2011 – Page 5 – Puffbox

28 Jul 2011

e-government

cabinetoffice, parliament

MPs call for 'urgent rebuilding' of government IT capacity
The Commons Public Administration Select Committee has published its report into government IT, and to be frank, it’s all a bit predictable. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be welcomed: the four highlighted points – better management information, greater transparency, more involvement of SMEs, agile working – are all good. But if we haven’t heard it all before, we probably should have done.

The report’s opening factoid – that ‘some departments spend an average of £3,500 on a desktop PC’ – will almost certainly grab the headlines. (Update: step forward Sky News, who do a textbook job of it, including under-informed talking head.) It shouldn’t – but the report doesn’t help itself by putting this figure in the second paragraph of its introduction, without any context (as Paul Clarke has already noted).

The real story, such as it is, is the Committee’s apparent recognition that the current process – reliant on a small number of large suppliers being given over-spec’ed, over-detailed, over-sized and over-priced projects – is the ‘root cause‘ of the problem. And it’s quite nice to see them challenging the Cabinet Office, about whether its initiatives are tackling that root cause, or just the symptoms (paras 10-11).

Para 13 goes on to list what the Committee sees as the ‘six underlying causes of failure in government IT’:
- Inadequate information, resulting in the Government being unable to manage its IT needs successfully;
- An over-reliance on a small number of large suppliers and the virtual exclusion of small and medium sized (SME) IT contractors, which tend to be less risk adverse and more innovative;
- A failure to integrate IT into the wider policy and business change programmes;
- A tendency to commission large, complex projects which struggle to adapt to changing circumstances;
- Over-specifying security requirements, and
- The lack of sufficient leadership and skills to manage IT within the Civil Service, and in particular the absence of an “intelligent customer” function in Departments.
It acknowledges that outsourcing has often gone too far, leaving Departments short of people able to manage suppliers – the ‘recipe for rip-offs’ which gives the report its inflammatory title:

Currently the Government seems unable to strike the right balance between allowing contractors enough freedom to operate and ensuring there are appropriate controls and monitoring in-house. The Government needs to develop the skills necessary to fill this gap. This should involve recruiting more IT professionals with experience of the SME sector to help deliver the objective of greater SME involvement.

I’m not sure about the need to hire too many new people: Whitehall already has a decent number of insightful specialists, dotted around various Departments, and it would certainly be a start to concentrate their skills and experience within the evolving Government Digital Service (as outlined in the engagement-centric contribution I made to Alphagov, along with Neil and Steph). Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t apply for any such recruitment exercise: for now at least, I think I can do ‘my bit’ better from outside, rather than inside.

On engagement itself, it’s good to see the report recommending ‘that Departments exploit the internet and other channels to enable users to provide direct online feedback both in the design of services and in their ongoing operation and improvement’ – as that’s broadly what we put in the Alphagov proposal.

Not for the first time, data transparency is presented as a silver bullet to eliminate the profligate spending – except that, as Paul Clarke notes, the report rather undermines itself by ‘intentionally’ (Paul’s word) throwing opaque figures around. Can transparency solve the problems? In theory, I want to agree – but a year into Cameron’s open data revolution, I can’t think of many grand successes.

And there’s surprisingly little about open source per se – although you could argue it’s probably implicit in references to greater SME involvement, supplier lock-in and use of non-proprietary data formats.

So, personally, I’m struggling to get excited by the report. It’s not the first time any of these things have been said: and the government response will contain a lot of ‘we’re doing this already’… which, in fairness, they probably are. If the report helps keep those plans on the straight and narrow, I suppose it’s done its bit. As long as we get there in the end.
15 Jul 2011

e-government, technology

cabinetoffice, catn, hosting, wordpress

WordPress-based hosting solution in final stages of Cabinet Office cost-saving contest

It’s great to see some positive coverage of the Cabinet Office’s Innovation Launchpad process at the Telegraph today; and with it, a very positive writeup for a company we’ve been building a partnership with.

CatN first came to my attention when their commercial director, Joe Gardiner blogged last year about how the Department for Transport could save more than £750,000 per year by moving its website over to WordPress, running on CatN’s vCluster platform. A man very much after my own heart, clearly. And of course, last month, Transport – quite coincidentally? – migrated their website to WordPress.

Joe worked his Transport calculations up into an entry into the Cabinet Office contest, with a tantalising promise to save government departments an average of 75% on their hosting costs – a minimum of £17.88 million per year – by moving over to WordPress. And as he tells the Telegraph in their article today, ‘one of their concerns is that we are offering to save them too much and that we can’t be a sustainable business.’

The thing is – and this won’t come as any surprise to anyone reading this blog – such savings are absolutely possible.

We’ve been working with CatN for a few months now, and we’re in no doubt that their services, costing hundreds of pounds per year, are at least a match for – and in most cases, far better than – the services departments are spending thousands on. And arguably more importantly, their heart is in it.

So we’re wholeheartedly backing Joe and CatN in their efforts next week. For all the innovation going on around WordPress in government, there isn’t yet a strategic approach to hosting. It’s an idea whose time came a good while ago.

CatN and Puffbox are both sponsors of WordCamp UK 2011, taking place this weekend in Portsmouth.
12 Jul 2011

e-government

appstore, directgov, gds, wordpress

Public services white paper promises GDS 'app store'

With all the tabloid shenanigans going on yesterday, you’d be forgiven for missing the publication of the new White Paper on Open Public Services – launched complete with a WordPress-based consultation site, developed by Harry Metcalfe’s DXW, with rather cheeky advertising in the source code.

It’s worth noting a couple of references to the Government Digital Service:

7.9 We want to shift the approach of government from ‘public services all in one place’ (focused on how departments want to deliver) to ‘government services wherever you are’ (open and distributed, available where citizens want to access them). To take this forward, the Government Digital Service (GDS) will have the authority across central government to co-ordinate all government digital activity, including encouraging the commissioning of the best user-centred digital services and information at lowest cost from the most appropriate provider. This commissioning process will identify those providers who are the most appropriate to provide content on a particular topic. For example, the Department for Education has already taken this approach in funding some of its parenting support services through the voluntary and community sector – these online services provide in-depth counselling and intensive support as well as information and guidance.

7.10 The GDS will develop a digital marketplace, opening up government data, information, applications and services to other organisations, including the provision of open application program interfaces for all suitable digital services. All suitable digital transactions and information services will be available for delivery through a newly created marketplace, with accredited partners, including charities, social enterprises, private companies and employee-led mutuals, all able to compete to offer high-quality digital services. In opening up this marketplace, the GDS will establish appropriate processes and consider a ‘quality mark’ to ensure that public trust in information and public sector delivery is maintained. This may go as far as including quality assurance of third-party applications.

Two concise paragraphs, but several interesting points in there.

The reference to ‘public services all in one place’ is a rather cheeky, and somewhat barbed reference to Directgov’s strapline, and is surely another nail in its coffin – well, in its current form anyway. I’m surprised to see the word ‘encourage’ for GDS’s role, as opposed to something stronger; and it’ll be intriguing to see how the trinity of best quality, lowest cost (note use of the superlative) and ‘most appropriate supplier’ plays out in practice.

The second paragraph puts some flesh on the bones of the ‘government app store’ notion. But the more I think about it, the more uneasy I get about the idea of QA’ing third-party applications. If an application hasn’t been approved, is it still permitted? Who exactly is doing the approving? Would the approval process become a bottle-neck?

I hate to bring it all back to WordPress (again), but it’s the best example I can personally think of, of a rapid, cheap and non-traditional solution being widely successful in government over the past few years. We – a word I use in the widest possible sense, covering myself and many other (rival?) suppliers – made our case, we delivered, and we didn’t let people down. The only approval we needed was the recommendation of the previous client.

We didn’t need no stinking badges. And if we’d have had to wait for delivery of our badges before being taken seriously, none of it would ever have happened.
11 Jul 2011

e-government

cabinetoffice, downingstreet, wordpress

Downing Street redesigned

Very quietly last week, Downing Street launched a new design for number10.gov.uk – but to my own great relief, and (happily!) contrary to my prediction of last December, it remains very much on WordPress.

Visually, I personally think it’s a great improvement, with bold use of the iconic 10, now complemented by the lion door-knocker. It looks a lot more head-of-statey: with the central alignment of the ‘logo’, and the capitalised primary navigation, I can’t help thinking of the White House a bit… but maybe that’s just me. It’s also nice to see a non-standard font in use – the free PT Serif.

One of the new site’s most striking aspects is the way it seeks to represent government policy across departments – see, for example, this FCO page. If we didn’t know that BIS’s Neil Williams has only just started looking at this area, you’d be left wondering if this was the next stage of the Alphagov vision, with No10 taking control of all policy presentation. These pages look like WordPress pages (or a similar custom post type), with the sidebar news stories being pulled in automatically via tags (or a similar custom taxonomy).

And it’s intriguing to see Prime Ministerial initiatives being represented up-front: ‘TAKE PART’ is one of the handful of primary nav headings, and includes some very Cameron-y elements (which one wouldn’t previously have expected to see on the No10 site):

Apart from the animating slideshow (which in my mind doesn’t count, somehow) there’s no actual ‘news‘ content on the homepage, and not that much of Cameron himself – which might be indicative of a change of target audience, away from the Westminster Village? And whilst static icon-based links point out to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, I note the virtual disappearance of video content from the site: no Number10 TV, not even a YouTube link. (Although to be fair, it’s still there on the sitemap.)

The front end doesn’t give much away, in terms of what lies behind (boo! not fair!); but I sense there’s a fair bit of hard-coding going on in certain page templates, not least because the source code is very neat. Plus the page generation times, as reported by WP Super Cache in the source code, also look extraordinarily quick… usually measured in hundredths of seconds, which is impressive by anyone’s standards.

My only criticism – and it’s a very mild one at that – is that there seem to be a few missed opportunities to do things ‘the WordPress way’. The primary navigation, for example, looks hand-crafted, where it could surely have been done as a custom menu – meaning changes are dependent on the technical team editing the theme code, rather than the editors using the admin interface. But we’re mainly talking about the potential for things to be problematic in due course, rather than already causing problems already.

I understand it’s been done almost entirely in-house: in which case, hearty congratulations to the Cabinet Office team. I never doubted you. 🙂
8 Jul 2011

company, politics, technology

coopparty, jonworth, wordpress

Puffbox develops new web platform for the Co-operative Party

It takes a special kind of political anorak to even know that the Co-operative Party exists; so you might be surprised to learn that it’s actually the fourth largest political party in Westminster.

Formed in 1917, it has been in a permanent electoral pact with Labour since 1927. In the current Parliament, 29 of Labour’s 250-odd MPs were actually elected as Labour & Co-operative candidates – including one Ed Balls. A good number of other Labour MPs are paid-up members of the Party, but aren’t actually sponsored by it. It depends on the Co-operative Group – yes, as in corner shops, banking, funerals, etc – for a large part of its funding.

And since I have a ‘loyalty card’ for my local corner shop, I suppose I should formally declare an interest: I am a part-owner of the Co-operative Group. A very, very, very small part indeed. But technically, still an owner.

For the past few months, Puffbox has been working alongside left-leaning digital specialist Jon Worth to help the Party up its game online. And in doing so, we had to up our own game too: it’s unquestionably the most intricate WordPress build I’ve ever done – with a multisite-based strategy, (double) wildcard DNS, four custom post types, two automated custom taxonomies, and a parent/child theme arrangement, both offering full visual customisation. See what I mean?

To give you some idea of how it all stitches together: each of the Party’s Parliamentarians has a ‘person page’. You can click on ‘People‘ in the navigation bar to see them all, or hover for various filtered views. Say, for example, Members of Parliament. Oh look, there’s Ed Balls.

Click on his name, and you’ll see a ‘person page’. At the top of it are links to his Twitter account, and his personal website. Then there’s a concise biography. And towards the bottom, a ‘snapshot box’ for his latest activity on Twitter, in Hansard, on Flickr, and on his personal website, plus any content on the site itself which mentions him… all populated and updated automatically.

For those interested in the technical side: ‘person’ is a custom post type, with an extra metabox for the various external content sources. There’s a custom taxonomy called ‘role’, which is how we know Ed Balls is an MP. (And of course, each person can have multiple roles: here’s an example.) We pull the tweets in via JSON, to avoid API limiting; the other external data comes via RSS feeds. And of course, there’s a custom display template to stitch it all together. Meanwhile, invisibly, there’s also a people taxonomy on posts, which syncs with any changes to the person record.

And, uh, there’s something similar for areas of policy. But you’ll just have to work that out for yourselves. 🙂

The ‘main’ site will be complemented by a handful of distinct subsites, within the same WordPress multi-site install. There’s still some fleshing-out to be done, but you can see sites for the party in Scotland and Wales starting to come together. They use the same core theme, with the ability to change the background and header images; but will be managed on a day-to-day basis by the Party’s regional operations. Regular readers will recognise the influence of our work with Defra

Visually, it’s not the richest design I’ve ever done, but that’s entirely in keeping with the ethos of a party which doesn’t actually have a logo per se. We’ve kept things nice and simple, concentrating on clarity and ease of navigation. But as it’s turned out, there’s been a lot of very positive feedback about the look and feel, so we’re confident we got it ‘right’ for the client and their audience.

Thanks go to my own co-operators on this project: Simon Wheatley, for his technical assistance and inspiration. Jon Worth, for putting the project together. Martin at the Co-op Party (see his person page), who’s been an absolute star – and is already on his way to becoming a WordPress expert. And finally, to WordPress 3.x, without which none of this would have even been conceivable.
7 Jul 2011

technology

polaroid

The many uses of a Polaroid Pogo printer

I’m amazed quite how much use I’m getting out of the Polaroid Pogo printer I bought out of sheer curiosity on a rainy afternoon a few months ago. Roughly the size of your hand, from wrist to fingertips, it prints photo stickers about the size of a business card. All done via Bluetooth, so there’s no need to even plug it in. Switch it on, send the file over, wait a minute, and bingo.

The quality, frankly, isn’t brilliant. But as the parent of two young girls, we seem to be finding regular excuses to use it. Illustrating school reports, enhancing greetings cards, that kind of thing. So much quicker and easier than printing, cutting out and Pritt-sticking. You’re looking at £30-40 for the printer (although I think I got mine for a bit less?), then about 12p per photo, which right now seems very reasonable.
27 Jun 2011

e-government

cabinetoffice, liammaxwell, opensource

Open source advocate's Cabinet Office role
Liam Maxwell is head of ICT at Eton College, and a Conservative councillor in Windsor & Maidenhead. He co-wrote a 2008 paper for the Tories on ‘Open Source, Open Standards: Reforming IT procurement in Government’, plus the 2010 paper ‘Better for Less‘ for the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age, in which he declares:

British Government IT is too expensive. Worse, it has been designed badly and built to last. IT must work together across government and deliver a meaningful return on investment. Government must stop believing it is special and use commodity IT services much more widely. As we saw with the Open Source policy, the wish is there. However, the one common thread of successive technology leadership in government is a failure to execute policy.

There is at last a ministerial team in place that “gets it”. The austerity measures that all have to face should act as a powerful dynamic for change. Let’s not waste this great opportunity to make British government IT the most effective and least expensive service per head in Western Europe.

And as from September, according to Guardian Government Computing, he’ll be taking a sabbatical from his day job, and advising the Efficiency and Reform Group [ie Ian Watmore] and the government chief information officer [Joe Harley] ‘on new ideas for the government’s use of technology’.

Maxwell was the Windsor & Maidenhead councillor who drove the debate a year or so back, on councils switching to Open Document Format (‘OpenOffice’ to you and me, although there’s more to it than that)… with savings in the tens of millions promised. There’s a nice interview with Charles Arthur from last summer, in which he talks through his ideas, with one rather interesting quote in the light of today’s news:

[Office software procurement is] a dysfunctional market because it’s set by standards which are set at the centre. Only the Cabinet Office can set this standard. It does sound a bit wet [to be waiting for that instead of just doing it in the council] but this is what’s actually stopping it happening.

A case of being careful what you wish for, perhaps? 🙂

I find it very hard to find much in Maxwell’s writing that I disagree with; and indeed, you’ll find many similar sentiments through the archives of this very blog, going back several years. It could get very interesting from here.

Update: it turns out this was announced on the Cabinet Office website last week. They’ve listed the areas he’ll be looking at:
- develop new, more flexible ways of delivery in government
- increase the drive towards open standards and open source software
- help SMEs to enter the government marketplace
- maintain a horizon scan of future technologies and methods.
Update 2: Liam is on Twitter, and has just tweeted:

Sad to be resigning as a councillor http://bit.ly/m09Uhi but its for a good reason http://bit.ly/keH94z

The new appointment means he has to resign his council seat. He’s also putting his (admittedly rarely updated) personal blog on hold ‘for now’… but with a promise to restart a new blog out of the Cabinet Office.
24 Jun 2011

e-government

ehrc, sharepoint

£874,000 on a website that couldn't be rescued?

From the Telegraph:

Britain’s human rights quango spent £874,000 on a new website that was scrapped and replaced less than two years later after suffering “grave technical difficulties”, it has been revealed.

After 18 months of ‘repeated crashes and other failures [which] meant it “could not be restored or used further”’, the story continues, they dumped supplier Parity and switched to ‘a new system which it’s understood was considerably cheaper and remains in place today’. A happy ending of sorts, I suppose.

Parity still lists the EHRC work on their website – and what do we discover?

Of course, it’s far from the first time we’ve seen nearly £1m spent on a short-lived website: DIUS (remember them?) spent £953k on a site which barely lasted 2 years, although in their defence, it did actually work.
17 Jun 2011

technology

How did I ever cope without BuiltWith?
Least surprising news of the day… 🙂

A site I’ve found myself using a lot recently, is BuiltWith.com – several times most days in fact. Basically, you give it a URL, and it churns out a nice list of the web technology the site uses.

You can go to builtwith.com and enter the URL, like Google; or you can drag their bookmarklet into your web browser interface, to give yourself one-click access to the report on whatever site you’re looking at.

What I’ve done, though, is add it as a ‘Tool’ within the must-have Web Developer toolbar for Firefox. And if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re well used to that particular add-on. It’s dead easy to configure:
- On the toolbar, click on Tools > Edit Tools > Add
- Enter a sensible name, plus a keyboard shortcut if you want one
- Change the ‘tool type’ from Application to URL
- Paste http://builtwith.com/? (with the question mark) into the URL box
- Then press OK, and you’re done
You’ll now have an option for BuiltWith in your Tools menu, along with services like HTML and feed validation.
17 Jun 2011

e-government

transport, wordpress

Transport website relaunched on WordPress (not by us)

There’s a new website at the Department of Transport; and it’s running on WordPress. Sadly, it’s not one we’ve been involved with; we weren’t even approached, in fact. (I wonder why.) However, there are definite similarities with the work we’ve done for Defra; so we’ll console ourselves with the knowledge that we’ve at least been influential.

Transport issued a tender document in March, with an explicit requirement for open source-based solutions, specifically either WordPress or Drupal. The target launch date was 20 June, making for an aggressive schedule; and to their great credit, and that of developers Bang Communications, they made it with more than a week to spare.

I haven’t yet seen a total cost quoted for the work; that will come in due course, of course. But I’ve been told what the budget was, as quoted in the tender document – and I have to say, it was pretty generous. I’ll be keeping a close eye out for the next departmental spending data (as it’ll be well above the threshold); or if any MPs fancy drafting a PQ, that’ll make life even easier.

The site bears all the hallmarks of a WordPress v3.x build. Multiple subsites being stitched together, as we did for Defra, with liberal use of custom post types and taxonomies. The design is fairly low-key, based on the YUI grid system, with a bit of jQuery front-end gloss, but not too much. It declares itself to be coded in HTML5, but doesn’t make much use of 5’s new features, so there are no rendering problems in older versions of IE (that I’ve spotted myself).

But there’s one major problem with the site: performance.

Each page’s source code includes, at the bottom, a statement of how many database queries were required to gather up the information, and how long it took. Naturally, for better user experience, and to keep your server from falling over, you’d be looking to minimise both of these.

If you look at the homepage, for example, you’ll see it requires over 1,000 queries, and seems to take between 3 and 5 seconds to generate. The News homepage quotes 300-odd queries, and 4-6 seconds. If you then try to filter news items by Minister or topic, you’re looking at as many as 1,800 queries; and I’ve seen times as long as 15 seconds. To put it bluntly, that’s just too much. (By way of comparison: the Defra news page also includes this data at the bottom of its source code: 87 queries, 0.6 seconds.)

It might be OK if you were then caching the pages, and delivering static copies for a defined period afterwards, hence only taking the hit once per hour (or whatever); but we can see no evidence of that. Each time you refresh a page, you’ll see a different generation time at the bottom. There may be some caching going on that we can’t see from outside; but even then, those high numbers and the often slow response times are ominous.

You’re looking at a server which is in real danger of falling over as soon as there’s a significant spike in traffic. It doesn’t have to be like that; any WordPress veteran reading this will be thinking of the same couple of plugins, which would help instantly. And you’ll find them with one Google search.

But that’s enough criticism for now. It is of course great news to see another major government department moving to WordPress. Some may question the timing, given Alphagov’s stated intent of eliminating departmental websites within a year. But if there’s a net saving to the taxpayer, that’s reason enough to go ahead… and a challenge to other departments to do likewise, too.

Welcome to the world of WordPress, guys. Just sort out the caching, please, before you live to regret it.