From Cabinet Office questions and PMQs today… and that’s before the debate on Segways tonight. So we’re to assume that the nation’s MPs were catching up on some serious geek time over the Christmas break then?
(Background pic from uk_parliament at Flickr)
Before you get carried away, it’s the prime minister of Kazakhstan who has demanded that all his Cabinet colleagues get blogging. Reuters reports:
“I have opened a blog on the government website,” Masimov told a government meeting. “So I order all ministers… to start personal blogs where people will be able to ask you questions that you must answer.”
Masimov started his own blog last week with an introductory post that has already received 152 comments, some of which were complaints about the quality of tap water in villages. He has since ordered the cabinet to investigate the criticisms.
For the record, I’m not sure you can actually order someone to blog. I wrote something on this ages ago, referring to David Miliband’s pioneering efforts: ‘The channel is nothing without having someone willing and able to talk to (and with) us.’
But anyway… the Kazakh PM’s website is running on BlogEngine.NET, not a platform I know well. There’s embedded Flash video, comments on every (?) post, and a fair smattering of RSS icons. He’s not exactly prolific, with only 5 posts on the site since the end of November, but he’s getting plenty of responses.
If anyone happens to speak Kazakh (or is it Russian?), feel free to tell us all about the content. No Borat references required, thank you very much.
A quick nod towards today’s New Opportunities (micro)site, in support of the white paper on Social Mobility. Most of it is fairly straightforward, ‘pages in a hierarchy’ stuff; well done, certainly, but nothing particularly special. There are a few points definitely worthy of note, though.
One is the root address: www.hmg.gov.uk – one of many domains pointing to the Cabinet Office’s webserver. It’s a very odd choice indeed; and somewhat ironic, given that the earliest government domains were hmg.gb. Presumably it’s because of the cross-departmental nature of the initiative itself; that would also explain the use of that lesser-spotted HM Government logo.
Another is the inclusion of Flash-based streaming video, direct from the host site itself – as opposed to the usual embedded-from-YouTube method. It’s quite a timely move, given COI new recruit Ross Ferguson’s reflections on that very subject this morning. Here’s one embedded example…
Streaming your own video can get expensive: at respectable quality, that’s a lot of data eating up your monthly bandwidth allocation. But I suppose the DIY approach means you can customise the appearance, see the usage stats, and (crucially in this case, I suspect) get around corporate IT networks’ blocking of YouTube et al.
Then there’s the ‘social media press release‘, which proclaims: ‘We want to encourage debate online and offline about the issues raised in this document, and have made the following resources available for bloggers and journalists to use within their own coverage of the White Paper.’ In practice that means a bullet-point summary, a dozen streamed videos for easy embedding, plus links to external resources and external coverage. It’s a nice package.
To be honest though, I’m not sure the fluffy ‘ordinary people’ video content is right for this sort of thing. I don’t see why anyone would want to include these case studies in their coverage. Surely you’d have a better chance with some pieces to camera from insiders / experts / Ministers? (Not that those are ideal, necessarily…)
As for ‘social mobility for bloggers’ – well, it’s always amused me how easy it is to get yourself some profile in this business. If you can crank out a half-decent blog, people will find you, and your name will become known. There aren’t that many people talking about the subjects I cover here. There’s no magic recipe: just demonstrate that you know your subject, and it’ll pay off. But that’s enough career advice from me… ๐
It isn’t every day you get writers like Stephen Fry and JK Rowling, Oscar-winning film producers and Nobel Prize-winning scientists contributing to a government website. But it does happen.
Governance of Britain is a site I built a year ago, on behalf of the Ministry of Justice. Plans and circumstances have changed a few times since then, which frankly haven’t helped with establishing the site; and there’s word that things might be changing again. But it contains a few features and functions which I’m particularly proud of.
This week saw us uploading a clutch of new contributions from high-profile public figures on what it means to be British. We’ve already had pieces from, among others, Trevor Phillips, Dame Evelyn Glennie and Nicole Cooke (pre-Beijing, by the way), as well as what you might call ‘the great and good’. A couple of them are even in video form. Comments are open; it’ll be interesting if such ‘citizen-friendly’ material can generate large volumes of feedback.
Each contributor has approached the subject in a different way. Some are short, some much longer. Some are very personal, others clearly ‘the official line’ from an organisation they represent. Some are quite academic, others quite provocative. Well worth a quick click through. I’d particularly draw your attention to Lord Puttnam‘s video: a one minute piece to camera, well-delivered by a natural communicator.
Chances are, you missed last month’s publication of the Cabinet Office’s white paper on the 2011 Census. ‘Modern times demand modern approaches,’ declares Sir Michael Scholar, chair of the UK Statistics Authority: you’ll be able to complete your census form online, and ‘all standard outputs will be publicly accessible online, and free of charge, from the National Statistics website (whatever that is – as I understand it, the name disappeared in the UKSA rebranding).’
The Census represents a marvellous opportunity. We’re now many years into the post-web world, and online is now the main distribution channel for data. We’ve got several years to learn from the best practice of others, be they fellow statistical organisations around the world, or heavy-duty data disseminators like the financial markets. There’s no issue as regards a business model: the commitment to free availability has already been made. It’s an open goal.
Unfortunately, I probably wrote something almost identical to the preceding paragraph seven years ago, when I started working for ONS as Web Editor in Chief, full of optimism at what magic we could weave with the 2001 census data. It didn’t last; there was virtually zero consideration of public usage in the output plans, and I couldn’t persuade the key people of the cultural shift happening outside. There were some blazing rows. I left ONS in 2004; it says something that the website I built as a six-month stopgap in 2002 is still their main web presence – reskin aside, almost exactly as I left it.
A quick skim through the white paper provides little reason to restore my optimism. It has more to say about printed books of preformatted tables than it does about electronic methods – there’s no fleshing-out of what ‘online dissemination’ might mean. Instead, there’s a commitment to produce CDs and DVDs… seriously? in 2012?
But there may yet be hope. Back in December, ONS quietly launched a 2011 UK Census Output consultation – based, remarkably, on a Wiki platform. They’ve published initial survey findings from 500+ respondents, half of whom were in government; it’s a bit disappointing to see so little input from potential new customers (only 2%), as opposed to the ‘usual suspects’. Yet a clear majority of this normally conservative (small ‘c’) audience said they would be happy with electronic output alone.
And hallelujah! – elsewhere on the wiki there’s even mention of an ‘intention is to support a variety of electronic dissemination options through the use of an internet-based API [said on another page to be ‘publicly-available’] that can access the full range of aggregated Census statistics.’ There’s even a link to a list of the API calls to be offered – but it ‘does not (yet) exist’. Many a slip twixt cup and lip, as they say… but they’re undoubtedly talking the right talk here, and perhaps that’s all we can ask at this stage.
My only plea is that they remember the huge potential value for new users. Things have moved on dramatically since 2001; I can think of countless websites which would adore a system they could hook into, with fantastic potential benefits to ordinary web users. The wiki’s list of planned response formats betrays the ‘insiders first’ instinct again: nothing your average masher will be familiar with. Consult your community by all means, guys; but recognise there’s an even wider potential community these days.
You’ll be seeing a lot of the Change 4 Life brand, and the associated bright Morph-esque characters whose aim in life is to tackle the growing problem of obesity. But whatever you do, don’t call it a government campaign, though – it’s a ‘society-wide movement’. Which essentially means, it’ll be everywhere: online and offline.
I’m almost becoming blasรฉ about seeing government accounts on Flickr and YouTube. But they’ve done it particularly well, with the YouTube videos obviously kept short, and the Flickr photos being more than just ‘Minister shaking hands with‘ (although it’s a shame they’re ‘All rights reserved’).
The defining characteristic of this campaign – sorry, movement – will be ubiquity, through brand extension. DH is offering the full range of design assets for download from its website; and ‘services or products provided or commissioned by the NHS or local authorities’ are being encouraged to use the Change4Life name, logo and sub-brands. They’re also being encouraged to think up their own sub-brands; and whilst it isn’t permitted to just add ‘4 Life’ on the end of an organisation name, the design guidelines imply an open approach. A good few household names are signed up as members of the ‘business 4 Life coalition’ – although that in itself has attracted some criticism already.
Not for the first time, the campaign’s online call to action is to do a search; on the ads I’ve seen so far, no actual URL is quoted. It’s a risky strategy, but I guess there’s evidence to show that it worked OK on previous campaigns (?).
The website is a subdirectory of nhs.uk, but there’s no hint of NHS branding – in fact, no mention of government at all, other than a Crown copyright reference in the footer. There are reasonable attempts at interactivity. I like the postcode search listing all sorts of active activities near you, with a Microsoft Virtual Earth map, and a link into Transport Direct for directions. But the function to create your own character is a bit of a mess: choose a colour, height, and one of half a dozen poses… hardly much in the way of customisation… then, as far as I can tell, nothing. My customised Morph has yet to make his promised return to greet me.
The main objective of the site, at first glance, is to make me sign up for an information pack. Nothing inherently wrong with that, of course… but it could have been so much more. A personal diet/weight tracker, maybe. Some kind of ‘introduce me to a local sports club’ function. Even some kind of blogging / discussion forum thing. But as it stands, I don’t see any reason for me ever to return for a second visit.
Mind you, if the objective is to get me to go outside and run around, maybe that’s deliberate.
A top Whitehall civil servant has sensationally quit in protest at government’s failure to take the web seriously. Well, I’m sure someone’s going to write it up like that, so it might as well be me. ๐
It hasn’t exactly been top secret, but ‘Whitehall Webby’ blogger Jeremy Gould has now formally announced his departure from the civil service. He’s quitting his role as head of internet communication at the Ministry of Justice, to join us on the outside as a government-specialist consultant. The post on his blog is clearly from the heart; and even though it’s no surprise to hear how he feels, I must admit I’m still a bit surprised to see it expressed so directly. And it’s curious to see someone express precisely the same feelings I had when I went solo myself.
It’s the right thing to do – for Jeremy himself, and on balance, believe it or not, for the greater good too. Good people need to be given good things to do; and particularly post-Web Rationalisation, individual departments rarely have enough substantial projects to make it worth keeping such good people permanently on the books. The System needs people like Jeremy (and myself) to circulate around, wherever and whenever we’re needed. (A point made by Nick Booth earlier this week… although I’m wondering, don’t us ‘mercenaries’ count too?) And in doing so, we see the ever-bigger picture, gain experience, and become better at what we do. I’m unquestionably better at this than when I started two years ago – and everyone benefits as a result.
But senior civil servants – and, frankly, Ministers – should heed his words. ‘Web stuff is still not being taken seriously enough. Thereโs been a lot of talk over the last four years of how more senior strategic web roles are inevitable, but in that time its been just talk. So there was no next move for me. I’ve also found my extra-curricular activities being scrutinised and discouraged in a way I hadnโt expected after it being benignly ignored for the first year or so.’
Government is rarely short of good people, of which Mr Gould – a good friend, and a great colleague – was unquestionably one. However, it’s never short of obstructive people who refuse to rock the boat, even when that boat is demonstrably about to capsize. Tom Steinberg talks about bringing computer-savvy people back into government; wouldn’t it be a good start to stop losing the ones you’ve already got?
Welcome (back) to the real world, mate. It’s much more fun out here. And you can actually get stuff done.
This week saw the next phase in the incremental redesign of the Department For International Development‘s website. It’s a much airier, brighter look than before, and with a YouTube video front and centre, plus all those drop shadows, rounded corners and various JQuery effects, it feels bang up to date. There’s a new ‘top layer’ of public-friendly information, Fighting Poverty, which is very easy on the eye, without getting in the way of the more mundane operational stuff. They’ve struck an excellent balance, I think.
The changes to the parent site meant we had to revisit certain elements of the DFID Bloggers site, built and launched by Puffbox just a couple of months back; partly for visual consistency, but also because we’re feeding off the same CSS stylesheet. Everything’s more or less where it was before, but the colours have been brightened up a bit, and taking a lead from the parent site, we’re now optimised for 1024px-wide screens. We’ve also tweaked a few other things, but I doubt you’ll notice them.
(The parent site has repaid the compliment by giving front-page space to the Bloggers site – but before anyone mentions it: no, it isn’t automatically taking the latest item via RSS, they’re choosing which items they want to promote.)
On the Bloggers site at least, the switch on the night was remarkably pain-free: just a simple matter of changing from one WordPress theme to another, literally a single click and it’s done. I’ve always seen this as one of WordPress’s hidden strengths – and I’ve talked to one or two clients about making deliberate use of it. You can imagine a scenario where there are several versions of the same basic design, all stored as separate WP themes, for different situations and circumstances – as a crude example, a black-tinged ‘national mourning’ version. Deploying it would take seconds. Hey, can your big ugly CMS do that, I wonder?
The DFID team are taking an incremental approach to their web development – and good on them for it. There are further ‘structural changes and technical improvements’ planned for 2009, plus – all being well – some cool new functionality in the Bloggers site. Stay tuned.
A few days ago, I bought an iPod Touch; and I can finally understand the fuss. I didn’t really want it; I’m not short of portable media players, and my Android phone gave me a perfectly good touchscreen to play with. But I’m very excited about mobile-optimised web interfaces at the moment, and felt I needed an iPod/iPhone to do some proper testing (as opposed to educated guesswork).
I’ve been especially blown away by the quality of videos streamed from YouTube. For example, I’m a big ice hockey fan – and the NHL (the big league in North America) is kind enough to put full highlights of every game on YouTube. But as you can probably guess, a flying puck isn’t easy to see in a heavily pixellated non-HD video stream. It’s a completely different story on the iPod Touch – crystal clear.
But – unless I’ve missed it? – there’s no easy way in the built-in YouTube applications, either on the iPod or Android, to log into your YouTube account and see your various ‘subscriptions’. On the face of it, it’s an extraordinary omission. Subscriptions are effectively your personalised EPG, allowing you to cut through the chaos, and get to the content you want. Isn’t that exactly what you want/need? So I did it myself.
If you go to mytube.puffbox.co.uk, you’ll see an intro page with a dropdown list of various YouTube channels: these are being called in dynamically via Javascript, from the puffboxtv account on YouTube, courtesy of Google’s astonishingly comprehensive API. (I got the list of HMG YouTube channels from Steph’s digitalgovuk catalogue – ding!) When you choose a channel from the dropdown, it makes a further API call, drawing a list of the last 10 videos posted to that account, with upload dates and thumbnails. Click on a title, and you’ll see the clip description, plus an embedded player. On a normal browser, the clip will play on the page; on an iPhone/iPod or Android unit, it’ll play in the native YouTube app, full-screen. The ‘back’ button in the top left corner (not the browser back button!) returns you to the list of videos.
That’s pretty cool… but here’s the really clever bit. If you have made your YouTube subscriptions publicly visible, you can call your own favourite channels into the dropdown – go to http://mytube.puffbox.co.uk/?account=yourname and you should see a familiar list. I should stress, my site never holds any personal information: it’s all coming in dynamically from YouTube.
As with most of my experimental stuff, it comes with zero guarantees. There are rough edges, and it could be a little prettier. But here’s the important point: I knocked this together in 24 hours*, thanks principally to (a) Google’s wonderful API and (b) the free JQuery javascript library to process the responses.
Coincidentally, as I was putting the finishing touches to the site, I came across Charles Arthur’s piece in today’s Guardian about the Home Office crime mapping problems – which concluded thus:
The Free Our Data campaign thinks the practices outlined in the memo do not go far enough: what external developers especially are looking for is pure data feeds of events, rather than static maps… Ironically, the police’s efforts to meet the deadlines might be better aimed at producing those data feeds with time, location and crime form data which could then be used by external developers – who would be able to produce maps more quickly than in-house efforts.
I couldn’t agree more – and I hope my efforts over the last 24 hours prove the point. I’m amazed by how easy (relatively speaking) such things are becoming. The common thread across all the really successful web 2.0 properties is the availability of an API, allowing developers to work their own unique magic. As I’ve said before… Government needs to recognise this, and get in the API game. Not just as a ‘nice to have’, but as an absolute priority.
* 24 hours? Well, put it this way. It was working perfectly in Firefox, Safari (desktop and mobile), Chrome, Android… but not IE. It’s taken me the best part of a day to make it work in IE, and I still can’t really understand what I’ve done differently to finally make it work. Opera’s acting really strangely, but I’ve spent long enough playing with it for now.