2010 – Page 6 – Puffbox

7 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, efficiencyboard, francismaude, tomwatson

Websites under £20k dodge Maude's gateway

There’s an intriguing mismatch between the answers to two PQs tabled by former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson today. In one, he asks ‘what criteria have been set to govern the creation of new Government websites’, to which Francis Maude replies:

I am determined to reduce the number of Government websites and so the creation of any new sites will be exceptional and only permitted where its objective cannot be met in any other way. The reduction in the number of websites is part of the overall control on communications spending, which the Efficiency Board is overseeing.

You’ll note the complete lack of any specific criteria being mentioned. That’s OK, it’s hardly the first time. But on the very same page of Hansard, we go on to learn there are some specific criteria as to whether or not a web project even requires the Board’s oversight.

Tom also asked about the cost of the Your Freedom website, built by Delib. Francis Maude responds that the site cost a very reasonable £3,200 (inc VAT) to build, and has a (very precisely) estimated annual cost of £19,853.98 including VAT. But the last line of the response is the most interesting:

The creation of the Your Freedom website did not come before the Efficiency Board as the estimated cost was below the £20,000 threshold for approval.

Ah, there is a specific criterion after all! There’s certainly been no mention of it in, for example, the Cabinet Office press release announcing the new procedure, which only stated that:

No new websites will be permitted except for those that pass through a stringent exceptions process for special cases, and are cleared by the Efficiency board

So at first glance, it looks like you’ll get away with it if you keep the price below £20k. Your Freedom, which comes in just £146.02 below that threshold, appears to be setting a handy precedent.
7 Jul 2010

e-government

bbc, rorycellanjones

How can a website cost £35m? Easily.

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones clearly doesn’t read this blog. His big story this morning is on the cost associated with the BusinessLink website: much as I predicted in my immediate analysis of the COI data a fortnight ago.

Rory was casting around on Twitter yesterday for interviewees: I know my name was put forward by a few people (for which I’m most grateful), but the call never came. Instead he’s gone to Sean O’Halloran from Hoop Associates, who offers a theory about ‘a big supplier, technology driven way of thinking’.

Speaking as someone who has worked as a civil servant, as a consultant on one of these mega-projects, and now as a small supplier trying to undermine them, I can speak with some authority on this. And whilst Sean’s theory isn’t wrong, it’s a little out of focus.

The simple answer to the question ‘how can a website cost £35m?’ is – because it can.

Government’s perceptions of ‘the going rate’ for website development have increased – ironically, just as the actual cost of web development has dropped due to open source and cheap hosting. In recent years, there’s been no shame in a department paying close to £1m on its corporate website – see these PQ answers from DFID and DIUS. It naturally follows that a ‘supersite’ representing multiple departments would cost a multiple of said figures. And when they asked for the money, they got it.

As soon as big money is on the table, the big consultancies swoop – in numbers. Waves of salespeople, account managers, and business analysts, which the civil service balances out with IT managers and procurement specialists. It’s a very cosy relationship, with both sides keeping each other busy, and everyone taking home a day’s pay.

It’s not unusual never to even sit down with the people doing the actual work. Instead, you find yourself in a whirlwind of meetings, documents, meetings about documents, and documents about meetings. And then there’s the stakeholders – mustn’t forget them. All of this costs money. And none of it actually generates a single line of code.

The brutal truth is that it isn’t in the big consultancies’ interests to deliver quickly, and the civil service often doesn’t know any better. Sure, government IT always runs late and over budget, doesn’t it?

How do we break the cycle? I think the forthcoming austerity measures will help. There simply won’t be the same amount of money sloshing around the system. Departments will simply have to try other, cheaper approaches – no matter what the current contracts say. And they’ll simply have to get tougher with suppliers who fail to deliver. A few new faces will also help: Tom Steinberg, Rishi Saha, the proposed skunkworks, (Lord) Richard Allan… maybe others.

None of this excuses BusinessLink costing £35m, and not being brilliant. But that’s for another day.
2 Jul 2010

news

guardian, wordpress

Guardian launches WordPress syndication plugin

On the very day that the Times puts up its paywall, the Guardian goes the complete opposite direction – and unveils a WordPress plugin intended to gets its content out there, on as many other people’s sites as possible, free of charge.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, and signed up for an API key, you get effectively a subeditor’s view of the Guardian’s archives. If you find a story you like, and want to republish, you save it down to your own WordPress installation, then edit and publish it as normal. It even checks stories for updates. Much neater than a DIY solution based on something like the FeedWordPress plugin, and without the potential for licensing headaches… as long as you’re happy enough to leave the credits and adverts in place.

The blogger (or whoever) gets free, simplified access to the Guardian’s content, without licensing worries; the Guardian gets additional attention for its material, a wider spread of advertising impressions, and a PR victory over its Murdoch rivals.

If it sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can download it from WordPress.org.

Update: worth noting Public Strategist’s problems with the plugin: ‘Nowhere in those extensive conditions does it state that the Guardian claims the right to extend that control to the host blog.‘
2 Jul 2010

company

wordcamp, wordpress

Proud to be sponsoring WordCamp UK (again)

Puffbox is proud to confirm that we will again be sponsoring WordCamp UK, the annual gathering of the nation’s users and developers of WordPress. As things stand, we’re the only sponsor to have supported the event in each of its three years of existence.

This year’s event takes place on 17-18 July – yes, just a few weeks away; and we’re being hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University Business School – right in the heart of the nation’s computing capital (historically speaking at least!). As with last year, it’ll be a full two days, with sessions in two rooms simultaneously; and I’ll be doing a session on… er, something. Haven’t quite pinned it down yet.

‘Life-changing’ may be too dramatic a word; but certainly, good things have happened for me in the aftermath of both previous WordCamps that simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I’ve met new and interesting people; learned new things; pooled new ideas; developed working relationships; and formulated grand plans. And there’s every reason to believe that this year’s event will be similarly stimulating. That’s why Puffbox is continuing its sponsorship of the event: because, by throwing a few quid into the pot, we ensure it all happens again.

The running order (still in development) will include sessions led by leading lights of the UK WordPress community like Simon Wheatley, Mike Little and Dave Coveney; plus at least one person, possibly two, from WP’s parent company, Automattic; and Peter Westwood, one of the core development team behind WordPress. (Regular readers of this here blog might be interested to note quite a few speakers with public sector experience, too.)

If you’d like to join us – and you’d be most welcome, of course! – the tickets are a modest £20 each if you book now, rising to £30 after the weekend.
1 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, delib, nickclegg

Another week, another major consultation

First it was the Programme for Government, then the public sector Spending Challenge… and now it’s Your Freedom:

We’re working to create a more open and less intrusive society through our Programme for Government. We want to restore Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness, and free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses. This site gives you the chance to submit, comment on, or vote for ideas about how we can do this. Your ideas will inform government policy and some of your proposals could end up making it into bills we bring before Parliament to change the law.

As with the Spending Challenge, it’s a concept which the LibDems tried (to a certain extent) prior to the election: they published their proposed Freedom Bill online, and invited comments on it. So for once, with concrete justification, you can argue that the government – at least part of it, anyway – knows what it wants to come out of this consultation before it starts. (Indeed, the Cabinet Office press release is quite explicit, that it will result in ‘a Freedom Bill in the autumn’.)

Update: Mark Pack makes some excellent points re the original LibDem exercise. The ‘blank sheet of paper’ approach of Your Freedom is inevitably (?) leading to some crackpot proposals. The LD approach was much more focused: here are the key repeals we’re intending to make; please tell us if you think we’ve got the detail wrong and if there’s anything similar missing.

This time, the site is running on Delib’s Plone-based Dialogue App platform. We know this because somewhat unusually, Delib have included a namecheck in the footer of each page. Whilst Plone is open source, Delib’s code doesn’t seem to be; however, there’s some suggestion among various gov people on Twitter that there should be ‘positive’ news on that front shortly.

It certainly looks a lot like the design I cobbled together for the Programme for Government site – although this time, it looks like they’ve rebuilt it from scratch. I’m now slightly worried that, in the space of a couple of hours, I may have accidentally defined a common design framework for all such sites??

Worth noting that they have a tickbox on the registration page, asking for permission to ‘contact you by email from time to time’. No specifics on what ‘time to time’ means, but at least they’ve started the exercise with that opt-in so explicit – meaning there’s no discussion later on about whether or not it’s OK to ‘spam’ people. That’s a mistake we’ve made before.

And since I haven’t mentioned it already: I also see Nick Clegg now has a separate YouTube channel of his own – although as yet, no website to speak of. But please, if you’re going to embed YouTube videos on pages, don’t set them to autoplay. We don’t need another MySpace.
29 Jun 2010

e-government

Govt claims 2,000 money-saving ideas per day

Some early figures are emerging from the Spending Challenge website set up by HM Treasury / Cabinet Office / No10 (and based heavily on my code). And if we take them at face value, they’re quite impressive – or depressing, depending on your point of view.

Since launch a week ago, they’ve received ‘over 26,000 ideas from public sector workers’ – including 8,000 on day one. A team based in the Cabinet Office is ‘processing over 2,000 submissions each day’, and will be ‘passing on the most workable ones to a team of ideas champions.’ That’s 26,000 possible ways of making things better; but equally, 26,000 ways public money has been squandered inefficiently managed in the past.

Helpfully, it seems that the Open Source movement has mobilised 😉 – and there’s a specific writeup on the site’s blog function on the subject:

One particular idea that’s been suggested by many of you is the use of open source software instead of potentially expensive commercial software. Most open source software is free to use, and has exactly the same capabilities as licensed software. The open source network also offers a huge online community that gives support and updates without expensive contract negotiations. Many of you are saying we should utilise the open source community much better than we do currently.

OK, so that’s probably not the pitch as an open-source purist would have written it, and it would have been nice if the site had mentioned that it was itself running on open source. But it’s a start I suppose.
25 Jun 2010

e-government

coi

New data reveals gov web spend, usage & satisfaction
There’s a huge amount of information to digest in COI’s ‘Reporting on progress: government websites 2009-10‘, published this morning. It lists, for virtually every government department, an assessment of staff numbers, staff and non-staff spending, page views and unique users, and where available, outcomes of user surveys, and assessments of accessibility and standards compliance.

Inevitably, there are some scarily large numbers contained within. For example:
- BusinessLink, one of government’s three super-sites, quotes a £35,000,000 spend on ‘non-staff costs’ – accounting for 27% of the total spend as outlined in the report.
- There’s no hint of the super-sites approach leading to economies of scale. BusinessLink, Directgov and NHS Choices spent £4m, £5m and £6m respectively on ‘design and build’, way beyond the biggest-spending ministerial departments (FCO and DH).
- HMRC appears to have 111 people working at least half their time on its hmrc.gov.uk website, costing £7,500,000.
- Across all departments quoted in the report, we appear to be paying £23,840,000 per year for web hosting.
However, despite COI’s best efforts, I’m still not convinced that the numbers are directly comparable. On hosting, for example, many departments quote £0 – but I’m pretty sure they’re paying for it somewhere. I’m not aware of too many departmental sites built on Blogger, WordPress.com or Geocities.

Some of the most encouraging news comes from the customer satisfaction reports from certain sites – although it’s a pity these numbers only cover half the departments in the study, with HMRC and BusinessLink being obvious omissions. The much-derided Transport Direct claims to have 1.2 million unique users in the average month, with a net customer satisfaction rate of +84%, scoring particularly highly for ease-of-use and design (!). DFID scores +79, Directgov scores +73, as does the MOD.

Other departments, sadly, don’t fare so well. DWP and Transport both show negative numbers for net customer satisfaction: -8% and -1% respectively, with very high %s of people finding ‘none of what I wanted’. I’m wondering if those measures are fair on them, though? – it seems odd with Transport Direct and (I’m guessing) JobCentrePlus, now a major part of Directgov, doing so well. And it must be a bit embarrassing for COI to rank so low in their own study, on an area where they are tasked with setting best practice (12% net satisfaction).

Like it or not, the raw traffic numbers are likely to be the main source of amusement. Predictably, the super-sites come top on all measures; but there’s a suspiciously strong showing for The National Archives, whose opsi.gov.uk site appears to be claiming to have more than 1m unique users every month. Again, BusinessLink‘s numbers stand out, reporting much lower traffic levels than their fellow super-sites. There’s also wide variety in the number of page views per visitor, and monthly visits per unique user, which might merit further investigation.

As with any dataset, it’s a mixed picture. The biggest questions, I think, are over the £23m hosting bill – and that’s unquestionably an understatement, when you consider the number of departments who quoted zero for hosting; and the value-for-money of BusinessLink.

But as with any dataset, there’s a huge risk of misinterpretation of its contents – and I wouldn’t necessarily guarantee that any of the above analysis is either true or fair. Data is good at asking questions, but rarely gives clear answers.

There’s a press release from the Cabinet Office; but to be honest, I wouldn’t bother with it.

Disclaimer: I do web stuff for lots of different bits of government. Many of the departments named above are past or present clients.
24 Jun 2010

technology

wordpress

Why WordPress 3.0 is a big deal
The latest release of WordPress pushed the version number from 2.9 to 3.0. Usually that ‘point-zero’ means it’s a significant release: but you’d be forgiven if you ran the automatic updater, and struggled to see what was different. Sure, the admin interface is a little brighter, and a few of the labels have changed. But if you were expecting new extra-powerful menu options, you’ll have been disappointed.

But the new release is a big deal. Among its additions:
- the long-awaited merger of the solo WordPress product with WordPress MU (‘multi user’). Previously I’ve tended to steer people clear of MU: although an excellent product, it was definitely second priority to ‘WordPress proper’, and the usability wasn’t brilliant. Updates were slower, and plugins didn’t always work. Although there’s still a way to go on usability, I’m much happier recommending it as a safe platform – and I’ve already started hosting some of my lower-profile projects in a single ‘multisite’ installation.
- custom taxonomies and custom content types. In fact, previous versions have had the ability to create multiple sets of tag- or category-style classifications, or tweaked versions of the ‘post’ and ‘page’ core content types – but the implementation was awkward and clunky. Based on some early experiments, I’d say they’re finally ready for industrial use.
- custom menus, allowing you to create navigation bars containing your preferred combination of pages and tags/categories. Amazing flexibility, but be warned: most themes won’t be ready to use it (yet).
- a new default theme which isn’t especially significant in itself, but it’s something for developers to bear in mind. Previously, if a theme didn’t have a specific file, you could rely on WP reverting to the version in the ‘default’ folder. But new installations won’t have that ‘default’ folder; and you’ll need to explicitly define a ‘parent’ theme for fallback purposes. Worth bearing in mind if you’ve lost any functionality after upgrading.
But here’s the thing. The two most significant aspects, ‘multisite’ and custom posts/taxonomies, only become available to those prepared to get their hands dirty in the PHP code. You won’t see them, or perhaps even know they exist, until you start hacking. In the case of multisite, for example, you’ll need to edit wp-config, then edit htaccess, then edit wp-config again… not to mention the likelihood of changes to file access permissions, Apache’s httpd.conf and/or your DNS setup. Scary stuff for the vast majority of people.

In other words, to really get the full benefit out of WordPress, you need decent coding and server admin skills. And as such, that feels like a subtle departure from the previous scenario, where a ‘power user’ could accomplish almost everything via the WordPress interface and a few plugins.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop those power users creating magnificent sites using v3.0, without having to get their hands dirty. And indeed, there are no extra options to intimidate the nervous author or editor: the WordPress experience remains unchanged. But the addition of that extra power, underneath the surface, effectively creates a new higher echelon of ‘WordPress guy’. It becomes a platform on which you can do some very serious development, if you know what you’re doing. Graphic designers calling themselves WordPress experts might want to re-evaluate.

On occasions in the past, I’ve worried about my business model’s longevity. All the difficult things I’d taught myself to do in WordPress kept getting easier with each new release: this time, for example, the new Custom Menu feature renders some of my smartest workarounds obsolete. But with all the new ‘developers-only’ potential, it looks like the path has a lot longer to run.
24 Jun 2010

e-government

directgov, opensource, treasury, wordpress

Remember to say thank-you

A bit of a tricky moment this morning. As you might have spotted, Downing Street has launched an initiative asking ‘public sector workers’ to help the government find ways to implement the massive spending cuts proposed in Tuesday’s budget ‘in a way that is fair and responsible’. And as has become the norm for such initiatives, there’s a comment-enabled website dedicated to it, built on WordPress. A ‘hooray’ is obligatory at this point, although to be honest, that’s getting a little predictable. 😉

In fact, it’s a return to an initiative launched by Nick Clegg last summer:

The people who are best placed to tell us where money is not being well spent are the teachers, nurses, social workers and other public servants who work so hard day and night on our behalf. Politicians should stop talking over the heads of public servants. We need to listen to the people in the know on how we can better run public services, making sure that every penny of taxpayers’ money is well spent. That’s what ‘Asking People In The Know’ is all about.

… but since it’s all happening again, and since the 2009 website is now giving 404 errors, one must assume it wasn’t especially fruitful.

Anyway… If you have a look at the new website, you’ll note a startling resemblance to the Programme For Government site which I built a few weeks back. It’s very obviously a derivative work, based on my code. I didn’t build it, and I didn’t get paid for it. My contract gives the Crown the right to reuse my work; and in fact, I’m very glad they did. It’s entirely in keeping with the open-source spirit… not to mention the need to find cost savings.

But as anyone following me on Twitter may have spotted, there was one slight hiccup. By convention, WordPress themes include details of their author. The original PFG theme notes me as its originator – obviously. But the derivative theme didn’t. My name had been deleted, and replaced with the names of two people I’ve never met or spoken to: at least one of whom appears to be a direct commercial competitor.

I was not best pleased. I sent out a tweet to that effect: and to the credit of one of the individuals concerned, he subsequently added a line of acknowledgement. My name is duly checked, and I’m happy again.

I am absolutely not suggesting there was any attempt to infringe my intellectual property rights, or deprive me of a deserved payment. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that it was a simple oversight. But I needed to make the point.

Acknowledgement is the currency of the open source movement. There are communities of developers spending their free time building these tools, not to mention businesses freely handing over the fruits of their labours, resulting in you getting phenomenally powerful tools for £0.00. Saying ‘thank you’ is really the least you can do; and it’s often the only ‘payment’ that the open-source contributor receives. Don’t forget.

Not for the first time, Steph Gray lays down a good model to follow. On every page in his Commentariat theme is an explicit credit for the Whitespace theme by Brian Gardner; and there’s a note of thanks to my regular collaborator Simon Wheatley in its style.css file.

And in case anyone’s interested: yes, I do plan to write something for the consultation – it’s also open to ‘private sector partners working within public sector’. Now, I wonder what I might propose?
17 Jun 2010

e-government

Govt skunkworks planned for November

Buried – inevitably – deep within a PDF file, the Cabinet Office has announced a start date of November 2010 for the ‘skunkworks’ team promised in the Conservatives’ technology manifesto.

But the Structural Reform Plan, reportedly the first of many to be published by government departments, says the skunkworks team’s role will be ‘to assess and develop faster ways of developing ICT’ – which, on the face of it, sounds like it’ll be more concerned with procedure than prototypes.

The Plan also points to the setting-up of a new Chief Information Officer’s office, and an increase in the power vested in the CIO role, by the end of August. There’s (yet) another repetition of the pledge to ‘create [a] level playing field for open source software’ – although as mentioned here previously, Francis Maude seems to have taken things a step or two beyond that commitment already, certainly where websites are concerned.

Additionally, there’s a rather vague pledge to ‘devise a government-wide strategy on digital engagement and enablement’, and a promise to ‘support departments to reduce costs of transactional services including putting more services online’.

Other than that, a lot of it is simply the formalisation of manifesto pledges – but it’s interesting to note some specifics in terms of target dates. The promise to put all tenders above £10,000 on a single free-of-charge website is due to be completed in September this year; and details of all spending above £25,000 will follow by November; but you may have to wait until 2013 for the ‘right to data’ to kick in.

And one more thing: the wording on the publication of details of those earning over £58,200 is somewhat watered down – in that it doesn’t explicitly mention the publication of people’s names. But I wouldn’t necessarily read anything into that: the PM did sign a letter which said ‘names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates’.