Puffbox

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

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    Wanted: consultation platform, £1m reward

    I’m glad my former Microsoft colleague John McGarvey reminded me of Conservative shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s proposal of a £1m prize to develop ‘the best new technology platform that helps people come together to solve the problems that matter to them’. That’s what happens when you announce things over the Christmas holidays.

    The plan is for a future Conservative government to use it ‘to throw open the policy making process to the public, and harness the wisdom of the crowd so that the public can collaborate to improve government policy. For example, a Conservative government would publish all government Green Papers on this platform, so that everyone can have their say on government policies, and feed in their ideas to make them better.’ Why does that sound so familiar? ‘There are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by Government,’ says Mr Hunt; ‘this prize is a good and cost-effective way of getting one.’

    Now I don’t know what kind of ‘scale’ or ‘depth’ Mr Hunt thinks he requires. If there’s a formal brief, I’ve yet to find it – and I’d be delighted if someone could point me in the right direction.

    Because I’ve been building websites allowing the public to input their views on government green and white papers for some time now. Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme kickstarted the process: and I’ve since gone on to build reusable WordPress MU-based platforms for two Whitehall departments, for a few grand each. We’ve proven WordPress can handle (literally) thousands of responses – and in the only case so far where it’s wobbled, that was because of ISP throttling rather than the ability of WordPress to handle it.

    Then on the academic side, you’ve got the work that’s been done by Joss Winn and Tony Hirst et al on JISCPress / digress.it / writetoreply.org. Their focus has been on the technical side, including some early steps towards community-building. It’s a bit lacking in terms of aesthetics, and it hasn’t yet been tested with huge volumes, but it’s doing some very interesting things.

    And of course, barely a month ago, you had Mr Hunt’s own people at Tory central office proving the point by turning the government’s draft IT strategy into a consultation document using WordPress. Cheap and quick, showing signs of inexperience with the platform – but good enough to receive nearly 400 contributions.

    So you have several independent operations in the (wide) UK public sector, already proving in the real world that WordPress is perfectly capable of supporting such ‘user feedback’ websites, and delivering some pretty sophisticated functionality and user experience. BuddyPress, meanwhile, continues to improve, and could certainly form the bedrock of a government-backed policy development community.

    There’s no doubt in my mind that the technology is ready. And there are enough good people who have built up enough experience to collaborate on building something pretty special. For a slice of that £1m, I’m sure I could find time in my own schedule.

    But the big question is… is Mr Hunt ready? What does it mean to receive large volumes of contributions from the general public? When do you ask for them? How do you deal with them? How do you ensure they’re representative? And what if you don’t like the consensus of the opinions expressed?

    I’m all for the kind of revolution in policy development he seems to be proposing; and I’d be happy to play a part in it. But it isn’t the lack of a technical platform that will hold this vision back. If anything, that’s the easiest part.

    PS Just a thought… whither Tom Steinberg?

  • 2009: the year I became a developer (sort of)

    When I started in this business, I made a conscious decision not to become a programmer. I knew I had it in me: if I could crack Latin, I could certainly crack PHP. But I’ve always recognised that I’m better ‘across the board’ than most people I come across in the field. There just aren’t that many people who can appreciate design and development and editorial and Westminster. And besides, if I decided I wanted to be a developer, I’d have to concentrate 100% on it.

    And yet somehow, at some point during the summer of 2009, I started cranking out more and more ambitious code. My PHP efforts went beyond straightforward HTML templates with WordPress tags dropped in. I wasn’t scared to look at javascript. Next thing I know, I’m writing WordPress plugins and pretty advanced javascript/Ajax routines. I’m scraping web pages in their thousands, to get data in the form I want. All stuff I knew was possible, and probably understood on a superficial level – but here I am, doing it. Dammit. So how on earth did I get here?

    A lot of it is down to WordPress, which acted as a gateway into the depths of PHP. You can achieve a heck of a lot in WordPress with fairly sketchy PHP knowledge – following the Codex‘s instructions, and not asking too many questions. But inevitably I found myself wanting to dig a little deeper: to understand why certain things did what they did, and to find out what other options were available. I realised I’d unconsciously picked up quite a lot of the basics, enough to understand the more complex concepts.

    It’s also been the availability and maturity of certain tools: in particular JQuery and SimplePie. The former is the perfect route into javascript, making pretty advanced techniques seem as straightforward as CSS. The latter makes it laughably easy to work with RSS – opening the doors to all sorts of possibilities, where feeds are available. It’s also been extremely helpful to find a couple of CSS frameworks I’m comfortable with, namely YUI and 960.gs – simplifying the layout process and letting me devote my time to other aspects of the work.

    Part of it, too, has been the challenges thrown up by several key projects. For example, there was a moment in the Lynne Featherstone project where I discovered an unexpectedly huge amount of unstructured HTML content to be imported. I’d never looked at screen-scraping in much detail: sure, I’d played around with it, but I’d never yet had a reason to get my hands seriously dirty with it. To my great relief, I came up with a (so far) reliable method for scraping entire websites into a format suitable for WordPress import… and I’ve had cause to use it on a couple of other projects already. Necessity, being the mother of invention, has added several such strings to my bow.

    And I have to say, meeting some great people through the year – particularly within the WordPress community – has been a further encouragement. It turns out, developers can be relatively nice, relatively normal guys. Blimey, one or two of them might even qualify as cool.

    I’m not ‘one of them’ yet, nor do I ultimately want to be. I’m still in awe of, and slightly intimidated by, the really good ones. I’m sure a real developer would look at some of my work, and laugh. But by and large, my stuff works as well as it has to work. And even if it doesn’t, we can call it a prototype until someone more skilled can come along and do it properly. 🙂