Puffbox

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

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    Language matters

    I’m still gathering my thoughts from Saturday’s UK GovCamp: not sure what I can or should say. Several people told me fascinating things, on condition I didn’t write them up here. Several things I would truly love to blog about, but I know I shouldn’t. I’ll piece together the rest in due course.

    But one thing which has already hit home numerous times is this slide by Anthony Zacharzewski, during his (sub)session ‘Making the political sell‘:

    Anthony’s point was that politicians from the two leading parties respond differently to different (apparently synonymous) words. Depending on which party your interlocutor represents, you may need to alter your vocabulary if you’re going to get your proposal passed.

    A fascinating idea, not something I’d ever thought about before – but on reflection, spot on. Worth printing out this sheet and keeping it handy for the next few months, maybe.

    Anthony’s full slide set is here. Follow this guy, he knows his stuff.

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    Photo-sharing function for Health consultation

    One of my longest-running projects has been the consultation around Care and Support, and the creation of a National Care Service. It’s been a huge engagement process on many fronts, moving through numerous phases – and the website has reflected that, with frequent changes, additions and updates.

    The latest enhancement went live last week – and effectively grafts Flickr-like photo functionality on top of WordPress. We’re asking people to submit photos which illustrate the issue from their perspective, with the prospect of including the best ones in the White Paper due later this year.

    Now I’ll confess, I wasn’t too convinced by the idea initially. Would we get any response at all? Would the photos be any good? Would people take the issues seriously? But I’m happy to admit my instincts were wrong this time: yes, people are sending in their photos, and yes, some of them are fantastic.

    The upload function is based around the TDO Mini Forms plugin: not always the easiest to work with, but it opens up all sorts of possibilities. In a perfect world we’d maybe have tried to do a really slick upload form: TDOMF relies on an iframe, with some downside in terms of usability. But it’s good enough, and it was up and running in next to no time. All submissions are moderated prior to publication: and thankfully, TDOMF makes this as easy as normal WP comments.

    If you know Flickr, you’ll immediately see echoes of its design in the custom templates I’ve done – and yes, that’s entirely deliberate. Since it’s fulfilling the same basic purpose, it made sense to use the same basic presentation. We considered using Flickr itself, but didn’t feel too comfortable with its rules on ‘commercial’ groups: maybe we could have pleaded non-profit status, but it wasn’t worth spending time on. (Comment functionality is of course present on the site; but it was decided not to open comments on these pages.)

    I doubt there’s a place for this in many consultations; but I’m glad we’ve been able to prove it can be done – and that there are people out there, willing to get involved. A soft engagement success story in the making, I hope.

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    WordPress powers Scotland's new national newspaper

    A hearty congratulations to Stewart Kirkpatrick whose project to launch a new online national newspaper for Scotland got off the ground at the weekend. It’s called the Caledonian Mercury, and its rather ambitious mission statement is ‘to revive Scottish journalism by using the internet rather than railing against it.’

    If you remember the days when, inexplicably, The Scotsman was one of the best online news sources on the planet – that was Stewart. I met him when I spoke at a conference in Edinburgh; he had moved into a small online startup, but was clearly still a news man. And looking back over his blogging in the last year or so, you can see how he’s reached this point: one track extolling the virtues of WordPress (well, usually), the other seeing an opportunity to reinvent the news business.

    So here it is then, the CalMerc. A fairly straightforward WordPress build, using an off-the-shelf news-y theme – with a bit of customisation, and a healthy dose of plugins. I can see a few rough edges to be smoothed out, and it’s all fairly modest in design terms: but as they told one critical tweeter, ‘behaviour first, design second’. Couldn’t agree more.

    So Stewart – all the best, big man. If anyone can do it, I’m pretty sure you can.

    PS: Other WordPress-powered newspapers are available – Bristol 24-7 springs to mind as a similar online startup; the Express & Star came to WP after 120-odd years in print. There may be much more to come if the Press Association has its way.

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    Creative Commons coming to data.gov.uk

    There’s something almost unnerving about the launch of a government website getting so much positive coverage. But today’s been data.gov.uk‘s big day, and everyone seems to agree it’s a jolly good thing. For now.

    James Crabtree’s piece for Prospect magazine hails it as ‘a tale of star power, serendipity, vision, persistence and an almost unprecedented convergence of all levels of government’. The New Statesman says it’s ‘a far more radical project than it first appears… a clear break with the closed, data-hugging state of the past.’ We’re all getting quite excitable, aren’t we?

    Me? I’m just looking back over posts on this blog last year: this one about the need to make moves on data release (including an excerpt from my resignation letter from ONS), and this one on Tim Berners-Lee’s appointment. I’ll confess, I got something wrong in that latter post; I wrote that it was ‘probably’ a cult-of-celebrity, hands-off appointment. Looks like that wasn’t entirely accurate. Sorry.

    This has been a long time coming. Too long. Shamefully long. But there is still good reason to be excited. Amid all the talk about bicycle accidents, you may have missed the news that OPSI is working on simplified T&Cs for reuse of the site’s data:

    These terms and conditions have been aligned so that they are interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. The terms and conditions are also machine readable meaning that the licence is presented and coded in such a way that applications and programs can access and understand the terms and conditions too.

    This is the first major step towards the adoption of a non-transactional, Creative Commons style approach to licensing the re-use of government information. The new model will replace the existing Click-Use Licence. We are working towards the launch of the new licence model by the end of May 2010.

    Don’t overlook the significance of this move. This is government adopting someone else’s standard, for something they have historically claimed as their own. The Click-Use Licence is actually pretty liberal… but it’s scary.

    This simple shift will take us from this:

    Unless otherwise specified the information on this site is covered by either Crown Copyright, Crown Database Right or has been licensed to the Crown. It is your responsibility to clear any other rights. You are encouraged to use and re-use the information that is available on and through this site freely and flexibly, with only a few conditions…

    to this (or something very like it). We, the citizens of the web, know what Creative Commons means: we don’t need to look it up, we won’t need a dictionary, and we won’t need a lawyer. Good things will happen as a direct result.

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    UK Location: our new microsite for Defra

    One department making steady steps into WordPress has been Defra: it started with a ‘public beta’ blog on third sector issues late in 2008, then a Commentariat-based consultation in mid-2009. I’ve been working with them since late last year, and the first fruits of that relationship are now starting to appear.

    First to go public is a microsite for the UK Location Programme – which you probably won’t have heard of, but is all about EU-wide interoperability in geographic data, so it may well be of interest. They needed a website which they could manage themselves, rather than through the central Defra web team; and were open to online consultation methods. Ideal WordPress territory, in other words.

    The site is closely modelled on the Defra corporate site, even going so far as to use the same base stylesheet. Behind the scenes, it’s the usual combination of WordPress posts and pages, with the former handling news updates, and the latter everything else. Inevitably we were looking at lots of downloadable PDFs and Office documents; so I’ve done a custom ‘widget’ to display the latest file uploads (excluding images), with the appropriate filetype icons.

    The human element on this one could be interesting too. The project’s communications manager is an iPhone owner; and we’ve already experimented (successfully) with him updating the site via the excellent WordPress iPhone app. All being well, you’ll never notice; but it opens up all sorts of possibilities.

    The site is sitting in some modestly-priced ‘sandbox’ hosting space, and came together in less than a week. In quite a few respects, it’s more advanced than the main Defra site; and I’m hoping they’ll see how WordPress could help at the top level too. Watch out for at least one more Puffbox-Defra collaboration in the next few weeks.

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    NHS Choices budget in eyepopping detail

    A written answer in response to Conservative MP Grant Shapps has provided the best breakdown I’ve yet seen of spending on NHS Choices, one of the government’s three £20m mega-portals. You kinda know what’s coming, don’t you?

    2007-08

Strategy and planning:        £3,291,659.57

Design and build              £4,266,748.79

Hosting and infrastructure    £1,871,933.81

Content provision             £3,010,242.69

Testing and evaluation        £1,236,993.29

Total                        £13,677,578.14

2008-09

Strategy and planning:        £8,764,040.54

Design and build              £7,470,562.03

Hosting and infrastructure    £3,169,335.95

Content provision             £7,156,673.03

Testing and evaluation        £1,300.208.47

Total                        £27,860,820.02

2009-10

Strategy and planning:        £5,845,541.38

Design and build              £6,377,614.00

Hosting and infrastructure    £2,610,803.31

Content provision             £5,448,688.20

Testing and evaluation        £1,023,417.78

Total                        £21,306,064.66

    I’m not sure which figure jumps out at me the most; they’re all eyepoppingly large. It’s probably the £8.76m on strategy and planning in 2008-9 – which, let’s note, doesn’t include the £1.3m on testing and evaluation. And since it’s broken out separately, you have to assume that the costs allocated to the other categories are actual production costs, ie ‘strategy’ not included..?

    The easiest to justify is probably ‘content provision’ – although it’s a genuine surprise to see it third on the list of priorities behind ‘design and build’ (of a site that’s already been largely designed and built already?) and ‘strategy and planning’.

  • Don't watch that, look at this

    Tom Watson (West Bromwich East, Labour)

    To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what the total cost to her Department was of the directgov advertising campaign, Go DirectGov.

    Jim Knight (Minister of State (the South West), Regional Affairs; South Dorset, Labour)

    The cost of production and airtime purchased to date combined is £2.05 million.

    Source: TheyWorkForYou.com

    Why? According to Mike Hoban: ‘Television advertising works and is an effective way of building recognition.’

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    A few freeware recommendations

    It’s taking a while to get my 2010 blogging up to speed – so I thought I’d share a couple of the utilities which have been making life with Windows a little easier.

    One which took a while to get used to, but is now a must-have, is the open-source Launchy. I was finding my Windows Start Menu getting over-full – to the extent that it took a good few seconds to even open. (Admittedly a memory boost later helped.) So I was looking for a way to avoid having to open the Start Menu at all – and that’s Launchy.

    You press Alt+space, and you get a text input window – into which you can start to type a program name, a folder name, a filename, a custom command… you get the picture. Launchy lists anything which matches whatever you type in, as you type it in – and when you see what you want, hit ‘enter’… and it happens.

    Even better, it learns which are your favourite applications for any given combination of keystrokes: so when I want to activate my local web development environment, all I need to type in is ‘w’, and it knows what I probably want. It may not sound like a massive productivity boost – but you might be amazed just how much time you spend navigating around your Windows environment.

    (There’s an equivalent for the Mac called Quicksilver; and for Linux, Gnome Do. I can’t vouch for Quicksilver, but I’m spending more and more of my time with Ubuntu, and Gnome Do is starting to become an essential part of that experience too.)

    My other recommendation is MaxTo for Windows – which actually makes 1920×1080 monitors make sense. I bought a new HD-resolution monitor last summer, and found myself overwhelmed with the available pixel space. Full-screen applications don’t make sense at that resolution, but there’s no built-in mechanism to make windows ‘maximise’ to anything smaller.

    When you first run MaxTo, it asks you to define a grid layout which suits you. So for example, I’ve got a full-height, 1024-wide area for ‘full screen’ web browsing; an 800×600 (ish) window which I tend to use for text editing / coding; and two narrow columns for Explorer windows, Javascript error console, odds and ends like that. Then, when you press the ‘maximise’ button on a window, it expands to fill the area it’s in.

    It’s the only way I’ve found, on any operating system, to get the screen layout I want – reliably, consistently, and instantly. It’s like having a multi-monitor setup on a single unit, and was precisely what I needed. MaxTo ceased to be freeware last year some time, but if you look around – eg here, you’ll find older versions.

  • Geolocation: getting worse?

    Credit: Roo Reynolds

    About a year ago, I ran a short experiment, with the assistance of the various misguided fools who choose to follow me on Twitter. I was intrigued by the possibilities offered by the geolocation element within Google’s javascript API. With one line of code, you could theoretically make a good guess as to where the user was physically located – and could tailor the page content accordingly. But did the theory hold up?

    The answer – sadly – was no, not really. When it worked, it was brilliant; but all too often, it didn’t work. Some ISPs reported curious results; sometimes it gave an error; some ISPs seemed to block it outright. So my conclusion then was that ‘it’s not really good enough to make meaningful use of’.

    One year later, and I’m working on a few websites for MPs/candidates ahead of the general election. One specific project involves a front-bencher with interests at both local and national level. It would be great if we could show local-level things to people in the constituency, and national-level things to people outside. Had the Google API improved at all?

    Sadly – no. In fact, if anything, it had got worse. Mobile seems to be a particular blackspot: nobody using a phone reported a success. And the various changes in the ISP market don’t seem to have helped. We had people in Leeds and Manchester being told they were in London, and people in Reading being told they were in Glasgow.

    So I’m reluctantly abandoning the work I’d done on automatic location detection. Instead, we’ll show you one view (either ‘local’ or ‘national’) by default, with an obvious method to switch to the other; and will drop a cookie each time you switch, so you’ll see the same view when you return next time.  Not a bad Plan B, really.

    There’s no doubt in my mind, ‘proper’ geolocation is going to be a very big deal – but for the foreseeable future it’ll be dependent on people running the most modern browsing technology. That’s fine for mobiles; but we live in a world where IE6 still refuses to go away. (Actually… according to this source, IE6 is the single most popular browser version out there?!)

    Picture: Roo Reynolds, Flickr

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    Commercial advertising on govt's no1 website

    Figures from Hitwise at the end of November showed the Met Office to be central government’s most popular website, with traffic getting on for double that of Directgov. Now I must admit, I’m not a regular visitor to the site: I tend to favour Metcheck. But with the country apparently heading for a new ice age, I thought I’d drop by, and see their prediction for the days ahead. And I got quite a surprise:

    But that’s not all. Every few refreshes, you’ll also see one of these:

    I seem to recall they’ve had ‘house adverts’ for their own commercial products for some time. But this is the first time I’ve been aware of third-party commercial advertising on the site.

    I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. They’ve clearly got healthy traffic levels, and they’re a Trading Fund: if advertisers want to hand over cash for a few pixels of unused screen space, hey – shouldn’t they be duty-bound to accept it? (There’s more information in this press release from September… including the rather startling suggestion that their traffic peaks at 19 million visits per day.)