It came as a bit of a shock this evening, when BBC1’s The One Show started talking about Twitter, that reporter Gyles Brandreth’s first port of call was Kingsgate House on Victoria Street, home of DIUS and minister David Lammy. With traffic up by a factor of three this year already, Twitter’s certainly a hot topic at the moment – with the BBC in particular facing accusations of going overboard; but where does David Lammy come into all this?
To be entirely fair, Lammy did talk (some of) the talk:
For me, it’s almost a broadcast means of people knowing what I’m up to during the course of the day. It is about finding ways in which people can be clearer about what government ministers are up to.
OK, so it would have been nice if he’d described it as a two-way thing – and of course, he may well have done, but that wasn’t the soundbite we heard. But nice to get the potential for political transparency on the record.
The only niggle is that Lammy has been a member of the Twitter family since mid-December. He hasn’t even reached three figures for the number of tweets. Indeed, he’s only been using it with any head of steam for a month. One can’t help feeling it was a nice ‘soft’ primetime TV appearance for a politician with ambition: the caption read ‘Minister, Dept for Innovation’, and it can’t have done any harm to put a government minister in a story about something ‘cutting edge’ and ‘cool’.
Speaking of Twitter: I see @downingstreet has now reached the Twitterholic Top 50, and looks like going even higher – they’ve already passed the MarsPhoenix Lander, one of Twitter’s iconic accounts. Between you and me, I’m told they have MC Hammer in their sights.
I love WP as much as the next guy. Unless this is the next guy. pics: bakershours.com
I’m suddenly receiving a lot of email (and other online communication) from people in the public sector, and indeed outside, who want to talk WordPress. And I’m not alone: Dave Coveney, from Liverpool-based consultancy InterconnectITtweeted yesterday:
The professionalisation of #wordpress appears to have finally arrived. We no longer sell websites that happen to be WP, but because of WP.
So what’s happened to raise WordPress to the status of ‘credible alternative’? It almost feels like a stupid question – ‘why are people turning away from big-money consultancies charging six-figure sums, in favour of rapidly developed, more flexible, more usable solutions that deliver in weeks for a relative pittance?’ But bear with me.
If I looked narrowly at the public sector, I could suggest a few milestones which might have led us here: Number10’s precedent-setting adoption of WordPress, Steph Gray’s work at DIUS (and the use of the Commentariat theme on the Power Of Information document in particular), the general acceptance of blogging post-Peston as serious communication, my own relentless evangelism maybe. Perhaps the combination of all the above. Or perhaps it’s as simple as the modest price tag, and the time of year – it doesn’t feel like end-of-financial-year spending sprees, but I could be wrong.
None of which explains the surge in private sector interest though. Maybe it’s increasing cost-consciousness, or the smoothness of the version 2.7 interface, or the mere fact that ‘this stuff is cool’.
But you know what? It doesn’t matter. The message is getting through, and the cause is being furthered. It really feels like we’re getting somewhere, taking the web back from the Big Ugly Consultancies. It’s a good feeling.
Quick précis for those who missed any of it: at 11.50pm on Sunday night, Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson publicly throws down a gauntlet. With the country facing snowy armageddon, could Directgov change their homepage to the only information people would care about – namely, ‘a host of travel info feeds and up to date advice’? A domain gets purchased before dawn, and within 24 (ish) hours, a School Closures mashup site is live. Happy Minister.
The site is, in effect, a dump of Directgov’s own Schools Finder data, uploaded into a Drupal CMS, with each school getting its own page; users are invited to find their local school(s) via a postcode or town name search, and then comment (blog-style) on whether the schools are open or not. It’s been put online using a uk.to domain, obtained from the FreeDNS service – presumably to get round the procurement process (and, one has to assume, the Web Rationalisation people). The precedents are duly noted. 😉
It’s really only a ‘proof of concept’ build. As commenters on the new Directgov blog have noted, we’re several significant steps – and a lot of public interaction – away from having a breakthrough service here. But just look around the web at the excitement and encouragement generated by the move. Harry Metcalfe, for example, recognises the same weaknesses I do, and yet still concludes:
It’s pretty rough around the edges: there doesn’t seem to be much RSS support, and there’s no access to the underlying data, and — well — it doesn’t tell you whether your school is closed… but it is still useful, and it’s very impressive that it appeared so quickly, and with such little prompting. Kudos to all involved — this is a fantastic and very encouraging start.
I don’t see this site ever being (properly) finished, certainly not in its current form. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it can (ever) tell me whether my local schools are actually open or not. But that wasn’t the point: as Brian Hoadley puts it in the blog post’s comments – ‘This prototype was the first in a series of efforts to create a process around which we can develop rapid ideas.’ (Followed up later by Paul Clarke: ‘its existence demonstrates an attitude, not a magic solution to a very difficult information challenge.’)
It was a concrete fulfilment of the principles Paul Clarke described at the weekend’s Barcamp, proof that it wasn’t just talk. Proof – to itself – that government can actually do this sort of thing. And just as importantly, it has proven how much we, the wider web community, have been longing to see this happen.
Another small step forward in e-government: HMRC is reporting that ‘67% of all self assessment tax returns were filed online this year… A total of 5,759,006 people filed online by the 31 January deadline – an increase of over 50% on the 2008 total, when 3.8m people filed online.’
Why the sudden change in behaviour? ‘HMRC’s SA online and other Internet services enable people to do business with government in the way we know they want to,’ says a quote in the press release – but I’m not so sure. There was a significant change in the rules this year: paper returns had to be in three months earlier. And as previous experience shows, most people don’t do their returns until the very last minute.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with using such ‘encouragement’ to move people towards online interaction – as long as government is able to keep its end of the bargain.
PS: In the initial version of this post, I said I’d heard that the Self Assessment system wasn’t compatible with Firefox. In fact, it’s the VAT system that still isn’t Firefox-friendly. There were problems with the C&E side of the HMRC website some time ago, but I thought they’d all been sorted? Apparently not.
Successful leading high tech businesses will spend at least 10% of their budget on innovation… DirectGov, BusinessLink and NHS Choices should create an combined innovation pot of 10% of their budgets, focussed on improving the public experience of government websites, through outside-in innovation not internal requirements. Annual plans on how this £10m innovation pool is to be deployed should be published and agreed by a new Head of Digital Engagement.
Now let’s be clear: £10m is a heck of a lot of money, particularly in a world where the price of the tools is almost negligible. By my rough calculation, that’s more or less equivalent to a team of 36 consultants on a day rate of £1000 ex VAT, working full time. Even allowing a big chunk for ‘overheads’, which you’d normally look to minimise anyway, you’re still talking about maybe 20 full time people earning absolutely top-whack salaries.
(Note: I’m not saying anyone’s worth £1000 a day; just noting that many in government would consider that ‘the going rate’. It explains why people keep telling me I should put Puffbox’s rates up.)
It’s too big a sum for the Big Ugly Consultancies to ignore, and that’s what worries me. If we’re serious about getting serious innovation, we need to treat this as a venture capital fund, and start getting the cash out to dozens of small-scale, agile, hungry operations.
The big boys are getting enough cash out of the public purse already – and will continue to take the lion’s share of the remaining 90%. If they want to innovate, they already have plenty of opportunity – and arguably, have had it for long enough.
I think he’s correctly identified the weakness in CommentPress: it isn’t meaningful to comment on individual paragraphs. Better instead to offer the content in editorially selected chunks. And that’s what Commentariat does. It makes commenting a breeze: I’ve just been through the entire POIT document, commenting furiously as I went… and I’ve certainly never done that before. The technology is irrelevant: if it’s getting me to contrbute like that, that‘s why I’d consider it a success.
I don’t understand the potential ins-and-outs of copyright (which will be the subject of another post in due course), but I really hope we can find a way to release this ‘properly’ as a theme offered through WordPress.org. It will genuinely amaze people to see HM Government producing something like this, and offering it free to the world. Who says we don’t ‘get’ open source?
Pic by Neil Williams: that's the back of my head next to Tom Steinberg
I felt a very different atmosphere at the second annual UK Government Barcamp (aka UKGC09), held at the Ministry of Justice’s offices in central London yesterday. Last year’s event buzzed with potential; all the talk was of things that we could or should do. This time, certainly the sessions I attended anyway, the talk was mainly of things that were starting to happen – or even better, things that had happened.
It’s impossible to write up any kind of authoritative account of the day: like last year, I came away wishing I’d been able to sit in on more sessions than I actually had. Some suggested there was an argument for a longer event, or maybe several shorter events – but I quite like the intensity of the single day approach, and surely it’s good to leave people hungry for more?
Paul Clarke
I started at the Directgov session led by Paul Clarke and Brian Hoadley, formally (?) launching the Directgov | Innovate programme – which they describe on their new WordPress-powered 🙂 website as: ‘to inform the greater developer community about available resources, to provide a platform to connect with one another, and to showcase new ideas with the aim of supporting and encouraging innovation.’ I’ve pressed for a Directgov blog for a long time, so it’s genuinely great to see this happening. Anything which opens the doors to ‘the community’ out there is a good thing.
Paul was frank that he couldn’t specify what would come out of the programme, but he expected that its first year would see: availability of data sets, a few experimental applications, and some hosting. The room seemed most excited by the prospect of data access – which kinda confuses me. If it’s just data they want, there’s masses of it out there – admittedly, in spreadsheets and CSV files rather than a web-friendly API. Look at the National Statistics site for starters.
Personally, I’m most excited by the prospect of a ‘sandbox’ hosting service – again, something I’ve been pushing for ages. For all the cool stuff we could do, and all the cool things people actually want to do, we need somewhere safe to put it. If nobody’s prepared to offer that, it’s no surprise to see departments buying cheap web hosting accounts left, right and centre. I’ve long argued for someone to step up to provide a service, ideally free of charge, with the kinds of guarantees government needs. It looks like this might actually be it.
Jenny Brown
Next was Jenny and Lloyd on their work with the Ministry of Justice press office. I’ve always had press offices in my sights: they should be ideally placed to see real benefits from all this online stuff.
Jenny’s been developing a ‘press office dashboard’ concept – and if they’re really saying ‘how did we ever cope without it’, you know we’re getting somewhere. It’s nothing too clever, to be honest: a customised iGoogle homepage, a bunch of Google News search feeds, a ‘starred items’ list, and a daily Feedburner ‘digest’ email. But it’s giving them things they’ve never had before – most notably, Jenny said, breadth of awareness; and there have been a few specific wins, particularly in the regional media. The next step was to go beyond the conventional media, and open their eyes to the blogosphere; but that sounded like it might be much harder work.
(It’s not the only such initiative: Steph has used Netvibes at DIUS (see his paper on the subject), and Shane from Gallomanor gave me a quick demo of a neat little application they’re developing, which does something similar. But it was great to get first-hand feedback of the apparent success of the project.)
Lloyd showed the ‘online media centre’ he had built for them: again, just a stitching together of real world tools – WordPress.com, YouTube, Delicious, all the obvious candidates – but this time, for the press office to create more web-friendly release material for use by journalists. It’s password protected, yet they weren’t prepared to open up comments – which, I think, is both disappointing and entirely to be expected. Maybe they need to be consumers for a bit longer, using Jenny’s work, before they start really producing.
Geek cuisine
The afternoon just seemed to whizz by. I helped out at the session on corporate blog platforms, led by Julia from DFID and Shane from FCO. I finally caught up with Paul Canning, who talked a bit about user testing. And there was a feisty session to close, on the subject of open source in government, which felt like preaching to the converted (sorry).
All of which meant I missed the session on Twitter; and almost everything on consultation, which was among my key interests for the day. Then there’s the long list of people I meant to speak to, but didn’t get the chance. And the videos I meant to capture, but didn’t get the chance. So yeah, as I say, hungry for more. Will there be another one next year? Put it this way, people were already starting to talk about it.
If you’re reading this on the website rather than the RSS feed, you’ll already have noticed things look a bit different. It’s a new year, Barcamp is around the corner, and it’s high time for a design refresh of the company website. Of course, it’s still a custom WordPress theme; and everything’s more or less in the same place. And yes, it’s still green, although not quite as green.
So what has changed? Not as much as I initially intended; there were some wild ideas in the initial sketches, let me tell you! But for all sorts of reasons, many of those fell by the wayside – not least, it has to be said, because many of my government contacts are stuck using IE6. In the end, it became a reinforcement of the principles I liked best from the previous design, most notably the very vertical approach.
You’ll notice a lot more imagery on the site. I’m conducting an experiment using the new WordPress media library function, to pull out the thumbnails it generates automatically when you upload a picture. There’s amazing potential in this, and I wanted to give it a try; but there may be issues with older content, posted in previous WordPress versions. I’m also using gravatar images to personalise the comments function a bit; if you haven’t already associated a picture with your email address, hop over to Gravatar.
It’s also been a chance to update my own site with the technologies I’m regularly using on other people’s: things like JQuery, and the Yahoo! UI Library’s CSS templates. I nearly built the whole thing without HTML tables, until a last-minute crisis courtesy of (guess) IE6. And for once, it looks great – and probably, best of all – in Safari.
I’ve often written in glowing terms about the Liberal Democrats’ approach to the web; for a good few years now, they’ve been doing some remarkably innovative stuff which, for whatever reason, was always overlooked. So it was a real pleasure recently to meet the party’s wonderfully-titled Head of Innovations, Mark Pack; and it led to a little Puffbox project to pull together some of their disparate material.
The Lib Dems run a number of blogs on very specific policy areas: defence, home affairs, the Al Yamamah arms deal. There’s the main party website, of course. And Nick Clegg’s personal site. Plus sites for the party’s representation in the Lords and the European Parliament. And the stuff they do on YouTube. And Delicious. And Twitter. That’s a lot of different RSS feeds to subscribe to; and no one place to look for an overview of what’s happening today.
So I’ve built them a new WordPress theme to sit at the top level of their blogs’ server, aggregating all this stuff into a single homepage, with a single RSS feed, and a single ‘blogroll’. Well, I say ‘theme’: it really only amounts to managing the blogroll, and a single paragraph of text. The rest is just stand-alone PHP.
It’s deliberately designed to match the main Lib Dems site, with a few tweaks to make it work better cross-platform. But I’ve also done an ‘iPhone version’, using exactly the same HTML, but calling a different set of CSS styles depending on the ‘user agent string’. We abandon the multi-column layout of the ‘normal’ version, to show it in a single column: it just works so much better with the smooth scrolling of the iPhone interface.
It’s our first piece of explicitly ‘party political’ work; and given our Whitehall focus, I had to think hard about (a) taking it on, and (b) talking about it here. But I concluded that it simply shouldn’t be an issue: being brutal, we’re a business, it’s legitimate work, there’s a recession on, and my mortgage won’t pay itself.
And since this isn’t a blog about politics per se, that’s where I’ll leave it.
We rolled out a fairly modest enhancement to the DFID Bloggers website this week: probably unnoticed by most users, but one I’m quite proud of. At its heart, the DFID site is a group blog; but we do a few things to present it as a network of individual blogs by individual bloggers. Then the question came – ‘could we do a group blog?’
What we’ve done is effectively hijack WordPress’s category functionality, turning it into a grouping function. We’ve created categories corresponding to the various ‘group blogs’ we want to run; and with the help of another custom plugin, we’ve added the ability to give each category its own ‘user image’, same as we’ve done with individuals. The WordPress category archive template then becomes, effectively, a ‘group homepage’ template.
Then, with another plugin, we’ve added a function to give each individual user a ‘default category’. So when they go to write a post, the appropriate category is already ticked – or to put it another way, it’s already identified as being for the appropriate ‘group’. But as with any WordPress categorisation, you have the option to tick other categories, adding the post to multiple group blogs; or you can untick your default category, if you want to blog in an individual capacity for a change.
Finally, we’ve changed the homepage code to handle both individual and group blogs. It took a while to get the logic right – but now, you should only ever see one entry per group blog, same as you only see one entry per individual blogger; and it all gets sorted together into reverse chronological order.
The result is a remarkably flexible blogging platform, with the ability to do solo blogs, group blogs, or any combination thereof. And as with the previous DFID work, we’re releasing the plugins to the world: the Default Categories plugin should prove particularly useful for people running group blogs.
Once again, it’s been a pleasure to work with Simon Wheatley: the man who makes my WordPress dreams come true. And the DFID guys have been great again too, giving us a general steer and letting us work out the best way to do it. I love this project.
