e-government – Page 21

20 Jan 2010

company, e-government

defra, uklocation, wordpress

UK Location: our new microsite for Defra

One department making steady steps into WordPress has been Defra: it started with a ‘public beta’ blog on third sector issues late in 2008, then a Commentariat-based consultation in mid-2009. I’ve been working with them since late last year, and the first fruits of that relationship are now starting to appear.

First to go public is a microsite for the UK Location Programme – which you probably won’t have heard of, but is all about EU-wide interoperability in geographic data, so it may well be of interest. They needed a website which they could manage themselves, rather than through the central Defra web team; and were open to online consultation methods. Ideal WordPress territory, in other words.

The site is closely modelled on the Defra corporate site, even going so far as to use the same base stylesheet. Behind the scenes, it’s the usual combination of WordPress posts and pages, with the former handling news updates, and the latter everything else. Inevitably we were looking at lots of downloadable PDFs and Office documents; so I’ve done a custom ‘widget’ to display the latest file uploads (excluding images), with the appropriate filetype icons.

The human element on this one could be interesting too. The project’s communications manager is an iPhone owner; and we’ve already experimented (successfully) with him updating the site via the excellent WordPress iPhone app. All being well, you’ll never notice; but it opens up all sorts of possibilities.

The site is sitting in some modestly-priced ‘sandbox’ hosting space, and came together in less than a week. In quite a few respects, it’s more advanced than the main Defra site; and I’m hoping they’ll see how WordPress could help at the top level too. Watch out for at least one more Puffbox-Defra collaboration in the next few weeks.
19 Jan 2010

e-government

budget, nhschoices

NHS Choices budget in eyepopping detail
A written answer in response to Conservative MP Grant Shapps has provided the best breakdown I’ve yet seen of spending on NHS Choices, one of the government’s three £20m mega-portals. You kinda know what’s coming, don’t you?
```
2007-08

Strategy and planning:        £3,291,659.57

Design and build              £4,266,748.79

Hosting and infrastructure    £1,871,933.81

Content provision             £3,010,242.69

Testing and evaluation        £1,236,993.29

Total                        £13,677,578.14

2008-09

Strategy and planning:        £8,764,040.54

Design and build              £7,470,562.03

Hosting and infrastructure    £3,169,335.95

Content provision             £7,156,673.03

Testing and evaluation        £1,300.208.47

Total                        £27,860,820.02

2009-10

Strategy and planning:        £5,845,541.38

Design and build              £6,377,614.00

Hosting and infrastructure    £2,610,803.31

Content provision             £5,448,688.20

Testing and evaluation        £1,023,417.78

Total                        £21,306,064.66
```
I’m not sure which figure jumps out at me the most; they’re all eyepoppingly large. It’s probably the £8.76m on strategy and planning in 2008-9 – which, let’s note, doesn’t include the £1.3m on testing and evaluation. And since it’s broken out separately, you have to assume that the costs allocated to the other categories are actual production costs, ie ‘strategy’ not included..?

The easiest to justify is probably ‘content provision’ – although it’s a genuine surprise to see it third on the list of priorities behind ‘design and build’ (of a site that’s already been largely designed and built already?) and ‘strategy and planning’.
18 Jan 2010

e-government

directgov

Don't watch that, look at this

Tom Watson (West Bromwich East, Labour)

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions what the total cost to her Department was of the directgov advertising campaign, Go DirectGov.

Jim Knight (Minister of State (the South West), Regional Affairs; South Dorset, Labour)

The cost of production and airtime purchased to date combined is £2.05 million.

Source: TheyWorkForYou.com

Why? According to Mike Hoban: ‘Television advertising works and is an effective way of building recognition.’
5 Jan 2010

e-government

advertising, metoffice

Commercial advertising on govt's no1 website

Figures from Hitwise at the end of November showed the Met Office to be central government’s most popular website, with traffic getting on for double that of Directgov. Now I must admit, I’m not a regular visitor to the site: I tend to favour Metcheck. But with the country apparently heading for a new ice age, I thought I’d drop by, and see their prediction for the days ahead. And I got quite a surprise:

But that’s not all. Every few refreshes, you’ll also see one of these:

I seem to recall they’ve had ‘house adverts’ for their own commercial products for some time. But this is the first time I’ve been aware of third-party commercial advertising on the site.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. They’ve clearly got healthy traffic levels, and they’re a Trading Fund: if advertisers want to hand over cash for a few pixels of unused screen space, hey – shouldn’t they be duty-bound to accept it? (There’s more information in this press release from September… including the rather startling suggestion that their traffic peaks at 19 million visits per day.)
4 Jan 2010

e-government, politics

conservatives, consultation, jeremyhunt, wordpress

Wanted: consultation platform, £1m reward

I’m glad my former Microsoft colleague John McGarvey reminded me of Conservative shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s proposal of a £1m prize to develop ‘the best new technology platform that helps people come together to solve the problems that matter to them’. That’s what happens when you announce things over the Christmas holidays.

The plan is for a future Conservative government to use it ‘to throw open the policy making process to the public, and harness the wisdom of the crowd so that the public can collaborate to improve government policy. For example, a Conservative government would publish all government Green Papers on this platform, so that everyone can have their say on government policies, and feed in their ideas to make them better.’ Why does that sound so familiar? ‘There are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by Government,’ says Mr Hunt; ‘this prize is a good and cost-effective way of getting one.’

Now I don’t know what kind of ‘scale’ or ‘depth’ Mr Hunt thinks he requires. If there’s a formal brief, I’ve yet to find it – and I’d be delighted if someone could point me in the right direction.

Because I’ve been building websites allowing the public to input their views on government green and white papers for some time now. Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme kickstarted the process: and I’ve since gone on to build reusable WordPress MU-based platforms for two Whitehall departments, for a few grand each. We’ve proven WordPress can handle (literally) thousands of responses – and in the only case so far where it’s wobbled, that was because of ISP throttling rather than the ability of WordPress to handle it.

Then on the academic side, you’ve got the work that’s been done by Joss Winn and Tony Hirst et al on JISCPress / digress.it / writetoreply.org. Their focus has been on the technical side, including some early steps towards community-building. It’s a bit lacking in terms of aesthetics, and it hasn’t yet been tested with huge volumes, but it’s doing some very interesting things.

And of course, barely a month ago, you had Mr Hunt’s own people at Tory central office proving the point by turning the government’s draft IT strategy into a consultation document using WordPress. Cheap and quick, showing signs of inexperience with the platform – but good enough to receive nearly 400 contributions.

So you have several independent operations in the (wide) UK public sector, already proving in the real world that WordPress is perfectly capable of supporting such ‘user feedback’ websites, and delivering some pretty sophisticated functionality and user experience. BuddyPress, meanwhile, continues to improve, and could certainly form the bedrock of a government-backed policy development community.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the technology is ready. And there are enough good people who have built up enough experience to collaborate on building something pretty special. For a slice of that £1m, I’m sure I could find time in my own schedule.

But the big question is… is Mr Hunt ready? What does it mean to receive large volumes of contributions from the general public? When do you ask for them? How do you deal with them? How do you ensure they’re representative? And what if you don’t like the consensus of the opinions expressed?

I’m all for the kind of revolution in policy development he seems to be proposing; and I’d be happy to play a part in it. But it isn’t the lack of a technical platform that will hold this vision back. If anything, that’s the easiest part.

PS Just a thought… whither Tom Steinberg?
18 Dec 2009

e-government, technology

dfid, foreignoffice, wordpress

Wireframes? Specs? Ha.
I’ve added a lengthy comment to Stephen Hale’s recent blog post about preparations for a much-needed redesign of the FCO’s blogs.fco.gov.uk site. Unfortunately, the FCO’s platform did horrible things to the formatting, so even if it’s only to make it legible, I thought I’d echo one of the more controversial points I made in that comment.

Specifically: my point that, for a project like that, the days of spending weeks and months honing wireframe diagrams and/or lengthy functional specifications should be behind us.

A blog platform is no longer a start-from-scratch, blank-sheet-of-paper kind of project. Wipe away the surface layer, and there’s a very limited range of web page layouts these days. The functionality of a blog platform is even more standardised, with only a handful of serious candidates. Virtually all the functionality you’ll need will be ready, out of the box, within a matter of minutes.

Having done this very regularly for several years now, I strongly believe that if you have a fairly good idea of the functionality you want, and a fairly good idea of the platform you like, you should look to force the two together at the earliest possible opportunity, rather than spending ages and £££ refining your wireframes and technical spec to perfection. Why waste time and money dreaming of what you might like, when you can have it in front of you within minutes, and know?

It’s like when you buy a new car. Cars are a mature technology. They all feel a bit different, and come with slightly different features, but they all do broadly the same thing in the same way. If you want a new car, you don’t sit down and design your dream car. You don’t recruit your own team of engineers, designers and mechanics. You make a list of the few things that are important to you; then you go to the local showrooms and test-drive a few.

In writing my comment for the FCO site, I went out of my way to avoid using the word WordPress. But my blog, my rules. So here’s the slightly less diplomatic version of what I wanted to say.
- In a world of instant zero-cost availability, it’s ludicrous to consider functionality and platform in complete isolation from each other. It just is.
- WordPress’s status as the world’s leading blogging platform is now, I’d suggest, undisputed. So if you want to run a multi-author blogging arrangement, it should be on WordPress. If you don’t believe me, maybe you could ask the Telegraph: they tried a bespoke platform, then tried a commercial product, then finally saw sense.
- DFID are already running a multi-blogger platform, based on WordPress, and have been doing so most successfully for the last 15 months. It can do everything that you’d expect any such site to do – and more. It’s unquestionably a better system than the FCO’s. It ticks all the boxes on the FCO’s future wireframes; and if there’s anything it can’t already do, it can almost certainly be grafted on: that’s the beauty of WordPress. And we’ve proven that with them numerous times.
- The DFID code is open source. Some of the key plugins are already available to the world on wordpress.org; I’m happy to explain and share any lower-level stuff within the templates.
So…
- If FCO come up with a reason why they can’t use the world-leading and lowest-cost solution, in conjunction with code already proven within government and also freely available, I sincerely look forward to hearing it. And I imagine Parliament will too.
14 Dec 2009

e-government

dcsf, wordpress

DCSF joins WordPress trend

It’s now two years since DCSF published their Children’s Plan – I know – and Ed Balls wants to know what impact it has had on you. They’ve published a progress report, and launched a commentable website… based on, guess what, WordPress. Not the first time they’ve gone down the open source route: a year ago they launched their National Strategies website on Drupal. But I think this is their first WordPress-based site.

Hold on a second though. What’s going on with that URL: gscdevelopment.com/wpsample? Well, gscdevelopment.com is simply an account at Bluehost – a very low-cost shared hosting provider. Nothing wrong with that at all; I use them myself for experimental hosting space, although I’m not sure I’d host a government site there. Google has literally nothing about a web development agency called GSC Development. And that’s a bit of a problem. It may look like a DCSF website: but without a gov.uk address, and no way to trace who exactly is its source, how would you know it isn’t some kind of elaborate phishing scam?

Update, 16/12/09: It looks like they’ve now moved it to a .dcsf.gov.uk address, and to a different hosting provider (Every City, by the look of it); which makes me wonder why they jumped the gun?

Ironically, it was a period consulting at DfES that convinced me it was time to escape the Whitehall machine, and embrace the WordPress community. So it’s great to see them coming on board; and I’m all in favour of departments experimenting with WordPress, whether inside or outside the firewall. There are things I’d certainly have done (very) differently: I wouldn’t have used a directory name ‘wpsample’ for a start, and I’d have tried to fix some of the ~~112~~ 153 validation errors. It also looks as if they’ve overwritten the ‘default’ WordPress theme, which isn’t wise. And it’s always advisable to use pretty permalinks if you possibly can, rather than number-based query strings. But it’s another step in the right direction, and is therefore to be welcomed.
10 Dec 2009

e-government

barackobama, opengovernment, usa

Obama's openness directive
The Obama administration’s long-awaited Open Government Directive was published on Tuesday – curiously, in PDF, TXT, DOC and Slideshare, but not HTML? – and seems to have received a warm welcome across the Atlantic.

What’s quite interesting is its very prescriptive approach. Within a specified number of days, specifically 45, they must have identified and published three new ‘high quality’ datasets in open formats. Then, by day 60 (ie 6 February 2010), each department must have created a new page on its website on open government issues, at a specified URL: http://www.[agency].gov/open. This page must include mechanisms for public feedback and quality assessment; a plan for ‘how it will improve transparency and integrate public participation and collaboration’, to be updated every two years; the annual FOI report; and regular responses to public input. (I’m almost surprised they haven’t offered a wireframe for the page.)

The document goes on to outline what it expects to see in each departmental openness plan, including of particular interest:
- proposed changes to internal management and administrative policies to improve participation
- proposals for new feedback mechanisms, including innovative tools and practices that create new and easier methods for public engagement
- proposals to use technology platforms to improve collaboration among people within and outside your agency
- innovative methods, such as prizes and competitions, to obtain ideas from and to increase collaboration with those in the private sector, non-profit, and academic communities; and
- at least one specific, new transparency, participation, or collaboration initiative that your agency is currently implementing (or that will be implemented before the next update of the Open Government Plan).
Very specific measures, milestones and expectations – plus mandatory innovation across the board. Would it work here?

For more, read TechPresident.com’s analysis of the directive, and its implications.
9 Dec 2009

e-government

conference, innovation, norway, origo, oslo

All so familiar in Oslo

If I take one thing home from my trip to Oslo, it’s the fact that we’re all seeing the same opportunities, and facing the same hurdles. Today’s day-long seminar on innovation in and around government kept coming back to freeing up public data – oh, including maps. Sound familiar, anyone?

The opening session was Hakon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera (and the guy who invented CSS), making the case for freeing up taxpayer-funded data. As it was in Norwegian, I didn’t get much of it: thankfully, it was essentially the same content covered in this article (complete with Google translation).

I talked about the UK experience of openness, open source and consultation: lots about WordPress, Commentariat and activism – familiar stuff to readers of this blog. With the Smarter Government paper on Monday, all the social media activity around Copenhagen, and the Tories’ forced commentability on the leaked IT strategy, I wasn’t short of timely examples!

Then it was Nikki Timmermans from the Netherlands, talking about their education ministry-backed Digital Pioneers fund which has supported 150 projects since 2002. I was particularly taken by one particular project they funded: effectively a ‘dating service’ for their MPs… by which I mean, it tries to match you with MPs who share your interests, based on voting behaviour, beliefs and background, even favourite football team. It’s an interesting challenge to the idea that the MP who best represents you is the one for the patch of your land where you go to bed each night. I wonder if it’s something we could put together in the UK?

The final presentation was by Olav Anders Ovrebo. It was in Norwegian. I didn’t get much of it. But he works for this website which is WordPress based. So clearly he knows his stuff. 🙂

After a (really very nice) sandwich lunch, we broke up into small groups for discussion. I couldn’t help feeling guilty, forcing the groups I joined to speak English; but they all coped much better than if I’d been asked to cope in Norwegian, and were too polite to complain.

Many thanks to Bente Kalsnes of social platform Origo for inviting me to participate. I hope the examples and experience I brought were useful; and I’m certainly taking away plenty of food for thought myself.
8 Dec 2009

e-government

directgov

A Lot Of Orange

Doing a bit of research for my presentation in Oslo tomorrow (of which more later), I came across a somewhat surprising figure in Hansard.

Directgov cost us £30.7 million in the year 2008-09 – well over double what it cost us the previous year. Of that £30.7 million, £7.48 million went on ‘advertising, public relations, publicity and marketing’. As one wag pointed out on Twitter, that would buy you a lot of orange.

Did it work? Well, the best comparison I data I can lay my hands on is Hitwise market share, courtesy of Public Sector Forums – and Directgov went from 9.14% of ‘central government’ traffic in March 2008, to 17.02% a year later. Of course, that doesn’t mean traffic has doubled… and it has to be seen in the light of web rationalisation, whereby Directgov is eating other websites.

Sadly, the last PQ on Directgov traffic seems to have been in December last year; and DG’s own traffic page only quotes the last 3 months. And even then, the numbers are curious to say the least. They can’t provide a unique user figure for August this year. And somehow, between September and October, unique users more than doubled, whilst visits fell by 8%, and page impressions fell by 11%. Eh?