2009 – Page 3 – Puffbox

4 Nov 2009

politics

commons, expenses, mpexpenses, MPs

MPs to lose Communications Allowance

Among the Kelly Report’s recommendations for reforming MPs’ expenses and allowances is the abolition of the £10,000 annual Communications Allowance. And quite right too. The report states:

8.20 The Committee believes that effective engagement between an MP and his or her constituents is of the utmost importance, particularly in the wake of recent events. The Committee’s survey research shows that the public expect MPs to keep in touch with what they think is important and to explain their actions and decisions.

8.21 However, with some commendable exceptions, the evidence that the communications allowance has really succeeded in promoting more effective engagement is very limited, even allowing for the relatively short time since its introduction. There is much more evidence of it being used in ways that are essentially party political or have more to do with self-promotion. It is also difficult to police.

8.22 For these reasons, the Committee has concluded that the allowance should be abolished.

It’ll only save between £2m (assuming some of the expenditure finds its way into other allowances) and £5m, a relatively minor sum. But I’m not at all surprised to read:

The Committee has been shown some good examples of the communications allowance being used to engage with constituents in ways which appear to be both valuable and appropriate. However, the Committee has seen much more evidence of the allowance being used to fund material which is largely self-promotional, containing little information about local issues but a large number of photographs of the MP, or which mainly recites party lines.

I recently received a richly-designed mailing from my own Conservative MP. Lots of colour photos. Official Conservative colours and fonts. It may not have mentioned the word Conservative, but there was no doubt which party it came from. If it’s the last one I receive… actually, let me rephrase that. If it’s the last one I pay for myself, I won’t be sorry.

The lesson here, surely, is that you can’t sensibly separate party politics and Westminster business. I’m glad the Committee recognises this. As I’ve written here before (eg around McBride), the implications of such a conclusion go well beyond the few million quid we’ll all save.

PS: The Committee also appears to have added a new definition of greater London, based on a ‘reasonable commuting distance’. It calls for the new independent regulator to draw up a list of constituencies to add to those which meet the current rule: ‘constituencies wholly within 20 miles of Westminster’. The BBC specifically names Reigate, Slough, Runnymede and Weighbridge, St Albans, Welwyn and Hatfield, Epping Forest, Sevenoaks, Maidenhead, Broxbourne, Mole Valley, Windsor and Dartford.
4 Nov 2009

politics

hotwords

Work in progress: what's hot on the political blogs

I thought I’d share an early screenshot of a little side-project I’m working on at the moment. Not sure if it’ll lead anywhere in particular, but it’s been an interesting* adventure into coding at the very least. Maybe some of you lot can see a use for it, or can suggest directions I might take it.

Basically, it’s an automated ‘word cloud’ generator for blogs: think ‘Twitter trending’ for a defined collection of RSS sources. Every few minutes, it pulls in the latest posts from Iain Dale’s Top 100 political blogs (although it could be any folder you care to share in Google Reader), and looks for the most popular words in article headlines and opening sentences. It joins up pairs of words likely to go together, such as people’s names, based on a manually-maintained list stored in a plain text file. It removes any words it finds in a 300-strong list of ‘stopwords’; then sorts the remainder in order of popularity. Finally there’s some cheeky string manipulation to apply CSS classes to the words in the ‘cloud’, including the calling-in of little icons where available. It’s all been built for flexibility (maximum number of posts to review, over how many hours, etc) and easy maintenance. And I’m really quite pleased with it so far.

I took this screenshot a few minutes ago: you can see how the hot news topics jump out at you.

But then what? In my current test build, the words are all clickable – and act as a show/hide toggle for a long aggregated list of posts. So you click ‘david cameron’ and you see all posts whose headline or opening sentences contain the specific phrase ‘david cameron’. It’s not bad, but I don’t yet feel it’s the right end result. Ideas welcome!

For the technically minded: I’m doing it all in PHP, pulling feeds in from Google Reader and processing them using SimplePie, before getting crazy with some monster arrays. On my local machine, it takes about 5 seconds to process each cloud, based on around 100 posts each time: maybe it could be faster, but it doesn’t need to be. In production, I’d probably have it running every 5-10 minutes on a cron, generating a static HTML chunk to be called in via an include. I did initially try building it in javascript, but processing times didn’t look promising.
4 Nov 2009

politics

libdems

LibDems relaunch website

There are quite a few surprises in the new Liberal Democrats website, launched today. First of all, and quite a relief, is that it’s not predominantly yellow / gold / orange for once. Secondly, curiously, is that it’s been built – and is apparently hosted – in Belfast. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

I rather liked the old LibDem site: it was a bit cold, and a bit ugly, but I felt it laid the groundwork for some interesting things going forward. For its replacement, more effort has clearly been put into the aesthetics, hitting you with a big and brutal image carousel at the top of the homepage. Unfortunately, it seems to have come at the expense of the features which made the old site interesting. Gone (as far as I can tell) is the collection of data from external sources such as MPs’ blogs, TheyWorkForYou, or Flock Together; and you’ll need to dig into the ‘media centre’ to find any outbound RSS – no autodiscovery on the homepage, tsk tsk.

Mark Pack recently wrote a spot-on piece about reviewing political websites, stating that you should only judge them on whether they meet the objectives they set for themselves. So how does this one measure up? Well, according to the site, here’s what the party stands for:

If you want things to be different, really different, choose the party that is different – the Liberal Democrats. There is hope for a different future, a different way of doing things in Britain, if we’re brave enough to make a fresh start. Change for real, change for good.

Does the website communicate these values? Is it ‘really different’, ‘brave’, ‘a fresh start’? Hand on heart, I can’t say that it is. The design feels dated, and whilst it’s built around a solid enough core structure, there’s nothing really inspiring. In fact, as redesigns go, it’s rather conservative (small ‘c’).

And then there’s the Northern Ireland thing. On the homepage, there’s a map of the British Isles (plural) highlighting the site’s postcode search function: rather curious for a party which doesn’t actually stand (directly) in Northern Ireland, never mind the Republic. And if you enter a Northern Ireland postcode into the search box, it responds with a (polite) error message. Yet there’s an explicit reference to ‘N Ireland’ in the footer, which links directly to their sister Alliance Party’s site – without obvious reciprocity. Er…? Now I admit, I’m from that part of the world, I notice these things – but I’d have thought their Belfast-based design agency would have too. (Of course, it’s quite a coup for a Belfast agency to win the contract for a party which has barely a token official presence locally.)

The LibDems have a lot of work to do presentationally over the next six months. They need to differentiate themselves positively from the competition, in a climate where ‘they’re all as bad as each other’ (regardless of what the evidence says). They need to manage the transition from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’, as the Tories reclaim seats they’d lost, and Labour lose seats they’ve held. They need to claim the mantle of ‘the party of real change’ (although that’s going to be a tall order). And like all parties, they need to enthuse their supporter base. And I’m afraid this isn’t the website to do any of that.

Update: The party’s marketing chief, David Loxton explains the changes in a post at Lib Dem Voice. The primary objective seems to have been simplification – and I’d agree, it probably achieves that, although I stand by my comments last night about it failing to match the party’s stated core values. The prospect of ‘new social action network site’ sounds interesting though, and not a million miles away from MyConservatives.com.
3 Nov 2009

politics, technology

blackberry, commons, parliament

BBC's Democracy Live site goes, er, live

On the day the BBC launches its Democracy Live website comes news that MPs speaking in the Commons chamber are ‘to be discouraged’ from reading out text stored on an electronic device. No, seriously.

But hey, back to Democracy Live. There’s a lot to like about it. The front page ‘video wall’ owes a lot to Sky Sports on a Champions League night, albeit without the drama. The ‘Your representatives’ databank (from Dod’s) is nice, with the ability to search by postcode – although it only gives you MPs, MSPs/AMs/MLAs and MEPs, not councillors; and it would be nice if there was an API onto the data too.

The bit they’re clearly most excited about is the ability to search the video coverage by text – using ‘speech-to-text’ technology with a success rate ‘slightly higher’ than the industry standard. However the results, in my experience so far, have been disappointing: it seems pretty good at finding results, but it drops you in at the start of the debate (etc), not at the moment your word or phrase was mentioned.

(Update: Ah, I see now. The search results’ main link is to the start of the clip; you have to click to expose the ‘deep links’ to the right place in the clip. Interface fail? Although actually, it takes you right to the very word: should probably start a few seconds earlier?)

Oh yeah, and then there’s the whole embedding thing:

At the moment, we do not have permission to enable the embedding of video from the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Discussions are continuing with officials at Westminster.

If there’s one thing the Beeb have really cracked, it’s quality video streaming. So there’s no arguing with the site’s TV-esque aspect. But there’s nowhere near as much depth of coverage as on the official Parliament Live site, which includes video – live and recorded – of each committee. Besides, is video an efficient means of reviewing the proceedings of Parliament? I can read the Hansard transcript much faster than an MP can speak it.

So whilst it’s a nice enough site in itself – and don’t get me wrong, it is a nice site – it doesn’t feel like it’s adding a tremendous amount, in qualitative terms, to what’s already out there. Yet. But a look at the source code suggests more exciting developments to come: there’s a lot of stuff ‘commented out’ or not yet enabled. Give it time.
30 Oct 2009

news

pressassociation, pressoffice, wordpress

WordPress to power new Press Assoc network?

The Press Association is the engine which powers the UK news machine. In effect it’s a cooperative owned by the UK’s regional and national newspapers. It has noticed that, as funds get tighter, its members have stopped reporting on local democracy – council meetings and the like. And it’s working on a proposal to fill that gap in the information provision market by providing the content itself, free of charge online… if the public purse cares to pay them £15-18 million to do so.

It’s a very interesting notion, and – considering the potential public benefit – a not inconceivable price-tag. But the line in Robert Andrews’s piece at PaidContent which really caught my eye was this:

“It will probably be delivered initially through a WordPress (blog) site, but it will be delivered with RSS feeds spinning off it and not as a primary site of interest.” Johnston showed a mock-up of PA content in a blog wearing an out-of-the-box default WordPress theme.

In fact, it’s a concept I’ve proven myself. A couple of years ago, I did some work with a small business information consultancy to move their (relatively tiny-scale) news publishing mechanism over to WordPress. Stories were being written in an existing workflow management app: but when it came to distributing these stories, we simply dropped them into a WordPress build – and let WP’s remarkably flexible RSS functionality do the rest. Stories were tagged according to subject area and clients; feeds were generated; and content got syndicated to wherever it needed to be, in an easily-republishable format. There was no front-end website at all: just the feeds coming off it.

So yes, I can heartily endorse this proposal. If it’s an open-access site, requiring easy authoring and easy syndication, WordPress should be perfect. And since it already does all the feed stuff, out-of-the-box, the project could be up and running as quickly as the reporters can be recruited.

But still, it’s a startling moment to be receiving the endorsement from the biggest player in UK news distribution. And it’s yet another reason, as if we needed it, for anyone working in news to look at what WordPress could do for them. If we could get every government press office on WordPress, for a start…
27 Oct 2009

company, e-government

bis, consultation, nationalstudentforum, wordpress

New site for National Student Forum

Today sees the launch of the latest little site we’ve built on behalf of – or more accurately, in collaboration with – BIS, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. It’s a pretty straightforward WordPress build for something called the National Student Forum: a panel representing HE students’ interests, whose latest annual report was published this morning.

It started out as a fairly simple project, to do the ‘commentable document’ thing around the new Annual Report. But it soon became obvious that, for various practical and structural reasons, the only sensible thing to do was to remake the Forum’s entire site. (Er, all half a dozen pages of it.) And although it’s still a fairly small site, it’s been built with future flexibility in mind, should it ever be needed.

I’ve put a lot of work into the visual aspects this time: it’s a big, bold design drawing heavily on the style of the printed publication. There’s a cute little routine which allows you to specify the header image for a given page. We’re using Scribd.com to host the PDF files, allowing us to embed them back into our pages with Flash; but I’ve used a bit of Javascript to hold it all back until it’s required. The site will use comment threading, which isn’t (yet?) the norm: I’ll be watching to see if the users are comfortable with it. And all turned round in less than a week. A fun job.
27 Oct 2009

e-government

bis, consultation, onlinepoll

Credit where it's due

The BIS All-Stars have produced something relatively small-scale in support of their new consultation on credit and store cards: but it works remarkably well.

Working with plain English consultancy Simply Understand, they’ve boiled the classic 80-odd-page goverment consultation document down to just 10 (and done a nice design job on it too). But then they’ve gone a step further, and reduced it to a simple web poll asking which of five issues is most important to you. There’s a short explanatory paragraph on each, hidden by Javascript thus forcing you to interact with it immediately. Concise, straightforward text which gets you clicking from the off… and makes you think a bit, but not too much. Modest in its ambitions, and all the more successful for it.

And then, when you’ve cast your vote, it offers you the option to send a pre-constructed tweet out on Twitter (as well as a few other sociable options)… which is how I heard of it, so at the very least, it’s worked on one person. Not rocket science by any means, but a wonderful little touch I wish I’d thought of.

Oh, and it all slots perfectly into their existing website. Another good reason to be using WordPress.

It’s not the only thing BIS have put out today… more later.
26 Oct 2009

e-government

foreignoffice, stephenhale

FCO's modest redesign

The Foreign Office relaunched its corporate website over the weekend – always a brave move. You’re met by a very striking news-y homepage, with large-format high-impact (and high maintenance) imagery: it works very well indeed, but is the sort of homepage which takes a lot of editorial effort, and presumably a photo budget of some sort. There are several RSS icons dotted around the place; blog and Twitter areas on the homepage; and if you dig a little deeper, a press office blog (of sorts). It’s a homepage which clearly knows its purpose. And that’s a good thing.

Design-wise, the header feels modest and contemporary. But I’d have concerns about the presentation of text lower down the page. Whilst I’m sure a lot of the issues – inconsistent spacing, curious alignment, empty links – can probably be put down to teething troubles, I’m forced to look back to the Blogs site which started fairly messy, and hasn’t ever improved. Stephen Hale promises a new look to that site too; I sincerely hope so.

The press office ‘blog’ is a very interesting addition: running since June, it actually uses an account at Tumblr.com as its CMS, with the material being pulled into FCO chrome (presumably) via RSS feed. It’s publish-only, so no comments; and if you want anything beyond the last few items, it sends you off to Tumblr. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s lots to like about Tumblr, a lighter-than-lightweight ‘blogging’ solution. But I don’t feel comfortable about a major department of state using it. And I wonder if they’d be doing that if their main blogging platform wasn’t a better one.

You’ll be wondering about cost, no doubt. ‘None of this work cost any extra money,’ says Stephen, ‘we’ve done it in house.’ And whilst that doesn’t mean it’s free, at least it means (one assumes) they’ve avoided the worst excesses of some previous site rebuilds.

Is it better than what went before? Yes, I think so. It feels like a much smaller, slightly better organised site. But as I said last time, we expect a lot from FCO – with a famously digitally-savvy Foreign Secretary, a communications remit and a significant budget. I still think they can do more, and do it better. We await their new appointment with interest.
21 Oct 2009

politics, technology

hansardsociety, iaindale, joswinson, kerrymccarthy, twitter

Hansard Society event on Twitter in politics

What can you say about Twitter? They came in their dozens to the Hansard Society’s event at Portcullis House to find out from a panel consisting of blogger Iain Dale, MPs Jo Swinson and Kerry McCarthy, and Tweetminster founder Andrew Walker. I hadn’t expected to learn a lot: I’ve been using Twitter longer and more intensively than most people. But I still came away more than a little disappointed.

Yes, some/many people talk a lot of pointless nonsense. Yes, people send links to stuff. Yes, sometimes certain topics rise to prominence. Yes, you can build engagement with people. But if you’d spent the hour and a half just looking at the Twitter website, you’d have learned all that for yourself anyway. And since most people in the room were already Twitter users, they probably knew it before proceedings started.

The event just didn’t get to the heart of what made Twitter different. Most of the points were equally applicable to any other ‘social media’ channel. And regrettably, it felt like we were falling into the usual trap of seeing social media as new broadcast channels. Sure, there were brief mentions of debate (conclusion: it’s not very good at it) and short-form correspondence with constituents. But almost everything was in a context of getting your message out to an audience.

All of which misses what, for me, is by far Twitter’s strongest selling point: namely, the fact that your audience is listening to you because it wants to listen, wants to engage… and wants to help.

I longed to hear one of the panel talk about how their Twitter audience helps them be better at their work. Examples of where they’ve asked a question, and their followers have answered it. Or where they’ve said they’re about to go into a meeting with someone, and a follower suggests a Killer Question. Demonstrations of the power of the network. But none came. (It’s a pity, because I’ve heard Tom Watson talk most persuasively about precisely that.)

One of the reasons I love Twitter myself is that, when everything – and everyone – gets boiled down to 140 characters, there’s no room for airs and graces. It’s a level playing field, with world leaders’ great pronouncements streaming in alongside mundane updates about what my mates are having for breakfast. It’s a reminder that you’re nothing special – or rather, you’re just as special as everyone else.

You might have something to say to me, which might interest me; but equally, I’ve got something to say to you, which might interest you. We’re all in this together. And post-expenses scandal, in a profession which depends on connecting personally with an electorate at least once every five years, I’d have thought that was a timely reminder.

A good-natured, upbeat but ultimately insubstantial evening.
13 Oct 2009

e-government

careandsupport, consultation, health, wordpress

We care a lot

One of my bigger projects this year has been the website for the Care And Support green paper, aka The Big Care Debate. Basically, the country is in desperate need of a new funding model for long-term care of the elderly and disabled: and in July, three funding options were put forward for consideration. And we’ve been trying various things, online and offline, to engage people in the debate.

When the green paper was published, we did a Commentariat-style ‘commentable document’; there’s also an interactive on-screen questionnaire, with or without a ‘face morphing’ app which shows what you might look like when you’re old. (I can’t claim any credit for that last element btw.) Meanwhile, in the real world, there have been a series of ‘roadshows’ for public and stakeholders – as shown on the clickable homepage map. You’ll also note, if you click on places like Peterborough, Derby or Coventry, that the team have taken a digital camera with them, and are posting snaps on Flickr. Then there’s the Campaign Monitor email list, the Twitter account, the Facebook activity (official and unofficial)…

The response has been huge, and often angry. The site has received more than 3,500 user comments, the majority of which have been to a single page of the commentable document: there’s clearly been a concerted campaign among interest groups to make their opposition known. There’s also been a healthy volume of comments on the campaign’s blog, written – you’ll note – in the name of the lead official, rather than a politician (although that hasn’t stopped people constantly raising the issue of politicians’ expenses claims).

In truth, on occasions, it’s been too much. At one point, we feared the site had been hacked: in fact, we’d just hit the limit imposed by our hosting company on outgoing emails. (Turned out, it was too many people asking to receive email notification of follow-up comments.) If you don’t count Downing Street petitions, it must rank as one of the highest volumes of responses to a government consultation exercise.

Now let’s be honest: most of the feedback has not been complimentary. There are a lot of people who think the changes are designed to cut their current benefits; and anything the Government tries to do at the moment is being met with disillusionment, cynicism and antipathy. So is it a bad thing to have received so many defensive, angry, confrontational comments? Personally, I don’t think so. Negative feedback is still valid feedback. It highlights the areas where there have been problems, if only communication problems. And it gives you a mailing list of people you need to contact, to make your case.

We’re now into the final month of the consultation, which – for some people, I dare say – is a relief. By any volume metric, I’m confident the process will be counted a success. But of course, the only meaningful measure of success is whether or not it yields a workable proposal with general public approval. In the current political climate, I fear that may be too much to ask. Still, I hope the web element has done its bit.