e-government – Page 17

24 Jun 2010

e-government

directgov, opensource, treasury, wordpress

Remember to say thank-you

A bit of a tricky moment this morning. As you might have spotted, Downing Street has launched an initiative asking ‘public sector workers’ to help the government find ways to implement the massive spending cuts proposed in Tuesday’s budget ‘in a way that is fair and responsible’. And as has become the norm for such initiatives, there’s a comment-enabled website dedicated to it, built on WordPress. A ‘hooray’ is obligatory at this point, although to be honest, that’s getting a little predictable. 😉

In fact, it’s a return to an initiative launched by Nick Clegg last summer:

The people who are best placed to tell us where money is not being well spent are the teachers, nurses, social workers and other public servants who work so hard day and night on our behalf. Politicians should stop talking over the heads of public servants. We need to listen to the people in the know on how we can better run public services, making sure that every penny of taxpayers’ money is well spent. That’s what ‘Asking People In The Know’ is all about.

… but since it’s all happening again, and since the 2009 website is now giving 404 errors, one must assume it wasn’t especially fruitful.

Anyway… If you have a look at the new website, you’ll note a startling resemblance to the Programme For Government site which I built a few weeks back. It’s very obviously a derivative work, based on my code. I didn’t build it, and I didn’t get paid for it. My contract gives the Crown the right to reuse my work; and in fact, I’m very glad they did. It’s entirely in keeping with the open-source spirit… not to mention the need to find cost savings.

But as anyone following me on Twitter may have spotted, there was one slight hiccup. By convention, WordPress themes include details of their author. The original PFG theme notes me as its originator – obviously. But the derivative theme didn’t. My name had been deleted, and replaced with the names of two people I’ve never met or spoken to: at least one of whom appears to be a direct commercial competitor.

I was not best pleased. I sent out a tweet to that effect: and to the credit of one of the individuals concerned, he subsequently added a line of acknowledgement. My name is duly checked, and I’m happy again.

I am absolutely not suggesting there was any attempt to infringe my intellectual property rights, or deprive me of a deserved payment. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that it was a simple oversight. But I needed to make the point.

Acknowledgement is the currency of the open source movement. There are communities of developers spending their free time building these tools, not to mention businesses freely handing over the fruits of their labours, resulting in you getting phenomenally powerful tools for £0.00. Saying ‘thank you’ is really the least you can do; and it’s often the only ‘payment’ that the open-source contributor receives. Don’t forget.

Not for the first time, Steph Gray lays down a good model to follow. On every page in his Commentariat theme is an explicit credit for the Whitespace theme by Brian Gardner; and there’s a note of thanks to my regular collaborator Simon Wheatley in its style.css file.

And in case anyone’s interested: yes, I do plan to write something for the consultation – it’s also open to ‘private sector partners working within public sector’. Now, I wonder what I might propose?
17 Jun 2010

e-government

Govt skunkworks planned for November

Buried – inevitably – deep within a PDF file, the Cabinet Office has announced a start date of November 2010 for the ‘skunkworks’ team promised in the Conservatives’ technology manifesto.

But the Structural Reform Plan, reportedly the first of many to be published by government departments, says the skunkworks team’s role will be ‘to assess and develop faster ways of developing ICT’ – which, on the face of it, sounds like it’ll be more concerned with procedure than prototypes.

The Plan also points to the setting-up of a new Chief Information Officer’s office, and an increase in the power vested in the CIO role, by the end of August. There’s (yet) another repetition of the pledge to ‘create [a] level playing field for open source software’ – although as mentioned here previously, Francis Maude seems to have taken things a step or two beyond that commitment already, certainly where websites are concerned.

Additionally, there’s a rather vague pledge to ‘devise a government-wide strategy on digital engagement and enablement’, and a promise to ‘support departments to reduce costs of transactional services including putting more services online’.

Other than that, a lot of it is simply the formalisation of manifesto pledges – but it’s interesting to note some specifics in terms of target dates. The promise to put all tenders above £10,000 on a single free-of-charge website is due to be completed in September this year; and details of all spending above £25,000 will follow by November; but you may have to wait until 2013 for the ‘right to data’ to kick in.

And one more thing: the wording on the publication of details of those earning over £58,200 is somewhat watered down – in that it doesn’t explicitly mention the publication of people’s names. But I wouldn’t necessarily read anything into that: the PM did sign a letter which said ‘names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates’.
14 Jun 2010

e-government

Another PDF-driven gov website launches

The new Office for Budget Responsibility has a new website. It’s quite nice looking: plain, sober, entirely befitting its subject matter. Its HTML validates, albeit with some 404 errors around favicon graphics; and it’s easy to find your way around – although admittedly, with a tiny handful of pages, bewildering navigation would have been quite some achievement.

So on the surface, it’s a nice enough job. But it frustrates me to see yet another website launched without so much as an RSS feed; and with an almost total reliance on PDFs for its main substance – not for the first time, even the most basic text-only press release is only available in PDF format. No data.gov.uk-friendly data files, either. (Not yet anyway.)

There also seem to be suggestions in the source code of manual HTML coding going on behind the scenes..? Surely not.
7 Jun 2010

e-government

logica, ministryofjustice, supremecourt

Supreme Court's untendered website cost revealed
My thanks to Charles Arthur at the Guardian for picking up my piece last week on the apparent commitment to using open source for government websites. In the same article, he notes an FOI request which reveals that the costs behind the admittedly quite pretty website for the new Supreme Court.
- It cost us £360,000.
- It was produced by Logica, and uses Open Objects. It’s built on the RedDot CMS.
- And here’s the best bit, which Charles overlooked: ‘No tendering process took place, as the work was let to Logica under the existing DISC commercial framework and to Open Objects as part of their on-going service provision.’
For that money, you’d have hoped for half-decent HTML coding – but there are some pretty basic errors to be found.

You’d have hoped for a website which doesn’t seem to consist primarily, almost exclusively, of PDF files – even a basic press notice.

You’d have hoped for a website with an RSS feed – several, in fact. But no, not a single one.

You need to ask yourself whether £360,000 seems like a fair price for such a website. I’d suggest it isn’t. Even with a significant allocation for design, I’d have thought you could produce a similar result – with better functionality – for 95% less. If there’s more going on behind the scenes than is obvious from the front end, perhaps they might like to explain what.

This is a perfect example of why I’m not scared of all the talk about massive public sector spending cuts.

Well done to Henry Kitt for extracting that figure via his FOI request.
4 Jun 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, francismaude, opensource, tomwatson

Gov websites to use open source 'whenever possible'

In the response to a pretty innocuous parliamentary question from Tom Watson, new Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude makes a statement which could, on the face of it, be of monumental significance for UK e-government.

The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges – and that this should be achieved efficiently and, whenever possible using open source software. Any future development of websites run by the Cabinet Office will be assessed and reviewed against these criteria.

We’ve heard the ‘hubs for debate’ line before, in the Conservative tech manifesto, but the other part is quite startling. Open source software ‘wherever possible’. An unqualified statement of policy. No caveats at all; not even financial. That takes us far, far beyond the ‘level playing field’.
1 Jun 2010

e-government, technology

api, directgov

Directgov unveils syndication API

In one of his final speeches ahead of the general election campaign, Gordon Brown announced plans to offer Directgov’s content via an API ‘by the end of May’. And whilst other announcements in the same speech, such as the Institute of Web Science, have since faded or disappeared, the commitment to a Directgov API didn’t.

Bang on schedule, the API has been launched – and it looks quite marvellous. You’ll need to go here to register – but all they ask for is an email address. Once you’ve received confirmation and a password, you’re away.

Pretty much all Directgov’s content is available, and in various formats. So you can request (for example) articles by section of the website, or by ‘keyword’ (tag); or articles which have been added or edited since a given date, optionally restricted to a given section. You can pull down contact information for central government organisations and local councils. Data is made available, dependent on the query, in XML, JSON, Atom or vCard. (There’s also a browsable XHTML version, from which I’ve taken the screengrab above.)

This stuff isn’t child’s-play; but to those who know what they’re doing – and despite a few successful experiments this morning, I don’t really count myself among them – the potential here is huge. Reckon you can do a better job of presenting Directgov’s content, in terms of search or navigation? Or maybe you’d prefer a design that wasn’t quite so orange? – go ahead. Want to turn it into a big commentable document, letting the citizens improve the content themselves? – well, now you can.

There’s quite an interesting back-story to it all: I had a small matchmaking role in joining up the ideas people in Downing Street with the delivery people at Directgov. And whilst I’m told Directgov did have it in mind for some time this year, the Brown speech on 22 March rather forced the pace. Six weeks (so I’m told) from start to finish isn’t half bad. And whilst I’ve certainly had the odd dig at Directgov in the past, I’m happy to say a hearty ‘well done’ on this one.

It’s a potential game-changer in terms of how the content is presented to the public; but it may also have implications for those producing it. A quick look at the nearly 15,000 ‘keywords’ reveals, perhaps inevitably, a rather chaotic picture: bizarre and inconsistent choices, typos, over-granularity, and so on. My guess is, it’s not been used for front-end presentation before, so it hasn’t had much editorial attention. However, now the data is out there, it has to be taken seriously.
1 Jun 2010

e-government, politics

blogging, dailymail, lynnefeatherstone

Minister (not) warned for (not) tweeting at 1am
For the last week or two, I’ve been trying to draw together some thoughts on Ministers and blogging / tweeting, particularly as regards former Opposition figures now finding themselves in government, and a coalition government at that. Truth be told, I still don’t have a great conclusion to share, only that it’s a bit complicated.

One MP who hasn’t let the transition to Ministerial office stop her blogging is Lynne Featherstone. She’s been as prolific as ever, with posts on constituency matters, party affairs and her new Home Office equalities portfolio. This caught the attention of the Daily Mail, who published a story at the weekend entitled: ‘Minister warned over 1am tweets‘.

There were only two problems with that headline:
- The tweets weren’t at 1am. As Mark Pack explained at Lib Dem Voice, the default timezone when you look at Twitter.com is San Francisco: so those ‘1am tweets’ would actually have been 9am UK time… if that even matters.
- I’ve been in touch with Lynne directly, and she confirms to me: ‘no [Home Office] mandarins have told me off at all!’ And the next bit won’t come as any surprise: ‘Nor did the Mail check any details with me.’
The extent of the warning appears to have been a proactive call to the Home Office press office, with a ‘spokesman’ being quoted: ‘The Minister is well aware of her responsibilities under the Ministerial Code.’ You could call that a warning; I’d call it a statement of fact.

It’s a pathetic character assassination piece, with so many holes in it that I can’t face picking it to pieces. Even a blog post highly complimentary of her ‘boss’ at the Home Office, Conservative minister Theresa May was depicted as a controversial expression of her doubts. So it’s not a bit of wonder that the ensuing comments react with horror at how someone so divisive and clearly deranged should be a government minister. Even if the Mail were to correct or withdraw the piece – which, so far, it shows no sign of doing – it’s too late; the damage, such as it is, is done.

But at least the ‘proper’ newspapers wouldn’t print something so shameful, would they? Sadly, they did. Later the same day, the Telegraph basically re-wrote and re-published the Mail piece, minus (to give them a tiny amount of credit) the embarrassing timezone thing. The Sun did pretty much the same thing, the next day.

You know, you’d almost think they’re more interested in inventing controversy than reporting facts.
1 Jun 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, transparency

First they came for the Permanent Secretaries…

Some excitement this morning at the publication of names, positions and salary bands of the civil service’s top 172 earners. A few names familiar to anyone reading this blog – Matt Tee, John Suffolk, Vanessa Lawrence, Alex Allan (one for the old-skool there!) – but mostly, it’s departmental Permanent Secretaries, and very obviously senior staff. The MoD and Cabinet Office have the most people on the lists: the former mainly ‘top brass’, the latter mainly lawyers. In truth, I’m not sure there’s an awful lot to get excited about.

The real fun will come in September: it was stated in the Programme for Government, and has now been confirmed in a letter from the PM, that:

Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants and NDPB officials with salaries higher than the lowest permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale to be published from September 2010.

And according to the Civil Service website, the bottom of the SCS band 1 payscale is £58,200. That’s going to mean the full salary details of many mid-level managers – quite a few of you reading this blog, I’d guess? – being published in full. Brace yourselves.

We’re getting a new committee – to include Messrs Shadbolt, Berners-Lee and Steinberg – tasked with ‘setting open data standards across the public sector and developing the legal Right to Data’; and a promise that full departmental organograms will be published in October.

But perhaps the most intriguing line is the one buried near the bottom of Cameron’s letter: ‘From July 2010, government departments and agencies should ensure that any information published includes the underlying data in an open standardised format.’ Open? Standardised? Would one expect Microsoft Office formats to meet those criteria? I’m not so sure.
28 May 2010

e-government

birmingham

Review blasts Birmingham's '£2.8m' website
Some fine detective work by Nick Booth aka Podnosh, to uncover Birmingham City Council’s report into the development of its reported – but denied – £2.8m website (mentioned previously here). The executive summary’s list of recommendations makes for painful reading:
- The new CMS ‘requires further work before it can be said to function effectively for its users.’
- ‘There are questions over the extent to which the FatWire CMS system was customised unnecessarily.’
- ‘The system is currently viewed as unstable by the BCC Web Team and requires remedial action.’
- ‘More needs to be done before the Council’s stated [accessibility] policy is achieved.’
- ‘requires a look more in keeping with the vibrant city which Birmingham is. Navigation and design could be improved as part of this process.’
All that time, all that money… and it still sounds like there are significant problems with the fundamentals. Ouch.

In the comments on Nick’s post, Will Perrin makes a daring – albeit, I’d suggest, a bit impractical – proposal:

there has to be a strategic communications and business case case for the council to cut its losses, ditch the site, write off the contrators, publish all the inevitable embarrasing internal emails and adopt BCC DIY, the subsitutue site built by volunteers in a few days reusing the council content. this would gain the council and Birmingham remarkable credit around the web as a world first and most importanly, give citizens and staff an easy to use reliable website. could probbaly be done beneth the EU tendering limit. the council leaders could speak on platforms around the world about brimingham’s crowd sourced web miracle.

But it’s not all bad news in Brum. The ultra-cheap WordPress-based BirminghamNewsroom.com site (covered here) was recognised this week at the Local Government Association’s Reputation Awards. And rightly so.
25 May 2010

company, e-government

cabinetoffice, coalition, coi, wordpress

Commentable Coalition plan

Out of the blue last week, I got a call from COI: was I available for an immediate, rapid turnaround WordPress job? I was a bit startled, and detail was lacking; but since this was precisely the kind of rapid-response thinking I’ve been trying to foster around WordPress for a couple of years, I couldn’t really say no.

As it turned out, the project in question was the Coalition Programme for Government: and the mission was to build a commentable version of it, by the next morning. COI’s initial proposal was to use Steph’s Commentariat as a base; but given the document’s structure, it didn’t feel like a good fit. Plus to be honest, I knew I’d be more comfortable working with my own code, as opposed to unpicking Steph’s – and time was too tight.

The theme came together fairly quickly, helped in no small part by the source document’s fairly plain design – which I basically mimicked, with a couple of tweaks for better web usability. Extracting the text from the supplied PDF was excruciating, as you’d expect. But by the time I got to bed at about 2.30am, having barely left the keyboard since lunchtime, the site was ready, and my part of the work was basically done. It went live at 9:30 the next – well, technically the same – morning.

Now… I’m going to skip over the next bit, because I’m not the right person to tell the story. Suffice to say, people came in their many tens of thousands. And although measures had been taken to handle the expected load, the platform wasn’t ready for quite that volume of interest.

But now, a couple of days older and wiser, the site has been re-enabled: and the comments are starting to come in. This in itself presents some interesting challenges: the document is, by its very nature, more party-political than most, and the comments will be too. The civil service’s usual get-out clause – about the government being democratically elected, on the basis of its manifesto (singular) – doesn’t really work this time. Thankfully, applying the moderation policy is someone else’s problem.

Of course it’d be nicer if things had gone perfectly smoothly on launch day. To some extent, we’ve missed the boat in terms of the immediate wave of interest; but arguably, the comments might be more considered, with the benefit of a weekend to reflect and cool off. (Well, not ‘cool off’ given the mini-heatwave, but you know what I mean.)

And regardless of what went wrong, there’s still a great story to tell, in terms of what went right. An interactive document, designed and coded from scratch, and delivered by bedtime. That’s why we love WordPress.