e-government – Page 16

29 Jul 2010

e-government

adwords, google

NHS kills Google advertising

I noted back in February that NHS Choices had spent £2.7m in one year on pay-per-click advertising. Well, that’s all changed now: a PQ answer reveals that the Adwords budget has been cut by 100%.

In line with Government policy, NHS Choices no longer has any arrangement, or pays for any search engine activity. No commitments have been made with Google or any other search provider for ‘pay per click’ online marketing since the moratorium on marketing spend was put in place on 24 May 2010. NHS Choices used paid search activity to ensure that it reaches the widest possible audience, and that users can easily find clinically assured health information and access the services they need from Government.

(And sure enough, other top spenders like the Act On CO2 campaign have also scrapped their Adwords activity.)

In my February piece, I looked at two specific search terms – ‘stop smoking’ and ‘chlamydia’. The NHS site is still the top natural result for ‘stop smoking‘… although it comes beneath sponsored links to specific pharma products. The picture for chlamydia isn’t so great: the NHS site comes well down the first page of Google results – beneath the American CDC, interestingly. Time to ramp up the SEO activity.
29 Jul 2010

e-government

directgov

Directgov's £28m/yr to be cut by a third
For those interested in the move of Directgov, and its 172 FTE staff, back to Cabinet Office control, there’s loads more detail in an explanatory document published on the Parliament website. I say ‘published’: it’s been slipped out as a PDF on the little-known deposits.parliament.uk subsite.

The note confirms that ‘Directgov funding will be reduced by a third over the Spending Review period’, from £28.4m in 2010/11, ‘together with the funding for the digital teams based in the Cabinet Office.’

But alongside the nuts-and-bolts details of who pays for the laptops, there’s an interesting perspective on what Directgov’s actual role is:
Directgov‟s ongoing role is to enable government to:
- Reduce the deficit
- Encourage individual and social responsibility, through provision and sharing of information and services in an open and transparent way
- Enhance the role of social enterprises, charities and co-operatives in public services
27 Jul 2010

e-government, politics, technology

geodata, google, maps, mysociety

Constituency maps in under a minute
Opening up geographic data is beginning to bear fruit. MySociety’s Matthew Somerville has just unveiled MaPit, ‘our database and web service that maps postcodes and points to current or past administrative area information and polygons for all the United Kingdom.’ What that means in practice is, postcode lookups and boundary data are now just a URL away.

(Quick update: actually, not for all the United Kingdom as it turns out – the following method doesn’t work for N Ireland. See Matthew’s comment below.)

Here’s a quick example, as much for my own future reference as anyone else’s. Let’s say you wanted to generate a map of a given MP’s constituency – say Lynne Featherstone in Hornsey & Wood Green:
- You need to find the appropriate reference number for the constituency: either by browsing the list of all constituencies, or searching for places whose names begin with Hornsey. Note – these will produce nasty-looking data files, rather than pretty HTML lists. Hunt through the code, and you’ll find:
  “65883”: {“codes”: {“unit_id”: “25044”}, “name”: “Hornsey and Wood Green”, “country”: “E”, “type_name”: “UK Parliament constituency”, “parent_area”: null, “generation_high”: 13, “generation_low”: 13, “country_name”: “England”, “type”: “WMC”, “id”: 65883}
- The ‘id’ is the number you need – in this case, 65883. The MySociety API now lets you call the geometry of that area, in – among others – Google Earth’s KML format, using the following URL. (Don’t worry about the ‘4326’ here: it’s a reference to the coordinate system being used, and won’t change in this context.)
  http://mapit.mysociety.org/area/4326/65883.kml
- Conveniently, Google Maps lets you enter a KML file’s URL as a search query, and it will draw it on a map. Even more conveniently, if you add ‘output=embed’ as a search parameter, it strips away everything but the map itself. So here’s an embedded map of Lynne’s constituency, pulled into an <iframe>. Look at the source code, to see how easy it is.
Boundary data generated by MaPit.mysociety.org which contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2010; Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2010 (Code-Point Open); National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2010 (NSPD Open).

And thankfully, it bears a close resemblance to this map on Lynne’s own website, which took me considerably longer to churn out.
22 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, directgov, dwp

Directgov returns to the Cabinet Office

I couldn’t help smiling at the news of Directgov going back to its original home in the Cabinet Office. Funny how things go full-circle: launched from within the Cabinet Office in April 2004, to COI (an ‘ideal location’) in March 2006, to DWP in April 2008, back to Cabinet Office in July 2010.

The Cabinet Office press release says it will ‘sit in the Government Communications team headed by Matt Tee’, with oversight from Francis Maude and Danny Alexander; but will also have celebrity input:

Today’s move puts new energy behind the drive to get more people and public services online. Martha Lane Fox, UK Digital Champion, will drive a transformation and redirection of Directgov as part of her role advising government on how efficiencies can best be realised through the online delivery of public services.

That’s quite a curiously worded sentence when you look at it. In terms of traffic at least, Directgov is doing well – so you could argue that a ‘transformation and redirection’ of Directgov would be breaking what has so far been a winning formula. But then comes the key word – ‘efficiencies’. I think we know what that means.

And so, Directgov continues to be shuffled around government every two years. But maybe now, with Matt Tee’s Cabinet Office government communications unit holding responsibility for all the key strands of activity, it’ll get the kind of clear, authoritative leadership it’s perhaps been lacking.

Let’s all meet up again here in 2012, and see how it went.
12 Jul 2010

e-government

branding, coalition

Coalition brand identity

Back in May, I wrote a piece about consistent government branding. Given the benefits in terms of cost savings and strengthened identity, I suggested: ‘it’s an idea whose time has come, and will not come again for some time.’ A couple of months later – after several web projects, a print item or two, and now even public events – it looks like we’ve got one.

I’ve already told the story of how I put together the Programme for Government website in under 24 hours. In the early evening before publication the next morning, I received a PDF of the proposed print output – and could really only mimic it. There wasn’t going to be time to get approval for anything else. A 2:1 wireframe, white ‘page’ hovering on a very light grey background, extra large Times Roman text in the top left, green highlight colour, Gill Sans body font (where available). Nothing too clever on either the technical or aesthetic fronts.

We then had the initial Spending Challenge site, which looked almost identical, not surprising given that it used my original CSS code… followed by the two discussion apps based on Delib’s platform, both coded from scratch but again using the same defining elements – 2:1 wireframe, white page on grey, big Times New Roman logotype, Gill Sans where available.

(It was particularly amusing to see the Delib guys sticking with the page shadow effect. Well past midnight, amid last-minute doubts about the design lacking a certain something, I added this using CSS3’s box-shadow. It took a few seconds to add to the CSS; it looked OK, and my creative juices had run dry – I wasn’t going to come up with anything better. Lo and behold, it’s one of the style’s defining characteristics! – although to Delib’s credit, they went back and did it ‘properly’ as a repeating background graphic.)

And now I note the same style has even been translated into event scenery: witnessed first at the Cabinet away-day in the North, then again last Friday in Cornwall.

The outside observer would have to conclude that this is HMG’s new across-the-board House Style… or certainly, the makings of one. There’s a lot to like about it, not least its easy online application; there’s something inherently ‘British’ about Gill Sans, and the colour combination blends sobriety and dynamism quite well. But some refinement is still required: I don’t think we’ve found quite the right green, for example.
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.
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.