Puffbox

I’m indebted to Public Sector Forums for pointing out that COI have issued a new consultation document on ‘delivering inclusive websites: user-centred accessibility’. In an immmediate nod to user-centredness, the document isn’t yet available on the Cabinet Office website, despite ‘going 1.0’ a week or more ago. 🙁

The main headline is that government websites which fail to pass AA accessibility may lose their .gov.uk address. In truth, there hasn’t been a strong ‘carrot’ when it comes to accessibility, so it’s no surprise that we should try the ‘stick’. But how rigidly can this rule be applied, when so many of the tests are subjective? My favourite remains checkpoint 14.1:

Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.

That’s a Level A criterion, not even AA. I’m not sure many sites even try. And besides, define ‘appropriate’. Ah well, I suppose the WAI guidelines are the only guidelines we’ve got, so there’s no real choice but to legislate upon them.

More disappointing, though, is the lack of ‘practising what you preach’. Wouldn’t it have been a wonderful example of user-centredness, if they’d published these guidelines on an open, public website for the users themselves to comment?

With the Foreign Office’s recent embracing of the blog, I’m reminded that a couple of Ambassadors in the field have been blogging for Britain for a long, long time. Alan Goulty, our man in Tunis has been writing a ‘blog’ for close to two years; and John Duncan, head of the UK’s Permanent Representation to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva (known, understandably as UKDIS) joined him at the start of 2007.

UKDIS is a particularly appropriate candidate for a blog-based approach: it’s a tiny office, usually only five people, which few will have heard of, and even fewer will understand. And much respect to both Ambassadors for doing it at all: the Foreign Office’s superheavyweight CMS solution certainly wasn’t built with blogging in mind. I did hear of the Tunis blog when it first launched, but I’m afraid I assumed it would be quietly dropped: too much effort to keep up long-term.

In both cases, the content is certainly bloggy: first person stuff, a mix of the professional and the personal, the serious and the sociable. But they don’t have permalinks, don’t have proper comments (although both offer workarounds), don’t have RSS feeds… etc etc. So do they still qualify as ‘blogs’? Probably not, in all honesty… which is all the more reason for the FCO new media team to do the decent thing, and bring them over to the new platform. They are already doing the hard part.

I’m spending most of my time convincing people to use a blog tool for content management needs. Messrs Goulty and Duncan are using a big CMS for blog purposes. Ying and yang. 🙂

Some interesting exchanges in Westminster Hall on Tuesday, with Southport’s LibDem MP John Pugh raising the subject of open-source software – and in particular, government’s relationship with Microsoft. Er, hang on a moment…

Fundamentally this debate is about neither Microsoft nor open source; it is about eradicating the suspicion and certainly the prospect—indeed, I believe it is the reality—of illegal state aid being given to any software enterprise through the use of public resources.

Oops, sorry, my mistake. Now, what’s this about ‘illegal state aid’?

If someone cannot access benefits online without using a (Microsoft) Windows-based computer, as is currently the case, I do not see how the Government can be doing anything other than involving themselves in illegal state aid. They simply do not need to do that as it would be technically possible to access the system some other way.

Um, yeah, I think I see your point.

Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury Angela Eagle gave a familiar argument in response: open source is used in certain places, and it’s a level playing field. ‘We will procure the solution that can offer the best value for money and that can best meet our requirements: high quality, reliability, security and more specific criteria in each case as the contracts are designed. If that solution is open source, we will use open source.’

I’m doing my bit of course, with a (growing!) list of mini-projects from various government sources, which will (in all likelihood) come back to WordPress. Never mind the cost argument: I’m increasingly of the opinion that open source offers a better long-term bet, in terms of quality of product, available skills base, and lack of lock-in.

I’m sure if you read this, you probably also read David Wilcox’s blog. In case you don’t… he’s just written a very well-considered piece on ‘the new politics’, in the wake of the weekend’s on-off election shenanigans. Read it – particularly the five points of conclusion at the end.

David might also have mentioned that David Cameron expressed very similar sentiments in his conference speech: half a dozen times he used the words ‘the old politics is failing’, before pledging:

‘Let us resolve right here, that we will not pursue the old politics. No more Downing Street summits, get together a packet of measures for the 6 o’clock News, brief them out and then while everyone has reported them they never actually happen and everyone moves onto the next thing. That is not what this Party is going to do.’

Sounds remarkably like a cross-party consensus for democratic engagement? Ha ha ha.

David’s point about ‘creating trusted places within which more constructive discussion can take place’ is an interesting one. I spent a bit of time last week (for obvious reasons) thinking about how you could aggregate leading political blogs into a single easy-to-browse site… and it should be remarkably easy. It would be a start.

My work contacts fall, more or less, into three camps: public sector, media and large corporate. And at the moment, two of those are in something of a frenzy.

The media contacts are desperately throwing together election plans, where they had expected to have at least six months to work them up. Indeed, to some extent, there’s an air of resignation that if the election is called, there just won’t be time to make the best ideas happen.

The public sector contacts seem either desperate to kick jobs off, perhaps before ‘purdah’ kicks in; or they’re getting understandably hesitant, on the possibility there may be a change of government, and their grand initiative doesn’t happen at all.

I’m currently running two separate ‘to do’ lists: one for ‘if he does’, one for ‘if he doesn’t’. So I’m very keen to hear an announcement, one way or the other. But here’s the problem – if we aren’t to have a November election, there isn’t a proper ‘no’ announcement. It’s only a ‘not yet’. Life just rolls on. And all the time, in the backs of our minds, we’re all left wondering if it’ll now be a spring election instead. The uncertainty scales back, but doesn’t disappear.

Depoliticising the electoral cycle suddenly seems like a good idea. In fact, if Gordon is looking to define ‘Brownism’, maybe depoliticisation is it.

I’ll try to find time to read the Hansard Society’s second Digital Dialogues report on using IT for public engagement, but I’ve got a load of other things to do in the next few days. For now, a quick skim of the executive summary has some sensible advice. I’m particularly drawn to the first recommendation:

Naturally, I do have a personal axe to grind here. But I’ve long felt there should be a ‘skunk works’ unit within central government, with minimal line management, and an open remit. You could describe it as a MySociety group on the inside, I suppose. It’s absolutely not the way the Civil Service wants to work, but I just don’t think there’s any other way to do it. Even a centrally-provided slice of server space for departments to test things out would be a start.

You may well have missed the UK’s first Day For Older People – called, extraordinarily, ‘generationXperience’ – on Monday just past. Could they possibly have come up with a less appropriate label?

I initially thought it was a reference to ‘generation X’ – normally taken to be people born in the late 60s or 70s. (Unless we’re officially considered ‘older people’ these days? I ran in a 10k at the weekend where the ‘veterans’ category began at age 35.) Then I thought it might be a Microsoft promotional campaign, accepting that many people are still choosing XP over Vista on new machines.

Turns out it’s actually a government campaign led by DWP, with a few pages on Directgov and a blog at wordpress.com, hiding behind its own domain. When I first picked up on it, the site was down, making me wonder if it had been deleted the day after the event… thankfully they aren’t that stupid. But if we’re all supposed to be marking a national day for this, shouldn’t there be more than two items, one of which is a ‘hello world’ effort? If the big day didn’t even set DWP’s Older People and Ageing Society Division’s creative juices flowing, how could it possibly have stirred the rest of us?

On the bright side – the two-way communication sentiments are encouraging, it’s good to put a human face on it all, and it’s intriguing to see it hosted (for free) at wordpress.com when DWP had its own WordPress installation(s) in-house pre-reshuffle. I guess we have to give it time.

So much for my exclusive… The Foreign Office blogging site went live yesterday afternoon, and is already attracting a healthy level of traffic, helped no doubt by Guido Fawkes’s reference to it. I can’t help but point out the high number of right-of-centre bloggers among the early comments.

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dVM8DDptSr0]

Also interesting to note the new FCO channel on YouTube. There’s no shortage of video material around King Charles Street, so this has been a long time coming. Of course, Miliband is no stranger to YouTube, having had his own channel previously, with the occasional on-the-hoof video posting.

I’m told YouTube will be an important component this time round. It’s the right decision, as it kills two birds with one stone. There’s no (serious) doubting that it’s genuinely ‘by the Minister’ if you can see his lips move; and generally speaking, it’s much faster than writing something. Senior government people are busy, so this is probably a more practical way for them to work – assuming they’re happy to do it in ‘one take’.

… the Australian Government has published a 30-page consultation paper (PDF) on whether it should have a consultation blog (singular). Words fail me sometimes.

In their defence, it sounds like they’re trying to spec up a full-scale system for online consultation, way beyond a mere ‘blog’. They’re talking about having an official invitation to participate, in easily-embeddable video form, from the relevant Minister. Response mechanisms could include an online survey, or a full-on discussion forum (with registration not mandatory). They have given some thought to using ‘social’ tools to highlight certain active consultations, but nothing of note yet.

So once you dig beneath the surface, there’s more to it than the rather ignorant title suggests. But I’m still a bit bemused that they haven’t at least launched a basic blog as part of the exercise. There is a web page about it, but don’t expect anything more than a mailto link.

There have been rumours flying around that David Miliband may be about to restart his blogging activity… in fact, I may even have generated one or two of them myself. Well, after a little detective work, I can exclusively confirm them. The Foreign Office is poised to launch a surprisingly ambitious blogging initiative, featuring not just one but as many as six blogs – from the very top to the very bottom of the organisation.

The intention, Miliband explains on the new site’s ‘about’ page, is to ‘show more of the enormous range of interesting, and challenging, work we do and why we do it.’ Miliband himself is joined by Jim Murphy, his Minister for Europe who ‘wants to hear your views on how the EU is doing, and to encourage discussion through this blog’. So whilst you’re not likely to get your referendum on the European treaty / constitution, you will at least have one outlet for your support / anger. Good luck to whoever’s moderating that one.

Then there’s Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles KCMG LVO, currently Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Afghanistan; and Lindsay Appleby, a First Secretary (ie relatively senior) in the Brussels office. Reporting from the front line, there’s Maria Pia Gazzella, from the Embassy in Chile. But most remarkable of all is Sarah Russell, who doesn’t even work for the FCO yet – she’s a Fast Streamer due to join in October 2007, so presumably we’ll be following her progress as she learns the ropes.

As I understand it, the system is running on the very same Community Server machine as Miliband’s former Defra blog – which explains (a) why the Defra blog disappeared a couple of weeks back, and (b) why the presentation templates look very familiar indeed. I’m glad to see my own blog has kept its place in the (fairly brief) blogroll in DM’s sidebar, along with a few other usual egov suspects, and a selection of political blogs (not just red ones, either). But as I write this, there’s at least one notable omission.

I haven’t heard anything about a launch date, and there’s nothing immediately obvious on the site to give any hints. It all looks ready to go, though, barring the first round of postings.

But I need to say one thing. Although I’ve got good contacts ‘on the inside’ who probably knew about this, nobody ‘broke the embargo’. Miliband told the world it was coming; I just did a bit of digging, and happened to dig in the right place. The site is wide open for all to see; and if it was meant to be kept ‘secret’, it would/should have been password-protected. Even so, I’m not going to link to it directly – but I can’t stop you doing as I did, and guessing what the address might be.

While you’re waiting for the official announcement, have a peek at the FCO’s Flickr account which has just sparked into life again.