Puffbox

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

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    On government organograms and RDF files (includes free WordPress plugin!)

    There was an initial buzz of excitement yesterday, at the launch of the new data.gov.uk interactive organograms… and then, by teatime, a bit of a backlash. I can see both sides myself. Yes, it’s a very cool rendering of potentially quite dull data, and it’s nice to see it done in javascript (jQuery) rather than Flash… but it’s actually a bit fiddly to navigate through. That isn’t to understate the significance of the achievement, though: such a coordinated leap forward, in both technical and bureaucratic terms, is no small task. And there’s so much to it, most of which is beyond me, that I can’t begin to explain it in depth. Hopefully someone else will oblige.

    As part of the initiative, departments have been instructed to upload raw RDF files to their websites, from which the organograms can be generated… which caused a bit of a problem for one of our clients. But it’s a problem we’re happily able to solve.

    The Wales Office was the first Ministerial department to move everything over to WordPress, back in early 2008; and they’ve been running very happily on it ever since. About a year ago, we helped them build a new Transparency section, which acts as a download area for (mostly) Word and CSV files. It’s all rendered via a custom page template, and managed via the standard WordPress ‘media library’ functionality. Unspectacular perhaps, but quick and easy for all concerned.

    However – when they tried to upload an RDF file, they couldn’t. WordPress has a surprisingly long list of file types it’s prepared to let you upload (look for get_allowed_mime_types() in wp-includes/functions.php): but RDF isn’t on it. So it throws up an error message like this:

    We could upload it as a zip file, which would have the added benefit of reducing the file size by 90-odd per cent… but then the orgchart generator wouldn’t be able to process it. Dilemma.

    But as ever with WordPress, there’s a happy ending to the story. We – by which I specifically mean my technical partner, Mr Wheatley – were able to write a quick plugin to ‘hook’ on to approved filetype list, and stick RDF on the end. Problem solved, file uploaded, everyone happy. You can see the successfully uploaded file here.

    And given that there are a good number of government departments running WordPress sites, including at least one other using WordPress specifically for its transparency information, we thought we’d do the decent thing, and offer it up for others to download. Here you go. There’s no configuration interface needed; just upload it, activate it, and start chucking up RDF files to your heart’s content.

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    Rishi Saha leaving government

    Rishi Saha: pic by gooliver (Flickr CC)

    Rishi Saha, the former digital chief at the Conservative Party who slipped very quietly into the role of Head of Digital Comms at Number10, is on the move again. It’s been announced that he’s joining PR agency Hill & Knowlton, part of WPP, becoming its new ‘Regional Director for Australia, the Middle East, Africa and South & Central Asia’.

    Based in Dubai, he will also ‘be responsible for leading H&K’s digital strategy across Europe and AMEASCA, developing H&K’s global content creation capability and business development with a focus on the emerging markets.’

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    Our new site for London mayoral candidate Mike Tuffrey

    Today saw the launch of Liberal Democrat member of the London assembly, Mike Tuffrey‘s campaign to secure the party’s nomination for 2012’s Mayoral contest. Puffbox has been working with Mike for the last couple of weeks to put together a digital package that’s fairly modest for now, but with scope for expansion depending on how the party membership votes in August.

    There isn’t much to say about the technical side of the new website: it’s a fairly straightforward WordPress custom theme, with posts for timely content, pages for background, and a custom homepage template. There’s an automated photo gallery, where you can access the full-size versions of any images uploaded to the site, but that’s about as clever as it gets. But it does everything it should, and all hangs together nicely.

    The design is a bit of a departure, though: bigger, bolder and more vertical than usual, influenced to a significant extent by iPad apps. I’ve been particularly keen to experiment with presenting the text in columns, using a custom plugin which reclaims the WordPress ‘more’ button (which nobody ever uses). With the initial tranche of content, there aren’t too many examples of this, but you’ll have to trust me; it’s there.

    Of course there are issues with columns on the web: they only really work when there’s ‘the right amount’ of text per page, with the column height fitting the (likely) screen resolution. Of course, this is where the iPad, and indeed the Kindle, benefit: you know exactly what screen size you’ll be dealing with. On the web, there’s no such luxury, so we can only base it on assumptions. But my instinct is that the benefit to readability makes it worth the risk.

    Supporting the website, we’ve sorted out Google Apps accounts for the campaign team; and there’s a Mailchimp-based mailing list, only doing RSS-powered alerts for now, but with scope for specially-written mailshots in due course. Thinking ahead, we’re asking people to indicate where they live in London, which will allow us to run geo-targeted campaigns further down the line.

    Now… thus far, Puffbox has a 100% record with political candidates: everyone we’ve built a site for has been successful in the electoral campaign they were fighting. Mike faces competition for the LibDem candidacy from Lembit Opik, with rumours of one or two others throwing their hats into the ring before nominations close at the end of the week. Of course, if Mike wins this initial contest, you wouldn’t perhaps be too confident about us preserving our perfect record against both Boris and Ken. But Mike’s keen to make full use of online in his campaigning; and his position as the inevitable underdog might give us scope to have some fun with it.

    The result of the candidate selection is (currently) due to be announced on 12 August. Will it be glorious?

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    Microsoft thanks WordPress for dropping IE6 support

    As I noted here a while back, there could be bad news on the way for government people running WordPress sites: the next release of WordPress, version 3.2, will discontinue support for Internet Explorer version 6. Here’s how the new WP dashboard will look, courtesy of Automattic’s Jane Wells:

    Ouch. Now, Microsoft has published its official reaction on the Exploring IE blog – and it might come as a bit of a surprise.

    Last week, WordPress dropped support for IE6 and joined the hundreds of other web sites that are working to move enterprises and consumers alike to a modern browser platform. Thank you! … The additional developer work supporting IE6 and even IE7 is something we would love to see be a thing of the past. More than that, however, is the security concern.

    Of course – and I say this as someone who used to work there – it wouldn’t be Microsoft if there wasn’t a sales message dropped in somewhere; and the blog post turns into a pitch to upgrade to Windows 7 on security grounds. But the point about developer effort is still entirely valid – trust me.

    Out of interest: are any government readers facing a crisis next month, when the upgrade happens? Anyone running websites on WordPress, with only IE6 available to them? (Feel free to contact me directly.)

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    WordCamp UK tickets now on sale

    Tickets have just gone on sale for this summer’s UK WordCamp, to be hosted by the University of Portsmouth in mid-July. If you fancy coming along for two jam-packed days of chat, code and creativity, and you fancy saving yourself a few quid, head over to the site and buy your tickets before 3 June – the price goes up by a tenner after that.

    We’re delighted to confirm that Puffbox is continuing its sponsorship of the event; we’re the only sponsor to have been there since the very beginning.

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    Guardian man is government's new digital director

    I have it on very good authority indeed It’s now been confirmed that the new (£142k pa) Executive Director Digital, filling the post currently held by Chris Chant on an interim basis, and advertised back in April, is to be Mike Bracken – digital director at The Guardian until last week.

    Computer Weekly makes some interesting – and quite exciting – observations about the management culture he built up:

    While GNM has outsourced some IT roles, the company has brought in information architects, analytics and product development managers as a discipline. GNM uses an agile environment for developing web applications and has scrapped project management and business analyst roles to replace them with product managers.

    In fact, he sent a tweet to Steph Gray yesterday which seemed to suggest he sees a similar role for ‘product managers’ in government:

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/MTBracken/status/71234171762262016″]

    To get a flavour of what to expect, fasten your seatbelt and watch this five-minute breakneck presentation on innovation, which he gave to a WPP event last year:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt3IdfdvwSI

    … or this slightly more corporate presentation on deriving benefits from social media, at a Gartner symposium in October. (Fast forward eight minutes to skip the extended intro.) You’ll like what you hear.

    Interestingly, in both presentations, he uses the same quote from Simon Willison. How exciting is it to have a new digital director who actually appreciates that:

    You can now build working software in less time than it takes to have the meeting to describe it.

    Those who know Mike are very complimentary about him: I note William Heath’s description of him last week as ‘one of the UK’s very best new-style CIOs’. On the downside, though, he’s a Liverpool supporter.

    Mike’s personal website is at mikebracken.com – and he’s done a post formally announcing the appointment. He runs a couple of Twitter accounts: you’ll probably want to follow his ‘work’ account, @MTBracken.

    He starts on 5 July.

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    BIS gets a blog

    A fairly soft launch today for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’s new corporate blog: built by Steph Gray (obviously), using WordPress (naturally).

    Taking a quick whizz round the Cabinet table, the departments now running formal, properly-designated corporate ‘blogs’ are:

    Additionally, of course, there are a few corporate sites which are actually running on blog technology, but choose not to present themselves as blogs – notably Number10, Defra, and the Wales Office; plus various blogs for teams and projects, too many to list here, and occasional Ministerial contributions to the Tories’ Blue Blog.

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    Top Of The Blogs (says Wikio)

    I discovered something rather disturbing in my website referrer data this afternoon; according to the otherwise reputable Wikio, puffbox.com is now ranked in the top 50 of UK technology blogs, and has been since last November. In fact, it’s been as high as no31 in previous months.

    This either means the site is much more popular than I ever realised; or Wikio’s algorithm needs work. For now, I’m assuming the latter.

    I’m almost certainly going to regret this in due course: but here’s the Wikio widget, proudly declaring the site’s current position:

    Wikio - Top Blogs - Technology

    Currently listening to: Phil Lynott’s Yellow Pearl, unquestionably the best TOTP theme tune. (Discuss.)

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    Skunkworks® building new e-petitions system

    Well done to Richard Parsons at edemocracyblog for extracting (via FOI) the proposal submitted by Directgov to the newly created government ‘skunkworks’ for building the new government e-petitions system.

    The project’s objective is ‘to allow UK citizens to submit petitions to Government, and particularly to be able to petition for parliamentary debates on any subject they chose, subject to the overall governance arrangements required by No 10 / Cabinet Office.’ With the commitment to debate any petition attracting over 100,000 signatures in Parliament, they’re expecting traffic levels to be ‘much higher’ than the Downing Street e-petitions site that went before. They’re proposing a development cost ‘upwards of £55.2k’ (at a £600 day rate, I note), and annual running costs of £86.2k for ‘light touch moderation’.

    On the technical side, they’ve explicitly specified that it should be ‘developed using Open Source technologies’ – specifically a LAMP stack of Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, and PHP – although there’s no explicit commitment that the petitions code will then be open-sourced itself. Hosting is to be ‘in the cloud’, with a passing reference to Amazon S3 and the existing (‘underused’) Cabinet Office setup.

    I can’t add much to Richard’s further analysis of the document’s contents; but I will note that it’s one of the first public airings of a full-on skunkworks ‘brand’ – which doesn’t appear to credit the name ‘skunk works’ as a UK registered trademark of Lockheed Martin, only to be used with ‘prior written approval‘. Hmm.

  • Beth Noveck 'recruited' to lead on open source policy making

    From George Osborne’s speech this morning at the Google Zeitgeist conference:

    We want to remain at the cutting edge of open source policy making.

    So I’m pleased to be able to tell you that we have just recruited Beth Noveck, who used to work at the White House running President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, to help us take this agenda forward.

    I can’t think of a better person to help us with this. After all, Beth literally wrote the book – ‘Wiki-Government’ – on how policy making needs to change in the internet age.

    She’s a genuinely world class recruit, and she’ll be working alongside the likes of Martha Lane Fox, Tim Kelsey and Tom Steinberg to harness new technologies to make government more innovative and accountable.

    She’s on Twitter at @bethnoveck, and has a blog at Typepad which has been updated within the past two years, no matter what its header claims.