Puffbox

I couldn’t help feeling slightly underwhelmed by the new Prime Minister’s statement on constitutional reform. I have fond memories of the rollercoaster week or so which immediately followed Labour taking power in 1997. I expected a grand gesture: instead, all we got was a ‘route map’. But he did make an explicit reference to ‘encourag(ing) this House to agree a new process for ensuring consideration of petitions from members of the public’. David Cameron said something similar a month ago, so I guess this one is a goer.

Congratulations to Jimmy Leach, a very deserving winner of this year’s New Media Age award for the greatest individual contribution to new media. If you aren’t in government circles, you may well not have heard of him; he’s the Head of Digital Comms at No10, and is arguably the man responsible for the e-petitions website, Tony Blair on YouTube, and various other unexpected innovations from Downing Street direction.

But I can’t help feeling the official citation misses the key reason(s) why he deserves it. As I’ve hinted before, Jimmy’s single biggest contribution has been in setting precedents. He has (or rather, had?) a direct line to the most important man in the country, and if TB said it was OK to do something, there’s really nobody ‘higher up’ who could overrule him. So Jimmy is free to do all sorts of radical things which most Ministries (with maybe one honourable exception) would typically strangle at birth.

Standard Whitehall mentality is that it’s only acceptable to do something innovative if someone else has already done it. (Which, of course, is a contradiction in terms, but anyway…) And if the ‘someone else’ happens to be the almighty Downing Street, all reticence disappears. Suddenly there’s no need to fear a call from the most powerful office in the land, asking what the hell you thought you were doing. If you post your Minister’s stuff on YouTube, in the same way that No10 posted theirs, what can go wrong? (And if it does go wrong, at least No10 will probably be stuffed too.)

Plus of course, don’t lose sight of an incredibly important part of Jimmy’s work: it hasn’t included a relaunch of the main No10 website. Most of it is just well-produced content, dropped into whatever CMS they have to hand. The video stuff uses external resources – a commercial supplier, and YouTube. (The petitions thing, admittedly, was a special case.) It’s all doable, no matter how bad your existing CMS is.

PS: Quick note on that other digital pioneer, new Foreign Sec David Miliband. Guido reckons he will be continuing with his blog. No surprise there: as I wrote here nearly a year ago, it was always a Miliband thing rather than a departmental thing. But I haven’t seen any signs of movement just yet, and it certainly isn’t something the FCO was factoring into its immediate plans, ahead of his arrival.

Gez Smith makes a fair point about the new DIUS (that’s the Dept for Innovation, Universities and Skills – obviously) website. Getting something together so quickly is quite an achievement… especially when you know how appallingly organised DfES used to be. (I think I’m safe to say that, now it no longer exists.) Sadly though, Gez, it isn’t built in WordPress. If only…

I read through the comments from the Cabinet Office, issued last week, accepting virtually all the conclusions from the ‘Power Of Information’ report by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg. Twenty pages of accept, accept, accept. So why did I feel so underwhelmed? In several places, the response seems to be saying ‘yes, we know all that, and we’ve started doing something about it already.’ (But if this were true, wouldn’t we have seen some results?) In others, the answer is the classic ‘let’s form a committee to talk about it’ response. By which time, of course, things will have moved on. Where I felt quite inspired after reading the original Mayo/Steinberg paper, this just feels like another pamphlet full of platitudes. Sorry.

I’ve also just spotted a new Better Regulation Executive report on ‘informing the public in a multi media age’ (PDF), concentrating mainly on statutory notices – planning, traffic orders, licensing, bankruptcies, etc. It seems to conclude that publishing notices in the local paper is expensive and ineffective, whilst lots of people are starting to use this new-fangled internet. Er, it is 2007, isn’t it?

This was presumably the final act of Pat McFadden’s time as Minister for E-Government; he’s now moved over to the former DTI. I can’t immediately see any indication of who’s taken on the e-gov portfolio: the new junior ministers at the Cabinet Office, under Ed Miliband, are Gillian Merron and Phil Hope.

A final posting on Miliband’s Defra blog. ‘The new mechanisms for political engagement and dialogue represented by this blog are needed more than ever,’ he writes. ‘It may take some time for new service to be resumed, but please watch this space.’ Strangely reminiscent of the last time he signed off… he was up and running again before the day was out.

I’ve a feeling David Miliband may prove to be a very good fit with his new department.

The Foreign Office was actually my first employer: I spent five years there in the mid-to-late 1990s, through what we should probably call the ‘web 1.0’ phase. I took it from a one-man effort (the one man being yours truly) to probably the most highly respected (and certainly the most trophy-laden) in Whitehall.

The promise of free, instant global communication naturally went down well with the Diplomatic Service – although I have to admit, most of my best work was done in the early days, before the whole internet thing came to senior management attention. FCO’s Travel Advice information is something UK citizens, at home and abroad, really do want and need; the daily supply of speeches and transcripts are an important ingredient of international diplomacy.

So now we’re into ‘web 2.0’, and by happy coincidence, the FCO will be headed up by someone who (as catalogued here continuously) ‘really gets it’. I do know that FCO is working on plans for a site relaunch early next year; they recently bought the Morello content management system ‘in a deal worth £1.47m’ over five years. They received a specific mention in Tom Steinberg’s recent report, naming them as a department which should do more in terms of information sharing and audience engagement, and I know they’re considering how to respond.

Miliband’s instinct for a more transparent and inclusive approach will sit well with FCO’s concept of ‘public diplomacy’. Foreign affairs is much more about persuasion and negotiation than most ministries’ activity.

So what fate awaits his ministerial blog, currently housed at Defra? With more UK casualties in Iraq this morning, he probably has more pressing concerns this time than website migration.

PS: Miliband just arrived at King Charles Street, and spoke of being ‘patient and purposeful, listening as well as leading’. And so it begins.

A couple of interesting ideas in the proposals from Jack Straw‘s Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons, published today. They reckon they can ‘revitalise’ the Commons by, among other measures, having ‘a new weekly 90 minute debate in prime time on a big issue of the day’, and allowing MPs to ‘use handheld devices in the Chamber to keep up to date with e-mails, provided that it causes no disturbance.’ More info in the press release.

David Miliband was a busy man this morning, launching his new carbon calculator – hosted, significantly, on Directgov rather than Defra’s own site. (In fact, there isn’t even a Defra logo on it.) He’s also done another short piece-to-camera on YouTube – and as before, it’s a very good, very natural performance.

The carbon calculator itself is a great big Flash application – which is beautifully done but, I can’t help feeling, is overkill. A basic HTML form (with a bit of Ajax functionality) would be more accessible, quicker to load, and might feel more genuine, more earnest somehow. With the application running so slow on launch day, presumably due to wide public interest, those might have been wise considerations…

(I don’t want to mention today’s Second Life appearance to promote the calculator, but I suppose I have to.)

I’ve been meaning to mention the cross-department ‘Act on CO2’ campaign for a while… it’s remarkably brave to run a TV campaign which ends on the call-to-action ‘just go to Google and search for Act on CO2‘. You’d better be very confident in your SEO strategy… or be prepared to spend big on pay-per-click advertising, bidding big to guarantee top spot on the results pages.

In just a week’s time, Tony Blair will finally leave Downing Street for the last time, and the bloke from next door will move in, prompting a curious and potentially unprecedented Cabinet reshuffle. We all know it’s coming, and we know several big changes have to happen – but we don’t yet know exactly how far-reaching it will all be.

Let’s run through what we know: and can I say for the record, I don’t have any particular insight here. This is little more than ‘bloke in the pub’ status.

• Gordon Brown will be leaving the Treasury, obviously. That’s one very important vacancy to be filled – and potentially two.
• John Reid has already pledged to leave the Home Office, so that’s another empty seat. At least they can rest assured there won’t presumably be any further remit changes, following the recent spinning-off of Justice.
• You won’t find too many people expecting Margaret Beckett and Patricia Hewitt to be staying in their current top-rank jobs. So that’s health and foreign affairs to be filled too.
• There’s been plenty of speculation about the future of the DTI, questioning its very existence. In the current climate (pardon the pun), you can easily imagine energy policy being combined with Environment; science used to belong to Education, and could easily do so again. What would that leave?
• Then, of course, there’s the Labour deputy leadership vote. Alan Johnson seems to be favourite there, and has apparently said he would want to stay as Education Secretary (subject, naturally, to the new PM’s wishes). Would the two other Cabinet-level candidates want to keep their current roles?
• As I’m writing this, Michael Crick is telling Jeremy Paxman that Brown intends to bring in non-Labour Party people at junior Minister level (but apparently not at Cabinet level). Think of the implications there?!

So we could be looking at numerous new secretaries of state, new departments or radically redrawn departmental boundaries, and Ministers who don’t necessarily endorse the governing party’s view. Or perhaps not. At least when you look to a change of government at a general election, you have the party manifestos to work from. Not this time. Only rumours, only speculation.

As I’ve blogged before, reshuffles are a great opportunity to see which departments are ‘on the ball’. Departmental websites are surely now the primary ‘shop window’ – and expectations are high. Is it too much for users to expect all the changes to be documented and reflected ‘on the day’? Or rather, is there anything a department can do to prepare, when it doesn’t have a clue what might happen? (You can’t exactly register new domains speculatively!)

I know of a couple of Whitehall departments’s web teams who are (sensibly) making active preparations for what might happen. But the prospect of non-Labour ministers takes us into completely new territory. If he/she wanted to run a blog, and wanted to pass comment on an aspect of Labour policy (to which he/she never formally signed up), where does that leave us? Interesting times indeed.

Update: ‘a Cabinet post!’ ‘A Cabinet post? Did you say that?’ ‘I did say that.’ ‘Wonderful.’

The redesigned NHS website is a bit of a shock to the system. I knew ‘NHS Choices’ was coming as a website, but I had understood it to be a microsite of www.nhs.uk rather than its replacement. (The T&Cs seem to have been expecting a subdomain, too.) But in the context of refocusing on the end user, it makes perfect sense – telling him/her what he/she needs to know.

Immediately you’ll notice that somebody’s been looking at the web 2.0 style guide. Huge fonts (a whopping 4.6em?!); wide screen layouts, breaking away from the 3-column approach; tab-based navigation; lots of whites, greys and gradients; Aqua-style buttons; even a few ‘stickers’. And yes – user-generated content:

‘Your thoughts’, lets you have your say for other users to read. To begin with you can make comments only on hospitals. Eventually these comments will become part of each hospital’s ‘scorecard’ showing the public’s opinion of it.

Look up your local hospital, and you’ll be invited to rate its service in several areas on a 1-5 scale; there are also big textareas for up to 500 words on ‘what you liked’ and ‘what could be improved’. They promise that:

We’ll publish all your comments whether they’re good, bad, or both as long as they meet (SD: the lengthy list of) moderation rules. Whatever you write, your privacy will be protected and your relationship with the NHS will not be affected.

Again, this makes a lot of sense. Time and again, you hear that people think the treatment they get from the NHS is great, but that they hear it’s bad nationally, so they conclude they were lucky. I guess this is an attempt to let the satisfied masses voice their satisfaction. You just have to hope that people are motivated enough to do so; sadly there’s no eBay-style inducement to leave positive feedback. And sadly, nobody needs asking twice to leave criticism.

Dig into the site, and you’ll see lots of graphic-rich material, and map-mashing (based on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, this time). At the moment, I’m having real trouble finding fault with it… although with the backing of external third parties like Dr Foster, LBi and Sapient, and at a reported cost of £3.6m, you’d hope this might be the case.