Puffbox

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

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    Permanent Executive Director Digital post advertised

    Just posted on the Civil Service jobs website: the recruitment notice for the permanent position of Executive Director Digital, as proposed in the Martha Lane Fox review. It’s the position currently being fulfilled on an interim basis by Chris Chant.

    The position is at SCS2 level, worth £142,000 per year, and promises ‘a rewarding role with a great deal of public visibility’. (Well, certainly if Puffbox has anything to do with it, anyway.) They’re clearly pitching it at a serious IT level, with references to ‘a track record of leading digitally enabled change at a strategic level, in a large federated organisation with complex delivery chains.’

    The job description calls for someone who will:

    • champion the citizen/end user through the implementation of the Coalition Government’s digital strategy;
    • design the organisation and recruit people to establish a successful Government Digital Service;
    • manage the budget of the central group within the Government Digital Service;
    • direct all government online spending in a way that delivers value for money, makes use of best existing technology, that is both available commercially and also free and results in an improvement of the user experience across all government online services (websites and APIs)
    • reduce the cost of providing the Directgov platform itself in line with efficiency plans; and
    • work closely with the Government Chief Information Officer to direct, set and enforce standards across government departments in areas such as  technical, content, design, process and customer standards.

    Plenty to get excited about in there… citizen first, recruitment into the new GDS, APIs, etc… but I’m most particularly drawn to the explicit reference to ‘existing technology available free’. With everything else around it being so serious and high-level, it’s pleasantly surprising to see ‘stuff you can just get off the interweb’ getting a look-in.

    The position is open to non-civil servants, and non-UK nationals. Slightly ominously, I note the job advert says ‘Language skills required: none.’ – but let’s hope that’s a quirk of the underlying database. Good language skills are going to be absolutely essential for this.

    You’ve got two weeks to get your application in.

    (And thanks to various well-placed sources for tipping me off.)

    Update, 11:00

    I’ve been sent the full job spec, and although it doesn’t add a tremendous amount, there are some interesting titbits therein.

    • ‘The budget for the central group within the Government Digital Service, which is currently £23 million per annum falling in line with other administrative budgets to £17 million in 2014/15.’
    • It talks about website rationalisation ‘through adoption of a single URL for all online services’ – er, really, a single URL? I don’t think that’s quite what they meant. Common parlance seems to have settled on ‘single domain’, but even then, I’m not sure that’s quite how it’ll turn out.
    • The lucky individual will be based at Hercules House, with hot-desking at the Cabinet Office / Treasury offices. As a statement of intent, that’s quite interesting in itself: they clearly want the person concerned to be close to the hands-on work.
    • The recruitment process will happen pretty swiftly, with interviews scheduled for the first half of May, in front of a panel consisting of Ian Watmore, Bill McCluggage and Martha Lane Fox (plus a Civil Service Commissioner).

    Reading through it, I’m struck by the differences with the Director of Digital Engagement job spec, published two years ago. Then, the wording seemed to be implying that they were particularly keen on getting someone in from outside, ideally the media – but that didn’t happen. This time, there’s no such implication: if anything, it feels like it’s angling for someone with a Big IT background – quite possibly from within government, or somewhere very like it.

    Another quick update, Fri am: Chris Chant has publicly ruled himself out – which is fair enough, as he’s got a pretty big job already.

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    Directgov meets 95% convergence target

    A significant milestone in the evolution of UK e-government was passed last week – very, very quietly. The Cabinet Office had a Departmental Strategic Objective for the 2008-11 spending round, DSO4 if you’re interested, to ‘migrate more than 95% of the total identified websites to Directgov and Businesslink by 31 March 2011’. Well, Directgov’s Tony Singleton announced via Twitter on 1 April:

    Remember target to converge 95% of citizen facing content and service to Directgov by end march 11? I’m please to say we did it @directgov

    The truth is, I don’t think many people do remember it: the Martha Lane Fox review has since upped the ante quite considerably. But it’s a significant milestone to have reached, all the same.

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    New govt IT strategy published

    The new Government ICT Strategy has been published on the Cabinet Office website – and to their great credit, it’s been published:

    • primarily for web consumption, with the downloadable versions a click deeper; and
    • not just in PDF, not just in Word format, but also in OpenOffice format! The quiet symbolism is noted.

    Much of the document will seem familiar, as it’s been (notionally) in place, or  certainly on the cards, for some considerable time. But I’m struck by the relatively strong language it uses, for example: ‘The Government will also put an end to the oligopoly of large suppliers that monopolise its ICT provision.’

    There’s formal endorsement of Agile methodology; ‘mandation of specific open standards’; and a commitment that ‘Government will not commission new solutions where something similar already exists.’ That may sound like common sense… but the impact of such a black-and-white statement could be substantial.

    The picture as regards open source specifically is somewhat disappointing, boiling down to little more than a restatement of the same ‘level playing field’ principle of recent years. Of course, as I’ve written here many times, that policy should be all that’s needed to kickstart a revolution; but it hasn’t happened. And I’m just not convinced that the creation of three new committees – an Open Source Implementation Group, a System Integrator Forum and an Open Source Advisory Panel – plus the creation of a ‘toolkit for procurers’ will do much to advance things… in themselves. But maybe that’s just how the Civil Service has to do things.

    A couple of other points which jumped out at me:

    • there’s an apparent endorsement of Directgov as the ‘single domain’, along the lines proposed by Martha Lane Fox. As I wrote at the time, there are pros and cons to this; and I know there were some efforts to keep services and policy separate.
    • an explicit commitment that ‘departments will ensure an online channel is included in all government consultations’, within six months.
    • no going back on the notion of open policy formulation, including a pledge to ‘develop practical guidelines on departmental access to the internet and social media channels’.

    Coincidentally, Francis Maude is just sitting down in front of the Public Adminstration Select Committee as I type this. I’ll be watching, and hope to provide notes later.

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    Early glimpses of Alphagov

    If you’re interested in where the Alphagov project is going – and if you’re reading this, you probably are – then it’s worth keeping an eye on the Dribbble account of Paul Annett (@nicepaul) – formerly of ClearLeft, now SuperniceStudio.

    If you haven’t come across it, Dribbble is a social network for designers to share and discuss little 400×300 snapshots of work they’re doing: ‘Twitter for creatives’, you might call it. Membership of the site itself is free, but the ability to post snapshots is invitation-only. Designers tend to use it to showcase the little touches they’re working on: so don’t go there expecting full-blown screengrabs.

    Paul is a designer; he’s putting forward ideas, not unilaterally deciding government policy. So don’t read too much into what you see… but I think it’ll give you an interesting snapshot of where the Alphagov thinking lies.

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    Loosemore leads Lane Fox vision work

    Confirmation on the Cabinet Office’s blog of something that’s been known within the Whitehall webby world for a little while now: Tom Loosemore (ex BBC, Channel 4, Ofcom, Show Us A Better Way, etc etc) has been ‘asked’ to put together an ‘alpha’ version of what a Single Government Domain website, as proposed by Martha Lane Fox, might look like.

    My feeling was that, although Martha’s principle was sound, I feared for its execution. With the ‘right people’ involved, it could be made to happen; with the usual people involved, however, it would almost certainly go the same way as previous attempts.

    Tom Watson MP took a very similar view of things. Writing at Labour Uncut last November, he said:

    As Martha rightly points out, to achieve the changes required to make engaging with HMG online a simple, pleasurable experience requires a massive change in culture and technical expertise. And Francis [Maude] is also humble enough to know that he’s going to need the flair and talent of Britain’s best web people. He needs the A-team.

    … and indeed, one of the names Tom (W) went on to list was Tom Loosemore. It was a suggestion I entirely agreed with: indeed, I’d mentioned Tom as an ideal candidate for the CEO Digital position (although he himself didn’t agree!).

    Tom and his team – which also includes FCO’s Jimmy Leach as the designated Editorial Lead, and has called on various ‘usual suspects’ from the gov/web field (including yours truly, briefly thus far) – have been working out of a deserted floor of COI’s Hercules House offices for a couple of months now, starting with a thorough analysis of traffic and search data from various sources, to identify exactly what the public wants from its government.

    Subsequently, there’s been quite a lot of activity over at ScraperWiki, showing a combination of political material, consultations and general public information. There’s an alphagov account at Github. And intriguingly, there have been a couple of FOI requests made via What Do They Know, in Tom’s name, to get JobCentrePlus-related information out of DWP.

    Some early visuals – rather bold, post web-2.0 you might call them – have been shown to senior Whitehall webbies, but it’s far too early to offer a judgement on them. The Cabinet Office blog includes a pledge that the team ‘will be making public their progress as they go’, and ‘will report when the first iterations are public’: which, I believe, should be in a matter of weeks rather than months. Meanwhile, you’ll probably want to start following @alphagov on Twitter:

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/alphagov/status/52762689625268225″]

    Whether or not you like the thought of this initiative, or its hush-hush approach (thus far), there’s no escaping the fact that Francis Maude had given his provisional approval to the notion of unification; and to get us all to a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’, we need exercises like this to test out what it will/would actually mean. And you’d struggle to put together a team with better experience, skills and insight to do so.

    PS Don’t forget, Francis Maude and Ian Watmore are in front of the Public Administration Select Committee tomorrow morning (Wednesday). I suspect this may come up. Follow the action live at parliamentlive.tv from 09:45.

    PPS I couldn’t resist a cryptic tweet this morning: ‘Tempted to register betagov.co.uk – it’s still available, and might come in, you know, handy.’ Amusing to note that it’s since been claimed by Richard Pope (aka memespring).

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    Getting down to business

    A couple of potentially interesting launches today.

    First came Start Up Britain, which offers an unusual proposition: ‘helping Britain’s future entrepreneurial talent by providing links to the web’s best business resources, along with offers from some of the biggest brands in the country’. You’re greeted at the top of the homepage, somewhat surprisingly, by a photo of David Cameron – looking quite sinister, or is it just me? (No, it’s not.)

    The site claims to have ‘the full backing of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and HM Government’, and the big photo of Cameron – which may or may not be connected to the adjacent proposition? – lends credibility to a one-page site which might otherwise come across as yet another attempt to make money from startups: of its four ‘top tips’, two are explicit adverts, and one expects the other two will lead to some monetisation further down the line.

    Dig beneath the javascript, and there’s little more to it – for now at least – than a bunch of links and money-off vouchers: so in effect, it’s an online equivalent of the goodie bag you’d get at the door of any one of the many startup exhibitions. Steph said it was hammering nails into BusinessLink’s coffin: that seems premature. But it certainly poses some challenging questions of it.

    Then this afternoon, we see the launch of Innovation Launch Pad, a Cabinet Office initiative powered by Spigit – whose recently appointed ‘general manager’ is James Gardner, who joined them from DWP at the start of the year.

    Until 22 April, the Cabinet Office is inviting SMEs to ‘pitch business ideas on how you can help to provide better value for money in the delivery of Government’s business… The best ideas will be handpicked by a community of civil servants and, after intensive mentoring from some of Britain’s foremost entrepreneurs, those that demonstrate the highest impact will be invited to present their ideas at a Product Surgery in the summer.  This will stimulate new, open competitions in Government markets in which these suppliers will be able to participate.’ None of which seems to guarantee any business, but anyway.

    Coming on the same day, these two initiatives – both sitting somewhere between the public and private sector – certainly point to a different way of doing things, and (I suppose) make tangible Cameron’s notion of an enterprise-led recovery. Both are backed by names with good track records in this sort of thing, so certainly worth keeping an eye on. But do either of them fill me with inspiration? To be honest… no, not yet.

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    Transport closes Code of Everand

    You may remember my little exclusive from the start of the year, about the £2.7 million spent by the Department for Transport on its online role playing game, Code of Everand. My FOI request also revealed that usage had basically flatlined since April 2010.

    So it doesn’t come as a huge surprise to learn that Code of Everand was closed earlier this week:

    Users trying to access the site – if there still are any? – will simply find their browser timing out; there’s been no attempt to bow out gracefully, by redirecting the URL to (for example) its Facebook page.

    And for the record, nobody from Transport ever got in touch with me about it.

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    Testing HMRC's open source claims

    The subject of open source came up at this morning’s Public Administration Select Committee hearing with (among others) new government CIO Joe Harley. You can watch it at the ParliamentLive.tv website, if you’re so inclined. I had it on in the background, and my ears pricked up when I heard HMRC CIO Phil Pavitt make a bold and somewhat unexpected claim:

    Open source has been around for some time now, and in HMRC we’ve been very fortunate to develop a quite extensive open source-based set of solutions for us. We’ve actually transformed our website, which as you know is one of the largest websites in the UK if not in Europe, to actually become a completely open source technology. […] This is the website obviously which self-assessment and so on runs through. […] So not only is it out there on a very large scale in terms of open source, it is very heavily used.

    (12:02pm)

    Now, leaving aside the unqualified claim to be one of the continent’s biggest websites… ‘completely open source’? That’s pretty categoric.

    So it’s a little odd that if you look at the HTTP headers, using a web-based tool such as Web Sniffer, you’ll see that www.hmrc.gov.uk is actually running Microsoft’s IIS 5.0. Netcraft.com seems to confirm that it’s running IIS on Windows 2000.

    And if you look at the source code for, say, Phil Pavitt’s biography on the site, you’ll immediately see it littered with ‘InstanceBeginEditable’ tags: the tell-tale sign of (Adobe) Dreamweaver code… not to mention explicit references to .dwt templates.

    The Online Services section, online.hmrc.gov.uk, uses F5 Networks‘s BigIP – I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it. But the only information I could find about its engagement with open source was a blog post by a staff member, who wrote (admittedly a year ago):

    I’m not new here, just new to blogging at F5 Networks. I’ve actually worked at F5 for almost three years now. […] One of the first things I started checking into upon my arrival was how involved we were with the Open Source community. Sorry to say, it wasn’t much. We use parts of Open Source software in our platforms; we have customers that use our platforms in conjunction with their own Open Source deployments; we even have our own successful community in DevCentral, where we encourage users to share in the forums, publish their solutions and iRules, and generally give back to the community. As for the larger Open Source community, it didn’t seem we had a role.

    Curious, eh?

    Update, October 2011: After further research, inspired by a sudden spike in traffic from (what looks like) HMRC’s intranet, I found something of a clarification from Mr Pavitt, in an interview given to Computer Weekly in July.

    HMRC is the foremost government department on open standards, we give away our APIs to over 1,600 software vendors for example. On open source it’s more complicated. For self-assessment online, of the bits that face the customer, the high-volume stuff, SMEs provide that for us, and 70%-80% of it is open source. But for a heavy-duty tax like PAYE – crunching 35 million people’s tax details – people may be more worried if that’s open source. We have to wrestle with what is appropriate. Certain things will never ever be open sourced. Our job is to make sure as much as possible that can be, is.

    Spot the difference.

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    Martha's vision taking shape

    [blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/Marthalanefox/status/47206064797659136″]

    Monday saw a meeting of the ministerial working group tasked with considering Martha Lane Fox’s vision of a ‘single domain based on agile web shared web services’… resulting, as I understand it, in across-the-board approval. So it’s with commendable speed that just two days later – to prevent me revealing it first?! 🙂 – the Cabinet Office has announced the creation of the Government Digital Service, created by merging ‘Directgov and the Cabinet Office Digital Delivery and Digital Engagement teams’.

    The Cabinet Office blog post states:

    This new organisation will be the centre for digital government in the UK, building and championing a ‘digital culture’ that puts the user first and delivers the best, low cost public services possible. To deliver this vision and the government’s digital priorities requires a new streamlined, agile organisation and an operating structure with an integrated, flexible team of skilled staff.

    According to FCO’s Jimmy Leach:

    [blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/JimmyTLeach/status/48078117000052736″]

    Things are getting interesting.

  • Cabinet Office's open standards survey

    With some unexpected free time in my schedule for today, I sat down to complete the Cabinet Office’s recently published questionnaire on Open Standards in government. To be perfectly frank, its 120 questions have left me reeling, and nervous.

    Screen after screen of acronyms and document reference numbers – ISO this, BSI that, W3C whatever – which you’re asked to rank as priority, mandatory, recommended, optional, or ‘should not use’. They swing from the insanely detailed to the laughably obvious. At one extreme: I can’t believe more than a handful of people on the planet understand the finer points of ISO/TS 16071:2003 as opposed to ISO 9241-171:2008… and I’m not entirely sure they would be the right people to be making decisions affecting day-to-day hands-on use anyway. At the other: yes, I think JPGs are probably a good image format to use.

    The thing about standards is, even a bad standard is a good standard.

    OK, I’m over-simplifying a little. There might be certain reasons why one particular refinement of XML is better than another for a specific purpose. But broadly speaking, as long as you’re giving me XML, I’m sure I’ll be able to deal with it.

    I don’t think we have the money to spend on librarians and uber-consultants, the only people who’ll really know or care about this stuff, holding talking shops about which particular ISO standard is just right. It’s the absolute opposite of the ‘Agile’ philosophy I thought we were all supposed to be moving to? And what if The Market decides that it prefers a different standard… or more likely, that it just doesn’t care? It should be perfectly possible to deliver well-structured data in whatever format people may require: be this, to take one specific web-related example, HTML4 or XHTML or HTML5 or RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 or Atom or NewsML.

    I can’t help feeling that we’re coming at this from the wrong angle altogether. The problem isn’t with the selection of a particular open standard. The problem comes when government chooses closed standards (er, MS Office?)… or even worse, decides to create standards of its own (eg IPSV).

    The end game on this, I’m convinced, is the centralised provision of open-source-based platforms, which are – by their very nature – standardised and open. Imagine if we had all government news output in a single multisite WordPress instance, and someone somewhere asked to receive material in NewsML. WordPress does a lot of formats ‘out of the box’, but not NewsML. However, WordPress is built with the expectation that you’ll want to add to it. It has an add_feed function, which would let you create a new feed output template, call out whatever data you needed, and drop it into the right place. A few days work to code a plugin, activate it network-wide, and you’re done.

    So Cabinet Office, I’ve answered your questions. You’ll end up with a piece of paper, ranking other pieces of paper in priority order. Will it answer the question? I fear not.

    Oh, and just for the record: neither the SurveyMonkey questionnaire, nor the Cabinet Office website’s page pointing to it, are [at the time I write this] compliant with the 11 year old XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard they both declare, according to the W3C’s validator. I know it’s a cheap shot, but it puts things in some kind of context.