2011 – Page 2 – Puffbox

10 Nov 2011

news

bbc, breakingnews, toldyouso

BBC 'news jockey' experiment

By Steve Herrmann, writing on the BBC News Editors blog yesterday:

During the past few years the “live page” format has become a regular feature of our coverage around big breaking stories. The format has been a big success in terms of usage, so we’re thinking about what more we could do with it. We think the pages are not necessarily just about breaking news – they are also a real-time showcase of the best of what we (and others) are doing.

By me, writing in July 2007:

A ‘breaking news blog’, in my book, should look and feel more like Twitter. Activate it when a huge story breaks – maybe only a couple of times a year, maybe a couple of times a month. Short snaps of maybe only a couple of lines, written in an informal tone. Pretend you’re MSN-ing a friend. Be prepared to be vague – read between the lines if necessary, and don’t be shy about getting it wrong. Stream of consciousness, if you like, and proud of it. I haven’t yet seen any news organisation doing this systematically… but if they have any business in breaking news, then they should be.

I’ve also got an early idea for a ‘news jockey’ role, writing a running commentary on the day’s news blog-style. The USA Today thing is probably the closest comparison, but I’m thinking of something slightly different. It calls for a certain style of writing, and a certain style of writer, but I think it could be a winner.
10 Nov 2011

e-government

blogging, foreignoffice, toldyouso, wordpress

Foreign Office finally switches to WordPress

Earlier this week, the Foreign Office rebuilt its blogs.fco.gov.uk site. It doesn’t look much different. But the screenshot above isn’t the significant one. The one below is.

Yes, after some gentle encouragement on the pages of this blog, it’s great to see the Foreign Office moving off the Apache Roller blogging platform – What, you’ve never heard of it? Exactly. – and on to the blogging platform of choice, WordPress.

Like a lot of government projects, the brief has clearly been to keep the visuals almost exactly as-was. But Steph Gray has rebuilt the site using an HTML5-based theme, deployed on a multisite setup at Bytemark (by the look of it), and has managed to migrate 50+ blogs’ worth of content too.

I can see a few things we’d have done differently – notably around non-English content. But as Word Up Whitehall attendees will have heard, Simon Wheatley and I have been concentrating on precisely that subject for most of the past few months, so we’re probably deeper into it than most.

And so the highest-profile blogging platform in Whitehall comes over to WordPress, joining similar efforts at DFID (launched Oct 2008), Health, DECC and BIS. Well done to Ross & co for doing the right thing. You know it makes sense. That really only leaves the MOD…
9 Nov 2011

e-government, technology

health, transport, wordpress, wordupwhitehall

When WordPress gets boring, things get interesting

[Thanks to @JonAkwue for suggesting a vastly improved headline for this piece…]

The big moment of this year’s Word Up Whitehall came in the second presentation of the day: Gavin Dispain from the Department for Transport, telling the story of their hasty migration to WordPress.

It was already clear that we were in very different territory from last year’s inaugural event: Stephen and Francis from Health had opened with a presentation featuring the kind of technical architecture diagrams you just don’t see at WordCamps. We weren’t just talking about the potential for government departments to use WordPress, or sharing examples of little microsites they’d built: no, this was real corporate-sized heavy-duty stuff. And there, at the heart of it, increasingly so in fact, was WordPress.

Then came Gavin, and that slide. He didn’t really make a big deal of it. I think we all knew about the potential to generate massive savings. But there it was, in black and white: hundreds of thousands of real pounds, not notional pounds, saved at a stroke. With further savings to come, as more arms-length agencies come on-board. (Defra are a bit further down that track already, as David Pearson related later in the day.)

Technical architecture diagrams. PowerPoint slides with incomprehensibly large numbers on them. Weren’t these precisely the things which drove me out of ‘proper’ IT, and into the world of WordPress? What the hell were these doing at a WordPress event? For a moment I could feel myself switching off, as I’d done in countless meetings over the years.

And that’s when it all suddenly fell into place.

I’d reacted against such things in the past, because they were visions of the future – and for the most part, futures that never quite arrived. But something was different here. People weren’t talking about how they could or would do it. They were demonstrating how they had done it. Health had built that structure, and it was working. Transport had left behind one set of contracts costing £X, and were now in a new arrangement costing £Y.

To be frank, systems admin and accountancy can be a bit boring. But it’s a mark of the success of the WordPress mission¹, and the potential it has unlocked, that we’re now into that business-as-usual territory. When you’re getting stuck into the ‘boring’ bits, that’s when change is really happening.

And it turns out, I don’t actually hate technical architecture diagrams and budget forecasts after all.

¹ When I first drafted this, I wasn’t sure about using the word ‘mission’. But then, by sheer coincidence, Seth Godin posts a few lines on his blog, and I feel a whole lot better about it.
3 Nov 2011

e-government

accenture, chrischant, dwp

DWP signs 'unacceptable' £420,000,000 contract

Chris Chant, at the Institute for Government, Thursday 20 October 2011:

I think it’s completely unacceptable at this point in time to enter into contracts for longer than 12 months. I can’t see how we can sit in a world of IT, and acknowledge the arrival of the iPad in the last two years, and yet somehow imagine that we can predict what we’re going to need to be doing in two or three or five or seven or ten years time. It’s complete nonsense.

Reported by Guardian Government Computing, Wednesday 2 November 2011:

The Department for Work and Pensions has awarded a seven year application services contract worth £50m to £70m annually to Accenture, for work including the software needed to introduce its universal credit system.

Or to phrase it another way: something between £50,000,000 and £70,000,000 each year – let’s split the difference, and call it £60,000,000 – for 7 years. A grand total of £420,000,000.
1 Nov 2011

technology

wordpress

Coming up in WordPress 3.3

The next version of WordPress, version 3.3 is on the horizon: a second beta release came out a couple of weeks back, and a first release candidate is due in the next couple of days.

So what is there to look forward to? I’ll hand you over to Andrew Nacin, one of the core developers, and the presentation he gave at a recent New York meetup.

There are quite a few incremental improvements to the admin interface, but nothing to stop you in your tracks. The left-hand menu is now based on ‘fly-out’ submenus, more or less as the compressed view has always done, albeit with a nicer animation. There are tweaks to the Admin Bar (including pointy notifications), the ‘Help’ area, and the ‘welcome’ screen you see on an initial install. The file uploader is no longer Flash-dependent, favouring HTML5 where available, and adds drag-and-drop functionality.

Lots of little things, none of which sounds like much; but I’m told that once you’ve been using 3.3 for a while, going back to 3.2 feels rather dated.

Final release is currently scheduled for the end of November.
27 Oct 2011

e-government, technology

chrischant, unacceptable

Unacceptable, unacceptable, unacceptable

Even a few days after their initial publication, I’m still slightly stunned to read the comments of Puffbox’s best pal Chris Chant, now back in his role as Programme Director for the G-Cloud initiative, at the Institute for Government earlier this month.

It is unacceptable at this point in time to not know the true cost of a service and the real exit costs from those services: the costs commercially, technically and from a business de-integration standpoint. So, how do we untangle our way out of a particular product or service. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the discussion that says, we need to get away from that, and we can’t because of the complexity of getting out from where we are, and of all the things that are hanging on to that particular service, that we can’t disentangle ourselves from.

I think it’s completely unacceptable at this point in time to enter into contracts for longer than 12 months. I can’t see how we can sit in a world of IT, and acknowledge the arrival of the iPad in the last two years, and yet somehow imagine that we can predict what we’re going to need to be doing in two or three or five or seven or ten years time. It’s complete nonsense.

[…]

I think it’s unacceptable, not to know how many staff that we have in government working on the client side of IT. I’ve not yet met anybody who knows what that figure is. People know about small areas, but overall, we don’t know what that figure is.

And equally, it’s unacceptable that we don’t know what those people do. So we don’t have any idea of the breakdown of that number that we don’t know either, surprisingly, and I think that’s outrageous in this climate – and actually, in any climate.

It’s completely unacceptable not to know what systems we own, how much they cost and how much or even if they are used. I know there are organisations that have turned off tens of thousands of desktop services, merely to discover if they’re used any more. And when they do that, they discover maybe 1% of those are still being used. That’s completely unacceptable.

It’s unacceptable not to know when users give up on an online service. And it is unacceptable not to know why they give up. Of course it’s unacceptable that they have to give up, because the service doesn’t fulfil their needs.

And it’s unacceptable to have a successful online service that sends out reminders to use that service through the post. OK? It goes on. Millions of times. And linked to that, it’s completely unacceptable not to be able to communicate with customers securely, electronically, when technology clearly allows that to happen.

It is unacceptable not to be able to do our work from any device we choose. That’s possible, and has been for some time, and it’s outrageous we can’t do that.

It is unacceptable to pay, and these figures are PAC figures, up to £3,500 per person per year for a desktop service.

It is unacceptable for your corporate desktop to take 10 minutes to boot up, and the same amount of time to close down. But that’s the truth of what goes on every day in government IT, and I suspect public sector [sic] too.

It’s unacceptable for staff to be unable to access Twitter or YouTube when they use those services for what they do; and it’s unacceptable for call centre staff not able to access the very service they are supporting in the call centre. These all sound funny, but when you think of the consequences of that, it’s truly dreadful.

And I think it’s unacceptable in this day and age to ensure people are working by restricting their access to the Internet. If truly we can’t measure people by outputs, where on earth are we?

It is unacceptable that 80% of government IT is controlled by five corporations. It is unacceptable that some organisations outsource their IT strategy in government.

And it’s unacceptable that, to change one line of code, in one application, can cost up to £50,000.

It is unacceptable to wait 12 weeks to get a server commissioned for use. And that’s pretty commonplace. When you think in terms of using a service like Amazon, the most problematic thing on the critical path is the time it takes you to get your credit card out of your wallet and enter the details on-screen.

And above all, and at the heart of a lot of this, it is unacceptable not to engage directly with the most agile, forward thinking suppliers that are in the SME market today, and not in the suppliers that we’ve been using.

Things have changed, and we haven’t.

Did he really say all that? Yes, he did. Alan Mather got a rough transcript up last week – which I’ve used a basis for the above. I wanted to get a searchable, indexable record of the exact words used. And I’m glad I did: it turns out, Chris used the words ‘outrageous’ and ‘completely unacceptable’ much more than Alan had recorded.

And now, for the removal of any doubt, courtesy of the Cabinet Office’s own digital engagement blog, here’s definitive audio proof.
23 Oct 2011

e-government

bonanza, cabinetoffice, govuk

22 more well-paid GDS jobs up for grabs
In addition to the five Government Digital Service product manager roles I mentioned at the end of last week, I’ve also had my attention drawn to several other roles being advertised on the Civil Service jobs website:
- Two creative leads (eh?), with salary package up to £80k
- Two technical architects, £90k
- 12 developer positions, with salary quoted at ‘up to £65k’
- Two ‘web ops’ (I’m not even sure what that means – guess I’m not suitable), £65k
- A delivery team manager, £85k
- Three interaction designers, £59k
All the above positions are based in Central London, are ‘open to UK, British Commonwealth and European Economic Area (EEA) Nationals and certain non EEA members’, and are offered on a Fixed Term basis. The closing date for all positions is 4 November.

Potentially totalling £1.5 million (and that’s without overheads, NI, etc), those look like very generous salaries indeed, particularly in an economic downturn. They’ve clearly set their sights very highly indeed: justifiable, arguably, given the importance of the positions, and the (net) savings they’re meant to generate.

Additionally, they’re advertising for the SCS1-level position of Deputy Director Digital Engagement: a permanent position this time, with salary in the range £58,200 – £72,000 – ‘with an expectation of joining at the lower end of the payscale’ , which seems slightly odd given the other positions on offer at the same time. Closing date on that one is 8 November.

There’s plenty of detail in the ‘person specification’ for the role, listing among its responsibilities:
- Managing the use of social media within government, focusing on standards, acceptable use and engagement.
- Engaging with other business units within Cabinet Office to assist in the delivery of key initiatives using digital channels to ensure that the GDS agenda is at the heart of government policy and execution.
- Defining the GDS communication approaches as an exemplar of best practice in digital communication
- Encouraging the maximum use of digital channels to access government information and transactions.
- Designing and implementing the organisational development programme that will embed the Digital by Default mission
- Actively promoting concepts of open governance through promoting the use of open government data, engaging actively with third party developers in conjunction with the partnership team
- Establishing an approach to managing reputation risk across the digital domain with appropriate ownership by individual departments
- Being the media spokesperson for GDS
But I’m having trouble confirming the position of this position in the GDS hierarchy. It reads like it’s a direct report to executive director Mike Bracken, but that isn’t made clear. (The paperwork attached to the job ad calls it ‘Deputy Director, Digital Engagement’ with a potentially all-important comma.) For the record, the last time we saw the words ‘director’, ‘digital’ and ‘engagement’ together, it was Katie Davis taking over from Andrew Stott on an interim basis… but she moved to DH in July.

I’d link to the various job adverts on the new Civil Service Jobs website … but it won’t let me. For some ridiculous reason, they’ve made the form submit via POST, not GET… so you don’t get any identifying data in the URL displayed by the browser. You’ll have to go here, and search for ‘Cabinet Office excl agencies’ positions.
21 Oct 2011

e-government

Russian infiltration on No10 website

The Downing Street website, redesigned this summer, uses a few fonts from the excellent (and free) Google Fonts service. Among them, the PT Sans and PT Serif fonts. They’re really nice, and I’m considering using them myself on a forthcoming project.

I’ve just discovered their back story via the Google site:

PT Serif™ is the second pan-Cyrillic font family developed for the project “Public Types of the Russian Federation.” The first family of the project, PT Sans, was released in 2009.

The fonts are released with a libre license and can be freely redistributed: The main aim of the project is to give possibility to the people of Russia to read and write in their native languages.

The project is dedicated to the 300 year anniversary of the civil type invented by Peter the Great in 1708–1710. It was given financial support from the Russian Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications.

The head of the British government relying on a Kremlin-funded project for his typographic needs? It’s like something out of Spooks.
21 Oct 2011

e-government

bonanza, gds, govuk

GDS hiring product managers

The Government Digital Service has posted a job advert, seeking five ‘world-class‘ product managers, on a 24-month fixed-term basis. I can’t see any detail on what the five ‘products’ actually are; but there’s a lengthy application form, posted online in Word format only, allowing you plenty of room to explain why you’re suitable to manage them.

There’s a total salary package of up to £90k ‘available for exceptional candidates depending on specialist skills and expertise’, but that comprises base salary, additional pensionable allowances, pension benefits, generous annual leave allowance and flexible working arrangements.

It’s interesting to see these positions being advertised externally: questions have been asked about the recruitment of GDS staff thus far, and the extent to which positions have been externally advertised. In a comment on a recent blog post, James Taylor acknowledged:

All roles in the GDS have to be filled in line with the Recruitment Principles published by the Civil Service Commission.

The Commission excepts certain appointments from the principle of appointment on merit through fair and open competition where it believes this is justified by the needs of the Civil Service. In the case of the GDS, some roles have been considered to be exempt under the following condition.

See Annex C of the Recruitment Principles:

3. Appointments of individuals with highly specialised skills and experience for up to two years to allow highly specialised people to be brought in without a competition for a particular one-off job on the basis that such a process would be a mere formality. Any proposal for a longer appointment at the outset or to extend an appointment made under this exception beyond two years requires the approval of the Civil Service Commission.

Closing date for applications is 4 November, with interviews in the week of 21 November. ‘Late or faxed applications will not be accepted’.
21 Oct 2011

e-government

appstore, cabinetoffice, consultation, govuk, opensource

Government publishes ICT Strategy implementation plan
Following on from March’s publication of the new government ICT strategy, the Cabinet Office has published its implementation plan – a long and detailed document, full of specific milestones, risks and nominated Senior Responsible Owner, leading to projected savings of ‘around £1.4bn of savings within the next 4 years’ (according to the press release).

‘Our plans are focused on standardising government ICT,’ states the foreword, with a pledge to ‘fundamentally change how government incorporates ICT into its everyday business. It will ensure the early factoring of technology considerations into the design of policy, increase digital inclusion, reduce the cost of our operations, and ensure information is shared and transparent where possible and always handled appropriately.’ Good news on all fronts, you’d have to say.

The document covers so much ground, it’s almost impossible to provide a meaningful summary of it. But to pick out a few highlights, based on the areas of particular interest to this blog and this blogger:
- Open source: a ‘toolkit to assist departments in the evaluation and adoption of open source solutions’ is due for completion this month, although it will only be accessible by ‘100% of departments’ by next March. By March 2013, ‘100% of all department software procurement activity includes an open source option analysis’. The Senior Responsible Owner for Open Source is Robin Pape, CIO for the Home Office.
- Open technical standards: the findings from the recent ‘crowd sourcing’ exercise will be published this month, with ‘the first release of a draft suite of mandatory Open Technical Standards’ to follow in December. Levels of adoption of these will be reviewed in six months.
- App Store: will launch in March 2012, but rather unambitiously, they’re giving it until the following December to reach ’50 accredited products’. Sounds like it’ll be pretty empty until this time next year.
- Single domain: The launch of a ‘Beta version of single government web domain for public testing’ is set for February 2012.
- APIs: I’m pleased to see the statement that ‘Government will select common standards’ – as opposed to defining its own. But despite having apparently completed a review of existing cross-government APIs in March 2011, it’s going to take until September 2012 for a list of APIs to be published. Like the single domain work, this stream will be owned by Mike Bracken.
- Consultation: This one looks a bit odd. All departments are to have established a ‘digital channel for online consultation’ by December 2011… but then in February, the GDS ‘online consultation product’ will have been delivered, which makes you wonder why they’re making departments spend time and money getting something together for December. Said GDS product will be ‘integrated’ into Single Domain by October 2012.
- Social media: Maybe it’s me, but it seems a bit odd that the lead department on departmental access to social media sites should be the Home Office: they’ll be producing ‘final guidelines’ by March next year. Verification of existing government social media accounts ‘where appropriate’ is to be completed by next month.
It’s good to see so many specific dates and people in this document, and I think we can take a lot of encouragement from the plan as a whole. Personally, though, I can’t help feeling slightly excluded. I don’t see too many specific areas where Puffbox, or someone like us, can offer a contribution.