Puffbox

Blair’s speech on British media culture was brave, perceptive and brilliant. But so far, I haven’t seen the media reports quote (what for me is) the key passage of the speech:

Newspapers fight for a share of a shrinking market. Many are now read on-line, not the next day. Internet advertising has overtaken newspaper ads. There are roughly 70 million blogs in existence, with around 120,000 being created every day. In particular, younger people will, less and less, get their news from traditional outlets.

But, in addition, the forms of communication are merging and interchanging. The BBC website is crucial to the modern BBC. Papers have Podcasts and written material on the web. News is becoming increasingly a free good, provided online without charge. Realistically, these trends won’t do anything other than intensify.

These changes are obvious. But less obvious is their effect. The news schedule is now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It moves in real time. Papers don’t give you up to date news. That’s already out there. They have to break stories, try to lead the schedules. Or they give a commentary.

Speaking as someone who has worked in precisely this arena through the Blair years, swapping between media and government roles, the effect was actually very obvious to me. If newspapers are to serve any continuing purpose, it has to be either (a) creating news or (b) commenting on it. Simply reporting the facts after the event is pointless, when the TV channels probably broadcast it all live, the news websites summarised it, and video clips have probably hit YouTube within hours. Ask the sports reporters – they arrived at this point several years ago. Read the next day’s press coverage of any big football match, and you’re unlikely to find much detail about the actual match. And why should you? – we probably all saw it on Sky anyway.

It’s naive to turn this into a ‘New Labour’ issue. Blair’s dozen years in the limelight – from his election as Labour leader to his departure in a matter of days – have coincided with a decade of revolution in communication and journalism. Neither Blair nor Alastair Campbell caused this; nor indeed could they have prevented it.

Blair’s words today are clearly those of a man who no longer has to worry about political survival. The response in tomorrow morning’s leader columns will be vicious – because the newspapers’ survival remains very much a live issue.

Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo’s report on The Power Of Information was finally published this morning (press release, PDF) – and it’s proposing a major shift in the mindset of the typical Whitehall ministry, and the typical civil servant:

The report recommends a strategy in which government welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives; (and) supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens.

Although you always knew what it was likely to come up with, a few specific things jump out from its fifteen recommendations. Further rationalisation of government websites, based this time on what’s available in the private sector, not just the public sector. The formation of a ‘data mashing laboratory’. A ‘suggestion box’ for information people to request the information they actually want. Effectively allowing civil servants to participate in online forums in an official capacity. But potentially most radical of all:

‘an independent review of the costs and benefits of the current trading fund charging model for the re-use of public sector information, including the role of the five largest trading funds (Ordnance Survey, the Met Office, the UK Hydrographic Office, HM Land Registry and Companies House), the balance of direct versus downstream economic revenue, and the impact on the quality of public sector information.’

Whilst I haven’t had time to digest it fully, the report seems more of a philosophical case for better information exchange, than a list of specific actions. It lists things that people need to think about, and proposes timetables and frameworks for doing that thinking. But there aren’t many direct statements that ‘government should do X’.

The key statements, in my first reading, are those right at the end, in paras 141-143. There is a need for government to be more open. There will typically be short-term costs, but there will often be long-term benefits. And we’ll need an arse-kicker-in-chief to make the change happen. I couldn’t agree more.

A couple of extra thoughts spring immediately to mind. There are several references early in the report to the power of postcodes, and I expected to see a conclusion endorsing them as a national information asset. The argument you always hear from geographers is that postcodes can’t be trusted 100%: in my view, they are now the de facto standard, so we’d better find a way to make them 100% trustworthy (and that may mean liberating them from Royal Mail ownership). There’s actually a wider point about geography to be made at some point, but not here.

The other is the impact of web services, which only get a single passing mention (presumably to stop it becoming too techy). I met Tom a week or two back, and we talked about the example of diplomatic staff not being permitted to engage on travel website discussion forums. Tom correctly raised the matter of Foreign Office travel advice notices, which the FCO refuses to let other sites carry (under explicit threat of prosecution). I was probably the person who made that decision, back in 1995 – a very different context. We couldn’t let other websites ‘copy and paste’ the text off our website, in case they missed an important update. There’s no reason now why the text couldn’t be pulled into travel agents’ sites via web service, on the fly, guaranteeing its up-to-date-ness.

Web services didn’t exist then, but they do now. And I increasingly believe that web services are the key to all this. I can almost imagine a policy which says ‘scrap government websites, just build web services.’

A new Directgov survey reveals what people say they want from online government services. A few of them seem sensible, and more importantly, do-able: it would be a huge boost for Directgov’s credibility if they were to make substantial progress on some of these, in double-quick time. (Text-messaging parents if their kids don’t show up at school ought to be a doddle, surely?)

Others, frankly, are sci-fi… making me wonder whether this was a ‘serious’ survey, or a cheap ‘get some news coverage’ PR stunt. But most disturbing of all, some are already available online – I’m specifically thinking of the #1 desire for motorists ‘in the future’, the ability to renew car tax online. Here’s a hint: try searching Google for ‘renew car tax online’. There’s even a ‘sponsored link’ at the top of the page, telling you where to go. And guess which bright orange government website it points you to.

Well, this would be interesting. One of the proposals in the Ken Clarke’s Conservative Democracy Task Force report (PDF) is to guarantee a debate in Parliament (well, Westminster Hall anyway) if enough people sign a petition. It’s a proposal which has won immediate favour with David Cameron:

Promising to examine the proposals in detail before deciding which will be included in the Party’s election manifesto, he commented: “I would like to see a system whereby, if enough people sign an online petition in favour of a particular motion, then a debate is held in Parliament, followed by a vote – so that the public know what their elected representatives actually think about the issues that matter to them.”

There’s also a reference to ‘full-blooded entry into on-line activities’, in the context of radio and TV coverage. Perhaps with that in mind, half an hour’s video from the report’s launch is available on YouTube.

I don’t entirely buy into their notion of ”interspersing clips from speeches in the Chamber or from Select Committees with round-table discussion and a suitably monitored chatroom’; for me, a better ‘on demand’ video function for Select Committees would be a great start. So much great stuff from great people, generally much more enlightening than any confrontational Commons debate, and we never even know it’s there, never mind getting round to hunting it down.

David Miliband continues to extend his influence across the web: during his trip to the US this week, he’s going to be writing a ‘daily log’ for the new ‘Earth’ section of the Telegraph website. Not the first time he’s done this: last year he fed content (via audio) from a UN conference in Kenya. Definitely an interesting approach: making use of existing platforms with larger audiences, rather than attempting to build up his own. Precisely the matter being reviewed by Tom Steinberg for the Cabinet Office, with publication (supposedly) imminent.

The Telegraph’s Earth section itself is really well put together… plenty of substantial content, although it does bear the mark of the Business Development Manager. There’s heavy promotion for its sponsors, without whom I wonder if this would have existed. And they really need to check its cross-browser compatibility: the ‘water efficiency calculator’ on the section home page is yer basic Flash, but it no like Firefox.

I’ve had conversations recently with two of the people most closely involved with the Downing Street e-petitions site. A common thread was their belief that the massive response to the road pricing petition was A Good Thing… but that we probably should have had something bigger and better to follow it up.

With that in mind, it’s interesting to see this ‘debate’ on the Drivers’ Voice website between Peter Roberts, the man who started the petition and Dr Derek Wall of the Green Party. Both are given a few hundred words to state their case; there’s a blog-style comments section; and two great big ‘vote’ buttons. Quite a nice way of taking the debate another step forward. It’ll be v-e-r-y interesting to see if any readers of Drivers’ Voice are swayed by what (by my reading) is a more articulate and more persuasive argument from the Green man.

I really set the cat among the pigeons when I noted the existence of a Directgov internal blog (which subsequently disappeared). I sort of regret mentioning it now; although it was a bit daft of them to hope it would remain a secret, I’m happier for knowing that some of them are experimenting with tools like blogs.

Beneath one of those posts, Paul Canning wrote a pretty damning comment on Directgov generally. He backs this up today with a review of their efforts (or otherwise) as regards search marketing. With evidence (which mostly holds up, although I’d question some of it), he rightly describes it as ‘not very efficient and either ill-advised or ill-directed’:

‘Search is the gatekeeper to Government services online, but in failing to take up Search Marketing with any seriousness government is abandoning citizens to the market for their advice at crucial moments. This is even more important when – as a result of a wider failure around linking – government advice does not show up automatically or with any consistency at the top of organic results.’

Absolutely. If anyone ever saw the presentations I regularly gave to Government Communications Network staff, you’ll recognise my point here: government finds itself in a competitive information market. It used to have a monopoly in terms of availability and authority. Both of those disappeared several years ago.

But I will come to Directgov’s defence in one respect. Paul wrote in my comments: ‘Just working with Google to boost eGov PageRanks would do more to send traffic to online services, many times more, than the entire multimillion pound ‘branding’ mess they’re running.’ There’s some merit in his comment, but it misses one important aspect. A key audience for the Directgov branding effort is the Civil Service itself.

The UK population sees one government, not twenty-odd Whitehall departments. But that didn’t exactly stop those Whitehall departments developing their own web presences, and usually several of them. Creating a content-rich Directgov was entirely the right thing to do. But to survive and thrive, it needs the engagement of the public sector – and to do that, it need profile. If a bit of real-world advertising helps in that regard, I don’t consider it a bad thing. There are better ways to spend public money, true. But without this spend, I hate to think how much more would be spent developing new, unconnected web presences.

Heather Brooke in today’s Guardian: ‘While maps and geographical information are vital to local authorities and their websites, the prices and licensing policies of Ordnance Survey, the government’s mapping agency, mean that some councils have decided to bypass OS and use free maps from Google to create mashups of information for their websites.’ She could also have mentioned usability, flexibility, instant availability via a one-field web form… I could go on.

You know that ‘secret’ Directgov blog I mentioned last week? It’s gone. Wasn’t me, guv.

I was looking at the Cabinet Office website’s section on Consultations. I clicked on a link ‘Less is More‘. It took me to a ‘page not found’ error page. You couldn’t make that up.

The new eConsultations website for Parliament is ‘the result of a great deal of effort from the Hansard Society over a number of years’ (according to Jeremy Gould); so it’s intriguing that in the end, they’ve gone (by the look of it) for an off-the-shelf discussion forum package. And so far, it seems to be working pretty well.

It’s running on the Phorum platform, which I don’t know at all but seems perfectly fit-for-purpose. And by taking an off-the-shelf product, they get some nice extra features including search and RSS. The debate on Medical Care for the Armed Forces is getting a lot of traffic, presumably as word gets round the forces and families; not so much for the other discussion around the Local government and the draft Climate Change Bill. Everything is subjected to moderation which ‘should happen within 24 hours’.

It’s further reinforcement of my growing belief that there’s an 80-20 relationship in most web projects: the first 20% of effort will yield 80% of the likely benefit… and that it’s very rarely worth the extra 80% effort to get the final 20% of benefit. There are exceptions, but then again, there always are.

We shouldn’t get worked up about the electronification of the existing formal consultations process. If Tom Steinberg reckons it’s beyond the mySociety crew, that’s a clue. And besides, it’s far from an ideal process anyway. Few old-fashioned consultations get great responses, in either quality or volume. We can do better.