Puffbox

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

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    Consultations supersite mkII

    Thanks to Jeremy for pointing out Harry Metcalfe‘s new ‘Tell Them What You Think‘, the latest mass screen-scraping exercise from the MySociety stable: this time, it’s government departments’ consultation exercises. I actually met Harry last week, but didn’t realise the project was actually ‘out there’. It bears all the classic MySociety hallmarks – which Harry should take as a great compliment.

    Describing the story so far on the site’s own blog, he writes:

    A few months ago, I responded to a couple of government consultations and, in the process, discovered there was no way to search all live consultations, or to be alerted when a new one was published. This struck me as more than a little mad.

    consultations.gov.ukExcept that, as web.archive.org demonstrates there was a central site listing live consultation exercises, at www.consultations.gov.uk from 2004 to early 2006. Did the site succeed in encouraging a new wave of civic engagement? Let’s put it this way: if it had, why would I be writing this? The site was then taken down, with the address redirecting into the Cabinet Office site.

    Today, it redirects to the BERR page on last year’s Consultation Policy Review. And – oh! the irony – if you look at their published response, you’ll find the following paragraphs:

    3.21 Several responses called for a new approach to publicising consultation exercises, including suggestions for a single website for all central Government consultations with a facility to register for alerts.

    3.23 The Better Regulation Executive will look into the feasibility of one website indexing all central Government consultation exercises and providing an automated alert system.

    Visibility of current consultations is part of the problem, but I’d argue it’s a small – and maybe even negligible – part. I’m not even sure we know what they are trying to achieve: is it simply transparency of process? is it just ‘what we’re meant to do’? are we looking for huge volumes of responses?

    And more pertinently, does the government really care what The Masses think? Harry almost acknowledges this himself to an extent, citing an example of a recent consultation which saw 85% outright opposition, and 91% disagreement with the phrasing of the question. What happened? The measure passed anyway.

    We need to decide what we’re trying to achieve with consultation, then decide the best way to go about it. We’re a long, long, l-o-n-g way from there.

    But there’s one important lesson from the exercise, as Jeremy notes. There are things you can do with your website to help the eage, public-spirited geeks take your information, and do something better with it. Ask them. And next time you spec up a website, make sure there’s a section on XML, RSS and/or API.

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    Could the banks run ID cards?

    Writing for ConservativeHome at the weekend, the Telegraph’s Robert Colville recalls his colleague Rachel Sylvester’s revelation (uh, OK…) that ‘Sir David Varney, Gordon Brown’s adviser on “public service transformation”, supports vast databases to tailor public services to individual need – “a joined-up identity management system” that acts as “a single source of truth” about every individual.’

    Whilst I claim no technical expertise on the subject, I’ve long been of the opinion that some kind of centralised – or certainly, joined-up – identity register is inevitable, and indeed desirable. Too often this debate gets confused with identity cards; police stop-and-search powers; or even less helpfully, the War on Terror. It is unquestionably ‘ludicrous’ if, as Rachel Sylvester’s piece noted, ‘somebody has to contact 44 bits of the state when a relative dies.’ It would mean an end to the (alleged) shame of means-testing; those in need would get what they’re entitled to, automatically. But I understand people’s concerns about the security of that single repository of data; if someone cracks your DNA or retina scan, for example, you can’t just replace it like a stolen credit card.

    This all comes down to trust – and the truth is, people don’t trust government IT. But government isn’t the only area this kind of ‘crisis of confidence’ affects. Just look at the queues outside Northern Rock branches, the minute people suggested you couldn’t trust that bank’s financial position. The first run on a bank in 150 years, we’ve been told repeatedly.

    Banks face exactly the same issue of trust. Every month you hand over all the money you’ve earned to your bank, and you trust them not to lose it. They don’t stash it in a box in their big vault with your name on it. Your personal wealth, or the roof over your head is nothing but a cell in a spreadsheet. The banks’ only currency is trust, trust that they won’t screw up your spreadsheet. Like government data, it’s impossible to secure it 100%. But unlike the government context, the banks have a competitive reason – in fact, a life-or-death reason – to ensure it’s as secure as it humanly, possibly, conceivably can be. Otherwise, the queues will be outside their branches… and you can’t imagine Gordon and Alastair wanting to nationalise another one in a hurry.

    Robert Colville’s ConHome piece presents it, wrongly in my view, as a choice between ’empowering citizens’ and ‘amassing information on them’. But I do agree with his point about the ‘decentralising spirit’ of ‘Public Services 2.0’; and that may be the key. Identity data doesn’t necessarily have to be centralised in government; or then again, as technology like OpenID seems to hint, it doesn’t have to be ‘centralised’ at all. Since we all already have a relationship with a bank, aren’t they the natural people to provide this kind of service? After all, what is a bank today other than a provider of a data security service?

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    New report on politics and internet

    Provocative stuff from Mick Fealty over at the Telegraph’s Brassneck blog. He highlights a report by the Centre for Policy Studies which suggests that ‘the internet could offer MPs an unmatched opportunity to create a niche for themselves, and to re-empower local politics.’ And echoing the Economist’s point about government in competition, he notes:

    The most subtle, but perhaps most powerful, change, will be to the public’s mindset. As we grow used to the instant availability of information online, we will no longer tolerate delay and obfuscation in getting similar information from government. The individual, and not the state, will be the master in the digital age.

    A weighty 60-page document landing on your boss’s desk may give you some useful extra leverage, but regular readers of these pages can probably skip the first half: it’s a rather predictable mix of stuff you know already, mostly from across the Atlantic. The good stuff starts at the half-way point: I particularly like the notion of a continuing dialogue between MP and constituents, in good times and bad. As author Robert Colville points out:

    MPs traditionally hear from their constituents only when they are angry or in need – whether that be by post, or email, or at a surgery or public meeting. Most normal people will never contact their MP, due to constraints of time or motivation. This, naturally, promotes a rather jaundiced view of humanity among our elected officials. Yet by inhabiting the same online spaces as their constituents on a day-to-day basis, MPs will interact with them in much more normal conditions – when the MP is not the privileged voice of authority, but merely one member of a conversation among many. In doing so, perhaps they will get a much more realistic idea of what their constituents actually think.

    The thrust of the report is undermined, sadly, by the curious formatting issues on the press notice announcing its publication. The link to download the full PDF is at the very bottom, behind an almost undetectable ‘click here’ link.

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    Department of Health redesign

    The new Department of Health site is a definite improvement; the previous incarnation looked like it had been designed primarily by the technical side (which, indeed, it had). Now it’s all colourful boxes with rounded corners and shaded colourings, and it’s all the better for it. All this without breaking links, apparently.

    Well done to them for trailing the new design in a ‘coming soon’ page, made available for a couple of weeks before the changeover. And even better, I love the review of old designs. I wonder how many of us kept screengrabs of old sites? I know I’ve lost all trace of some previous ‘masterpieces’.

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    FCO's brilliant Kosovo blog

    I can’t let today go by without mentioning the marvellous blogging effort over at the Foreign Office. Ruairi O Connell, deputy head of the British Embassy-in-waiting in Pristina, Kosovo, has put together a series of fascinating posts which give a terrific crash course in why today’s declaration of independence matters. Simple things like the protocol of how you refer to place names, the historic context, the personal stories. Read this one page, and be dramatically better informed.

    When Ruairi started blogging in January, I noted: ‘An insight from the UK’s Embassy-in-waiting could be very timely indeed.’ I’m now starting to wonder if it might actually be a deliberate new policy, to use the freedom of the web to tell the story from inside international hotspots. Traditionally, corporate blogging efforts have foundered because people have been unable (supposedly) to find the time. This almost looks like the Foreign Office deciding that blogging is a communication priority. And if so, good on them.

    Next on the list, by the looks of it, is a new blog from Philip Barclay at the Embassy in Zimbabwe. Another hotspot, at another significant moment: presidential elections are due in a month. Never mind the fact that the BBC – including the World Service, funded by the FCO – are banned from the country.

    PS: Pristina’s Albanian-language Express newspaper had a contender for Headline Of The Year. Be warned, it contains one use of very strong language in English, and in large print. See this thumbnail, or the full edition in PDF.

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    Government in competition

    Two articles in what looks like a special edition of the The Economist this week, which sum up exactly where e-government falls down. In ‘Government offline‘, they write (rightly):

    Governments have few direct rivals. Amazon.com must outdo other online booksellers to win readers’ money. Google must beat Yahoo!. Unless every inch of such companies’ websites offers stellar clarity and convenience, customers go elsewhere. But if your country’s tax-collection online offering is slow, clunky or just plain dull, then tough.

    Indeed. But in the same edition, ‘The electronic bureaucrat‘ notes, just as correctly:

    In the online world, government is competing for users’ time and attention with beautifully designed sites that are fun to use. The government’s offering, says Mr Markellos (of PA Consulting), “has to be massively attractive”.

    In other words: government is in competition, but (generally) only indirectly. So consumers steadily develop an understanding of how great things can be; then come up against government services with no particular incentive to be great. And since they’re fundamentally stuck with the government (or perhaps more accurately, the civil service) they’ve got, their only available response is to disengage. All of which leads the Economist to a depressing conclusion:

    The examples of good e-government in our special report have a common factor: a tough-minded leader at the top, willing to push change through against the protests of corrupt or incompetent vested interests. It would be nice to think that democracy would do that, concentrating voters’ preferences for good government and creating an electoral ratchet in favour of modern, efficient public services. It hasn’t happened yet.

    Enjoy your Friday, folks.

  • How many Directgov sites?

    You know the way all government sites are meant to be merging into Directgov… does that or doesn’t that cover externally located subdomains of direct.gov.uk? I did a quick bit of Google research and uncovered the following non-authoritative list:

    Several (although not not all) of these sites clearly required functionality which the Directgov platform couldn’t offer: database integration, mapping, etc. And that’s where Directgov’s problem will come. If you’re going to bring everyone on board, you need to be offering adequate functionality – or at least, access to adequate external functionality – to meet everyone’s perceived needs. As it stands, we risk ending up with a proliferation of subdomains.

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    Where's our Directgov blog?

    When the Guardian’s Michael Cross interviewed Directgov chief executive Jayne Nickalls in August last year, he wrote:

    In its response to the Power of Information report, the Cabinet Office proposes that Directgov embraces Web 2.0 technology by incorporating a blog in which users exchange their experiences.

    Now if it’s really in the official Cabinet Office document, ‘The Government’s Response to The Power of Information‘ (PDF), I’m damned if I can find it. But that’s not the point. We were promised a two-way communication channel with Directgov… and nigh-on six months later, it’s still not here.

    Tom Watson’s ‘minister for e-government’ role still hasn’t been explicitly confirmed, as far as I’m aware. But if he’s looking for ideas, there’s one for a start. I hear the Directgov people are waiting to be given official guidance. But now we’ve got a blog-literate minister in charge, it’s as simple as three little words – Yes We Can – and a quick trip over to wordpress.com. We could do it tomorrow. What do you say, Tom? Jayne? Anyone?

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    I thought it didn't have to be taxing?

    HMRC in FirefoxOK, so it’s not on the scale of the lost CDs exactly, but… this morning I got a letter from HMRC telling me that I’ll have to fill in an annual tax return. The thing is, it’s not the first letter I’ve had from them recently on such a subject.

    They initially wrote to me before Christmas to tell me I no longer needed to submit a tax return. Then they wrote again to say I did. Then they wrote again to say I didn’t. Now this morning, they’ve written to me again to say I do. The thing is, I’m a company director. They know this, and Companies House knows it. And that’s one of the criteria which requires you to submit an annual tax return, no matter what.

    HMRC has a real credibility problem as it is, and this sort of trivial stupidity isn’t helping. Nor is the fact that a large chunk of their website – basically anything from the VAT / Customs & Excise side, by the look of it – still doesn’t display properly in Firefox. Is it any wonder, as reported by Westmonster, that a majority of the British public doesn’t want inter-departmental data sharing?

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    New Wales Office websites by Puffbox

    Swyddfa CymruWe’re exceptionally proud to unveil the latest Puffbox site: a new corporate website – or indeed, two – for the Wales Office. And as you’d probably expect from us, it’s not just another government website.

    In late 2007, I was invited over to the Wales Office’s Whitehall HQ. I hope they don’t mind me saying, their website was probably the ugliest in government, and people were starting to take notice. They had no hands-on control of their own content, and no site usage data. Could Puffbox help? Yes, yes we could.

    The new site, which we’re launching today, was designed, built and populated in a timescale (and for a budget) which would put many suppliers to shame, and gives them functionality which many of their Whitehall neighbours will envy. I also believe it could spark a culture change in how government communicates.

    Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear it’s built on the WordPress ‘blogging’ platform, and continues our series of ‘blogs which aren’t blogs’. News releases, speeches, publications and FOI disclosures are all entered as ‘blog posts’, distinguished using categories. All the more static, corporate stuff is done as ‘pages’.

    For the readers, there are immediate benefits. Obviously, it’s prettier. It’s been coded with better accessibility in mind. Every page is automatically printer-friendly, using CSS. The blogging mechanism gives reliable, automated archiving by category and month. Not to mention the various RSS feeds. And as you’re legally entitled to expect, there’s a fully-functional Welsh-language version too.

    And for the Wales Office themselves, it’s a quantum leap. Previously they’ve been emailing pages out for someone to hand-code: yes folks, even in 2008. (Not the only ones, either.) They now have direct access into their publishing back-end, with all the benefits thereof. And because it’s WordPress, page authoring and management is a breeze. That’s before we get on to things like Google rankings, site usage statistics, multi-site and mobile working…

    Why do I see it as a culture-changer? The site is being run by the Press Office, a small team in a small department (60 staff). They have the authority, and now the ability, to publish new communications at a moment’s notice. If they want to operate by ‘bloggers’ rules’, they can. And as I recall Tom Steinberg once saying, it’s the tools which are transformational. Let’s see what happens… and if they make a success of it, expect others to follow.