Puffbox

Earlier in the week, I mentioned the Commons debate about MPs’ communications with their constituents – and mused on greater use of the internet for precisely that effect. So full marks to Tory MP Douglas Carswell, the member for Harwich (and Clacton).

Carswell is behind a new site, www.clactontv.com, which promises ‘to cover stories that interest you – using video clips made by you’. If, that is, you’re among the 102,028 people living in ‘Clacton, Harwich, Frinton, Walton, Jaywick, Holland-on-Sea, Dovercourt, Thorpe, Kirby and District.’

At first glance, you probably wouldn’t spot that the local MP was behind it; but glance at the footer, and you’ll see: ‘Douglas Carswell MP is responsible for this site, which is funded from the Incidental Expenses Provision of the House of Commons.’ The key to this is that it doesn’t mention his political allegiance, so it can be called ‘parliamentary’ in nature rather than ‘party political’… and therefore, it can be funded from his Commons allowance.

Early days, of course, with a few bits of placeholder text here and there (tut tut). But still some very encouraging signs. You’re invited to contribute your own video clips by email or DVD; there’s an RSS feed of all new clips, complete with iTunes tagging. There’s also a related forum site, talkclacton.com.

The site is produced by Politicos Design, using what looks like in-house JSP-based code. Like everything these days, the videos are being streamed using Flash – at a better-than-average resolution of 480×336. They’re using Politicos’ own servers, hosted by Positive Internet, rather than Youtube (etc). Personally, I’d have been inclined to use the free service, especially in the early days, and not just for reasons of cost: with a service like Youtube, there are well-established methods of including hosted videos in other pages. (You’ve probably seen me do it myself here a few times.) If you’re serious about harnessing the power of the community, why not let the community do some of the work?

Carswell’s main personal site is located at www.douglascarswell.com – and it, too, is funded from the IEP. Again, references to his Conservative Party allegiance are thin on the ground… but the front page offers ‘national news’, driven (I think) by the RSS feed of news stories from conservatives.com. One can’t help feeling that’s pushing the definition of IEP expenditure a bit. It’s clearly been a conscious decision not to push the Conservative branding… yet half the front-page content is pure Tory propaganda.

Carswell was one of the 23 Tories (along with leading blogger Iain Dale) behind ‘Direct Democracy: An Agenda for a New Model Party‘, published in June 2005 with a commitment to ‘making localism the core of the Conservative Party’s platform’.

Just noticed another ‘non-blog’ in government circles… since May this year, the Health and Safety Executive has been running a news website, www.hsenews.com, based on WordPress v2.0.2. A little disappointingly, though, its sole purpose seems to be linking back to the main HSE website, with each ‘blog posting’ barely a paragraph. (Does that constitute a ‘link farm‘?) Getting on for 100 categories, archiving by date, but as you’d probably expect, no comment function.

It’s not dissimilar to the Typepad-based Find Out More non-blog I set up for the Department for Education and Skills about the same time (or slightly earlier 🙂 ). And with a bit of luck, I should have news of another major government department doing likewise, within a week or two. I’ve done (virtually) all the tech work… it’s just a question of them being ready to roll.

I haven’t dropped by the Parliament website in a few weeks… and I’ve only just noticed the dramatic makeover, which apparently went live in late September. Very well put together, although it doesn’t seem to be the radical reworking I was expecting. (Maybe that’s next year.) Good to see so many live audio and video feeds… and I’m very impressed to see the Hansard transcripts of this lunchtime’s PMQs published in just over three hours. (Follow each day’s nearly-live transcripts here.)

If I were in a critical mood, I’d be obliged to point out the total lack of ‘web 2.0’ stuff… no RSS that I can find, no downloadable podcasts, and certainly no encouragement to participate in anything. For all that stuff, I guess you’ll have to resort to people like Mysociety.

Recommended reading for your teabreak this morning is the pseudo-transcript of yesterday morning’s Downing Street lobby briefing. Tom Kelly tries his best to dodge questions about whether No10 staff had been interviewed in the ‘Cash for Peerages’ investigation. I guess a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would be far too much to ask.

One senses that it maybe got a bit tetchy. Now that is something I’d definitely like to see on a Youtube video. Don’t any of the hacks have cameraphones? 😉

I didn’t see an awful lot of coverage of the report issued by the Hansard Society last week, on consultation and campaigning in the age of participatory media. It’s a free PDF download of 30-odd pages, which ‘explains key technological, political and social trends, highlights current innovative practice in the use of ICTs and discusses both risks and opportunities for the third sector.’

You might expect to get a list of cooool things like podcasts and wikis, with a lot of talk about better stakeholder engagement and disintermediation. And indeed you do:

Of the technologies now available, it is perhaps blogs that offer the best potential. Where websites provide an information source, blogs now also provide commenting features that enable visitors to compose their own statements of support for a campaign, rather than passively signing up to a prescripted statement. Many bloggers have their own sites: bloggers linking to or supporting the campaign websites of bigger, less-trusted institutions might lend a credibility and authenticity that is difficult to get in other ways. In addition, a web of linkages helps build the campaign’s network traffic and exposure.

But to their great credit, the authors strike a welcome note of realism:

Where voluntary and community organisations seek to use such tools, there clearly needs to be a readiness to accept the cultural changes they bring. The strategic application of such tools necessitates that they are integrated into ways and means of working, rather than simply bolted onto organisations as a way of communicating with younger or more media-savvy supporters. The emphasis on participation and dialogue will, in turn, have implications for transparency and accountability.

It would be easy to conclude that the seemingly revolutionary characteristics of participatory media will reconnect politicians with the public, or that they will increasingly engage an often cynical, disenchanted electorate. In themselves they will not; moreover, if the new technologies simply repeat the old mistakes of consultation and dialogue with decision-makers, they will harden and reinforce disaffection.

Well worth a read, even if you think you’ve heard all this stuff before.

I can’t really go without commenting on the ‘Better Backs‘ campaign being run at the moment by the Health and Safety Executive. An interactive rollover Flash advert caught my attention… one of the first I’ve seen from the public sector. Click on it, and you find yourself on the site for BAACKPAIN, an 80s heavy metal band on its reunion tour (or something). Click a bit further, and bloody ‘ell, if you don’t end up on Myspace.

Hey, it’s certainly an attention grabber… and I bet the creative team had a right laugh doing it. I’m imagining a whiteboard with the word ‘back’, then ‘spine’, and then ‘Spinal Tap’. But speaking as someone who can recite more or less the entire script from memory, I don’t see the references going any further. The Darkness, maybe. Lita Ford, even. (Never knew she was a Brit, incidentally.) No sign of Nigel, David or Derek.

This is not your run-of-the-mill government campaign website. And full credit to them for that, at the very least.

Knowledge management expert Steve Dale reports that ‘the debate on the (ir)relevance of IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) has burst out into the open again.’ He muses:

The schema is uneccessarily detailed/over-complicated, and these days most search engines do not rely on subject metadata alone (or even at all) to classify or organise results. Who will be brave enough to admit that the huge intellectual investment put into developing and implementing IPSV has been largely a waste of time?!

Er, I will.

Steve is absolutely right: it’s far too big to be practically useful, with over 3000 primary terms (that’s before you get into synonyms)… and it’s getting bigger, with an extra 350 primary terms added as part of the April 2006 update. And that’s before several major government departments get round to fleshing out the branches which should notionally be their domain. Which, of course, means the production of further revisions… which, inevitably, means everyone has to go back and review the subject tagging they did against the previous versions. And so it goes on.

I just don’t believe big taxonomies can ever work. I think there’s a reason Google (free text) deposed Yahoo (big classification structure) as the web’s #1 search engine. And if you’re writing decent web content anyway, you’ll have all the important keywords in your important fields – like the page title, the H1 heading, and so on. Just your standard Search Engine Optimisation tactics, which you should be doing anyway. Amount of additional effort required: zero.

But I do think a smaller-scale subject tree can be useful. I’ve recently led an exercise to produce a mini-taxonomy. We set very tight limits: a maximum 100 terms, ideally two levels, but three at a push. And I’m very happy with the structure we produced. It prints nicely on a single sheet of A4; people could keep it by their PCs, and refer to it as necessary. (Mind you, with only 100 terms, I’d expect people to know it by heart fairly quickly.) I’d much rather have a guarantee of a ‘near enough’ match, than a situation where exact matches are dependent on people being bothered to tag exactly.

But I’m quite relaxed about it, really. Yes, it’s mandatory… but, theoretically, so was IPSV’s predecessor, GCL. I don’t remember too many people actually implementing it properly either. And I certainly don’t remember the Taxonomy Police rounding people up.

PS: Note to Steve… nice blog, nice photo, but you need to make it easier for us to tell who you are. It took quite a lot of research to find your name?!

Government’s poor reputation as regards IT isn’t entirely undeserved. But all too often, it’s no worse than the non-IT processes it’s trying to replace. For example – can it really be true, as reported this morning, that ‘the NHS is cancelling more than 620 operations every day because of administrative errors… such as notes being lost, miscommunication between hospital departments, and booking errors’? The IT solution might not be perfect, but the status quo is indefensible.

Interestingly, the Department of Health doesn’t try to deny these figures – it only advises that they are treated ‘with caution’, as it’s an extrapolation. Which is fair enough. But it’s a bit much to try and score some points, on the basis that ‘we don’t collect data on all cancelled operations to minimise the burden on the NHS.’

This is quite an interesting case of some Freedom Of Information research yielding information we didn’t know before… and, arguably, should have. Tory MP Grant Shapps told BBC Radio Five Live this morning that he was looking into another matter, when this better story emerged. It’s just a pity there’s nowhere (so far) – either on shapps.com or conservatives.com – where we can see the full background. Otherwise, I hate to say it, we do have to pinch some salt here, as DH recommends.

If you’re having trouble locating the new quality ratings for your local NHS, and it’s much harder than it should be given its place at the top of the news agenda – you’ll find them at a special website, annualhealthcheckratings.healthcarecommission.org.uk. Gotta love that address, guys.

There’s a link to ‘search our findings‘. First mistake, and it’s a big one: wrong words. I’m not interested in your findings, I’m interested in my local area, my hospital, myself. For one thing, it tells me that your process is more important than my access. But more importantly, we know people scan rather than read pages… and having the right ‘scan word’ is essential. (It’ll also help your search engine optimisation.) Overall score:

Lots of search options – name, A-Zlisting, type of NHS trust, code number, distance from a given postcode. (Lose a point for using non-standard English regions: there’s no such thing as South Central.) Nice hover effects in the search results (with clear evidence that they’ve coded for Firefox first, rather than IE6 – try the hover effect). Overall score:

Then when I get to the page for my local area… it all looks so generic. I can see the scores for ‘quality of services’ and ‘use of resources’ (although I probably saw those already in the search results), but everything else looks like it’s produced by a template. Too much use of ‘this organisation’, and not its name. I don’t feel like I’m looking at a page that’s truly about my area. Overall score: (sorry)

The pages of more detailed scores don’t feel quite so generic; but what is going on with the merged graphs? The designer has tried to find a creative way to force two graphs into the same physical space; having stared at it for a while, I think I understand it, but I don’t know if many people would have my patience. But hey, the ratings are there in big letters, so you know how they did. Overall score:

So it’s a mixed picture to be honest. It’s clear that they’ve made an effort… and good on them for that. But as with so many projects, I can see aspects where the editorial (or ‘user experience’) person should have been a bit more proactive. Even the smallest changes could make big differences to the site’s usability. Don’t get me wrong, it’s … but it could have been .

Oh… and one can’t help noticing that Guido Fawkes is also (imminently) getting in on the video content game.

So send in digital videos from video-cameras, webcams or even phone-cameras. As long as it is political and isn’t boring, Guy News TV is here… Email videos (in any format) to [email protected]. Keep ’em short and snappy.

I’d love to think this is a new way to expand political coverage – but I suspect it’ll be more like Dennis Pennis. Stupid walkabout stunts, pain-in-the-arse questions at press conferences, comedy demonstrations at meetings, etc. All very amusing, I’m sure.

With this, 18 Doughty Street (which must surely be better than its agonisingly cheesy trailer, doom-laden voiceover and all), and now Webcameron, you won’t be short of stuff to look at. Whether it’s worth your time is entirely another matter.