provider (Every City, by the look of it); which makes me wonder why they jumped the gun?

Ironically, it was a period consulting at DfES that convinced me it was time to escape the Whitehall machine, and embrace the WordPress community. So it’s great to see them coming on board; and I’m all in favour of departments experimenting with WordPress, whether inside or outside the firewall. There are things I’d certainly have done (very) differently: I wouldn’t have used a directory name ‘wpsample’ for a start, and I’d have tried to fix some of the ~~112~~ 153 validation errors. It also looks as if they’ve overwritten the ‘default’ WordPress theme, which isn’t wise. And it’s always advisable to use pretty permalinks if you possibly can, rather than number-based query strings. But it’s another step in the right direction, and is therefore to be welcomed.
10 Dec 2009

e-government

barackobama, opengovernment, usa

Obama's openness directive
The Obama administration’s long-awaited Open Government Directive was published on Tuesday – curiously, in PDF, TXT, DOC and Slideshare, but not HTML? – and seems to have received a warm welcome across the Atlantic.

What’s quite interesting is its very prescriptive approach. Within a specified number of days, specifically 45, they must have identified and published three new ‘high quality’ datasets in open formats. Then, by day 60 (ie 6 February 2010), each department must have created a new page on its website on open government issues, at a specified URL: http://www.[agency].gov/open. This page must include mechanisms for public feedback and quality assessment; a plan for ‘how it will improve transparency and integrate public participation and collaboration’, to be updated every two years; the annual FOI report; and regular responses to public input. (I’m almost surprised they haven’t offered a wireframe for the page.)

The document goes on to outline what it expects to see in each departmental openness plan, including of particular interest:
- proposed changes to internal management and administrative policies to improve participation
- proposals for new feedback mechanisms, including innovative tools and practices that create new and easier methods for public engagement
- proposals to use technology platforms to improve collaboration among people within and outside your agency
- innovative methods, such as prizes and competitions, to obtain ideas from and to increase collaboration with those in the private sector, non-profit, and academic communities; and
- at least one specific, new transparency, participation, or collaboration initiative that your agency is currently implementing (or that will be implemented before the next update of the Open Government Plan).
Very specific measures, milestones and expectations – plus mandatory innovation across the board. Would it work here?

For more, read TechPresident.com’s analysis of the directive, and its implications.
9 Dec 2009

e-government

conference, innovation, norway, origo, oslo

All so familiar in Oslo

If I take one thing home from my trip to Oslo, it’s the fact that we’re all seeing the same opportunities, and facing the same hurdles. Today’s day-long seminar on innovation in and around government kept coming back to freeing up public data – oh, including maps. Sound familiar, anyone?

The opening session was Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera (and the guy who invented CSS), making the case for freeing up taxpayer-funded data. As it was in Norwegian, I didn’t get much of it: thankfully, it was essentially the same content covered in this article (complete with Google translation).

I talked about the UK experience of openness, open source and consultation: lots about WordPress, Commentariat and activism – familiar stuff to readers of this blog. With the Smarter Government paper on Monday, all the social media activity around Copenhagen, and the Tories’ forced commentability on the leaked IT strategy, I wasn’t short of timely examples!

Then it was Nikki Timmermans from the Netherlands, talking about their education ministry-backed Digital Pioneers fund which has supported 150 projects since 2002. I was particularly taken by one particular project they funded: effectively a ‘dating service’ for their MPs… by which I mean, it tries to match you with MPs who share your interests, based on voting behaviour, beliefs and background, even favourite football team. It’s an interesting challenge to the idea that the MP who best represents you is the one for the patch of your land where you go to bed each night. I wonder if it’s something we could put together in the UK?

The final presentation was by Olav Anders Ovrebo. It was in Norwegian. I didn’t get much of it. But he works for this website which is WordPress based. So clearly he knows his stuff. 🙂

After a (really very nice) sandwich lunch, we broke up into small groups for discussion. I couldn’t help feeling guilty, forcing the groups I joined to speak English; but they all coped much better than if I’d been asked to cope in Norwegian, and were too polite to complain.

Many thanks to Bente Kalsnes of social platform Origo for inviting me to participate. I hope the examples and experience I brought were useful; and I’m certainly taking away plenty of food for thought myself.
8 Dec 2009

e-government

directgov

A Lot Of Orange

Doing a bit of research for my presentation in Oslo tomorrow (of which more later), I came across a somewhat surprising figure in Hansard.

Directgov cost us £30.7 million in the year 2008-09 – well over double what it cost us the previous year. Of that £30.7 million, £7.48 million went on ‘advertising, public relations, publicity and marketing’. As one wag pointed out on Twitter, that would buy you a lot of orange.

Did it work? Well, the best comparison I data I can lay my hands on is Hitwise market share, courtesy of Public Sector Forums – and Directgov went from 9.14% of ‘central government’ traffic in March 2008, to 17.02% a year later. Of course, that doesn’t mean traffic has doubled… and it has to be seen in the light of web rationalisation, whereby Directgov is eating other websites.

Sadly, the last PQ on Directgov traffic seems to have been in December last year; and DG’s own traffic page only quotes the last 3 months. And even then, the numbers are curious to say the least. They can’t provide a unique user figure for August this year. And somehow, between September and October, unique users more than doubled, whilst visits fell by 8%, and page impressions fell by 11%. Eh?
7 Dec 2009

e-government

civilservice, freedata, gordonbrown, smartergovernment

Did we just win?
We’ve all learned to be cynical about government announcements – but I’m reading through today’s ‘Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government’ paper, and I can’t help smiling. We certainly aren’t in a position where the PM can make a policy declaration, and it all falls into place by lunchtime; there are some vicious battles ahead. But there can’t be much doubt, surely, that the tide has now turned in favour of open data, accountability, transparency, third-party innovation, and technology which is both smarter and cheaper.

The paper’s ‘action points’ list looks like an agreement to do many, if not all the things we as a ‘gov 2.0’ community were asking for. A few highlights:
- Establish common protocols for public services to exchange information
- Consult on and release valuable public sector datasets – including mapping and postcode, Public Weather Service, detailed government expenditure, various transport and health datasets
- Enable a single point of access for government held data through data.gov.uk (to launch Jan 2010)
- Launch a public consultation index through Directgov (although we’ve had this before)
- During 2010: Ensure public consultations have online tools for interactive dialogue (er, WordPress I guess?)
- During 2010: Ensure the majority of government-held data published in reusable form
- By 2011: Publish all comparative data on www.data.gov.uk and ensure that it is sufficiently consistent to enable cost comparisons to be made across services
- For the longer term: Reduce consultancy spend by 50%, and communication and marketing spend by 25%
And there’s plenty more, deeper into the report: prototype building, ONS data into data.gov.uk, ‘direct’ involvement for users in service design, local breakdowns of stimulus spending, a whole section on ‘Harnessing the power of comparative data’, and a pledge for ‘the majority of government-published information to be reusable, linked data by June 2011’. In fact, I’m struggling to think of anything on the wishlist which hasn’t been ticked off.

It’s important to see this in the widest possible context. This is just Whitehall accepting the reality many of us recognised long ago. This is a Labour government looking for causes around which to build its general election campaign; and of course, trying to steal something of a march on their rivals and likely successors: see Cameron’s pledges of June this year.

And it’s reliant on existing institutions, contract-holders and vested interests coming round to the new way of thinking. Like forcing Ordnance Survey to surrender their data. Escaping the restrictions of costly outsourcing arrangements. And embracing the tools and methods of the new ways of thinking, just as much as the mindset. Past performance doesn’t give much cause for optimism, perhaps: but at least there’s evidence of a desire to take the fight to people like OS.

The naming of the document is intriguing: having been known as the ‘Smarter Government’ paper for some time now, it emerges with the classically anodyne (and ultimately meaningless) title of ‘Putting the Frontline First’. Clearly, they were too nervous about presenting their vision as too technologically-driven – understandable, I suppose. But that’s precisely what it is.
3 Dec 2009

technology

gloves, oslo, thenorthface

Gloves for the iPhone generation

I’m heading off for a couple of days in Oslo next week; and I’m most grateful to Monday’s Gadget Show for reminding me of the problem of using a touchscreen phone in freezing conditions – namely, that you can’t touch the touchscreen through gloves. Thankfully they also suggested a solution: these North Face e-Tip gloves, which have silver woven into the index finger and thumb tips – and yes, they do indeed allow you to use a touchscreen.

They’re decent ‘soft shell’ gloves, with sticky silicone bits on the palms – although the cyborg styling is maybe a bit much. I wouldn’t fancy them for typing on the on-screen keyboard, but for yer basic scrolling and stabbing – skimming over a Twitter feed or calling someone already in your contacts list – they’re fine. £22 from the North Face shop in Covent Garden. The weather forecast suggests it could be a good investment.

I’m heading north to speak at this event organised by the Norwegian ministry of government affairs; I’ve been asked to talk about innovation in British politics and government, and will be sharing the platform with Håkon Wium Lie, who’s something of an online legend – MIT, Cern, W3C (where he invented CSS), now CTO at Opera. No pressure.
1 Dec 2009

e-government, politics

conservatives, leak, opensource, wordpress

Tories publish leaked Govt IT strategy with WordPress

You might have seen coverage in the last few days of the Government’s forthcoming ICT strategy – ‘New world, new challenges, new opportunities’ – which leaked out last week, and is due to be published next week to coincide with the Pre Budget Report. The first I saw of it was at UKAuthority.com, with follow-up coverage in places like Kable and Silicon.com. The key elements seem to be a move to cloud-based computing, a common desktop and common applications (known as the ‘Government Applications Store’, not a label I’m especially keen on); plus a restatement of policy on things like Open Source.

But here’s where it gets interesting. One of the recipients of the leaked document was the Conservative Party. And they’ve taken it upon themselves to republish it, in full, on a commentable web platform. (Which happens to be WordPress. Just thought I’d mention that.)

I’m not going to offer any comment on the strategy itself just yet: there’s something slightly uncomfortable about it being a leaked document, still apparently ‘work in progress’. But it’s a fascinating development nonetheless. We’ve seen academics and activists opening up documents like this: never a political party – although the only indication of the site’s origins is the obligatory reference in the footer. No logos, no explicit definition of who ‘we’ are, when it says on its homepage:

We have built this website to share with you a leaked copy of Labour’s report on public sector IT, which was scheduled to be published in the days ahead. … We think there’s a better way. … we believe that crowdsourcing and collaborative design can help us to make better policies – and we think this approach should begin now. This website allows you to post your comments and suggestions on this leaked Government report. We want to hear your ideas – and we will be responding to your thoughts in the weeks ahead.

The makeitbetter.org.uk domain was only registered on Friday last week; and it looks like the content was copied-and-pasted into the site during Saturday afternoon. It’s a modest build, using a plain off-the-shelf theme, and to be honest it lacks a certain finesse: no ‘pretty permalinks’, no mention of RSS, no subscribe-to-comments, etc. But it’s up there, in double-quick time, whether or not the Cabinet Office wanted it up there. And it’s a case study for how negligible-cost hosting plus free software, specifically WordPress, can change the game. As I may have mentioned here before.

It’ll be fascinating to see what kind of comments it attracts. (Here’s the site’s comment feed, if you want to follow it.)
26 Nov 2009

e-government, politics

lynnefeatherstone, postcodes

LibDem tech chief backs free postcodes

Delighted to see LibDem MP (and client) Lynne Featherstone write the following:

As Chair of the Liberal Democrat Technology Board – and an MP who believes that the internet should be used to strengthen democracy – I want to declare my support for the Free our Data campaign. We need postcodes to be owned by the public – not sold to the public. Postcodes are the basic pre-requisite for allowing services to be developed that support democratic accountability. This is an issue that cuts across parties […] and so it should, because it’s about how the data about us can help us all.

I wonder where she got the idea originally? Can’t have been this, surely.