Puffbox

Bristol council’s press office claims a bit of positive PR by announcing it has joined the Open Document Format (ie OpenOffice to you and me) Alliance. But if they really believe, as they claim in their press release:

The move is expected to make it easier to share documents in different formats and avoid the frustrating ‘can’t open yours’ culture, which slows down work.

– they’re in for a shock. OpenOffice is my tool of choice at home, and even though I’m an open-source believer with a clean conscience, we are a million miles away from ODF getting wide acceptance or recognition.

When I write a document on behalf of my current (government) employer, in OpenOffice, I invariably end up circulating it as a Word document – mainly because they’re using an ancient version of Acrobat which can’t read OpenOffice’s PDFs. I have to export my work as .doc, then load it into Microsoft’s free Word viewer to see how it comes out, then through trial and error, go back into OpenOffice to fix anything which didn’t quite work.

But I’d rather endure this whole rigmarole than use pirated software, that’s for sure. (Please take note, Mr Windows Genuine Advantage.) Is ODF helping me work faster? Don’t make me laugh.

Home secretary John Reid takes us another step closer to the US, with news that we’ll shortly have a five-point scale, to tell us all how terrified we should be.

From 1 August, the Home Office and MI5 websites will publish details of the national security alert level:  low, moderate, substantial, severe or critical. The BBC reports that we’ve been at ‘severe’ level, where a terrorist incident is considered ‘highly likely’, since August last year. (I suppose that’s like saying ‘we closed the stable door almost immediately after the horse bolted.’)

Apparently we didn’t get a colour-coded system like the Americans, because that was considered ‘unduly alarmist’. What, more alarmist than what we’re getting? Where we are ‘one away from crisis point’? I don’t know about you, but words like ‘severe’ make me pretty alarmed, much more so than (let’s say) ‘orange’.

Still, I suppose it’ll give us a shiny new e-government website to visit. It’s an ideal candidate for an RSS feed, actually: news-y but not published to a predictable schedule. As long as the Cabinet Office doesn’t order that all gov.uk sites carries details of the alert level. They wouldn’t, though… would they?

Since we in government didn’t get our fingers out to do it, someone else did. Cheers to Sam Smith for giving us thegovernmentsays.com – a website which brings together news content from many (but not all) parts of government, and feeds them out again as email or RSS. It may have been there for ages, but I only just discovered it.

At the start of the year, I found myself in an email exchange with someone from GNN – the government website which, really, should have been doing precisely this in the first place. I spotted a reference to RSS in their left-hand margin, and queried why it seemed to be registration-only. They responded that it was ‘still in test mode’, and its appearance on the site was ‘a technical oversight’.

Six months on, and if RSS is now available, it’s an unpublicised service hidden behind the site’s registration barrier. I’m afraid I stand by what I said to them at the time:

I would urge you to think carefully about how (and where) it is presented. Part of the attraction of RSS is the lack of subscription hassle. GNN is in a unique position here, with a unique opportunity to make things happen across the Whitehall press effort. A flexible approach to RSS would be an excellent contribution. Feeds for each department; even feeds for all items containing a given keyword, whatever their provenance. A completely customisable RSS experience would be truly groundbreaking.

In the meantime, departments – including us at DfES – pursue disjointed RSS efforts; or frankly, in most cases, they don’t. I can’t think of any government website which doesn’t have some kind of CMS running its press releases. Yet I can’t think of more than a couple who have had the foresight to apply an RSS front-end on top. We’re leading the way at DfES – and if anybody wants to talk to me about it, I’m more than happy to do so.

I’m really not sure what Ofcom’s research into older people and the internet tells us.

Non-users were largely consistent in the reasons they gave for not using the Internet: many were afraid of the unknown, of their ability, of breaking the PC, or of appearing foolish. The majority of non-users are the ‘disengaged’, and they showed an unexpected interest in going online. The minority, the ‘rejecters’, from busy grandmothers to contented hobbyists, saw no benefit in using the internet.

We saw similar sentiments in studies in the late 90s, across the entire population. But the proportions of non-users dropped as technology became cheaper and simpler, and as incentives grew.

I’m just not sure I buy the apparent conclusion that ‘courses designed for and run by older people, together with mentoring schemes would encourage them to get online.’ Again, we’ve been here before. The government’s UK Online Centres (you remember?) were supposed to teach the general population to love the internet. What sold it to us all in the end? Can I suggest budget air fares, pirated music and free access to pornography?

‘Supply2.gov.uk is a dynamic new government-backed service designed specifically to give companies easy access to lower-value contract opportunities (typically worth under £100,000) offered by the public sector.’ But don’t be fooled by the prevalence of the word ‘free’ – if you want to see opportunities out of your immediate locality, you’re going to have to pay for them. Not a huge amount exactly, but still, it’s another cashflow hit.

A couple of words of advice, guys. There shouldn’t be an apostrophe in explanation of area’s. (Ouch, it even hurt me to type that out.) And can I suggest you don’t refer to the Republic of Ireland as one of the ‘home countries‘, or lump it into a ‘national’ category with the United Kingdom. Last time I checked my passport, Ireland was a separate nation from the UK. It’s even recognised as such by the United Nations. Granted, you can walk from one to the other without getting wet – but then again, these days, you can walk to France too.

Sorry to labour the point, but people have a nasty habit of killing each other over precisely this issue.

Jadu isn’t a name I have come across before… but when anyone promises a ‘revolution‘ in content management, I’m prepared to listen. The company’s claim is certainly ambitious: ‘Websites that previously took weeks to develop can now be compiled in a matter of hours.’ And even more appealing – their Galaxies product ‘puts control back in the hands of the user, enabling non-technical webmasters to create a CMS themselves.’ Blimey.

The Leicester-based firm is smart enough to see the business opportunity in local government, and tailors its product accordingly. The sales pitch talks in terms of ODPM’s ‘required outcomes’, and the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (ahem) is fully supported. The E-Government Register hosted by Brent Council lists a dozen councils who use the company’s products. Understandable, when you look at a comparison like this.

The company website deliberately avoids any technical language: so much so, in fact, that it’s hard to pin down exactly what the product is. The heart of their CMS product seems to be the ability to generate customised CSS, building on top of a number of predefined templates. The site itself has filenames ending in .php, so you have to assume that’s a key part of it. A page on Technology talks about Apache, Debian Linux and MySQL. But there’s no denying, it’s an impressive sales pitch, and it’s hard to see what’s missing from their features list.

Where did Chris Huhne get the figure of £40,000 for the annual cost of David Miliband’s blog? I thought I’d email to ask him. And he replied. So full marks there. 🙂

It all comes from a parliamentary question, answered by DEFRA’s Barry Gardiner on 5 June:

The Secretary of State writes his own blog. Two staff in Defra’s Communications Directorate – at Grade 7 and Higher Executive Officer grades – have integrated the blog into Defra’s website, and continue to oversee operation. For the two weeks following the recent ministerial changes, approximately 30 to 40 per cent. of their time was spent on work in some way connected to the blog. This is expected to decrease. The blog promotes a new and more direct form of communication between the public and the Secretary of State.

Apparently his researcher ‘merely took the salaries of the grades specified to get the result.’ I can’t lay my hands on the DEFRA pay scales, but looking at other departments’ data (eg DfES), a Grade 7 salary is probably £40k to £45k per year, and an HEO salary around £25k.

So how do you turn those salary numbers into an annual total of £40,000? The best I can suggest is that they’re taking the total salary for those two people (let’s say £67,000), multiplying by the top end of the time estimate (ie 40%), and adding 50% to cover ‘overheads’. (That comes to just over £40,000. Try it.)

But let’s look at those figures another way. Two people spending ’30 to 40 per cent’ of a ten day period is a total of eight person-days. Even adding 50% for overheads, I make that a setup cost of just over £2,000 – after which it probably becomes normal website maintenance, and almost impossible to quantify separately.

As ever, your calculation is entirely dependent on your guesswork, your assumptions, your extrapolations… and given that this is Westminster, your party position. Always remember this is politics, not mathematics.

Many, many thanks to Chris for replying.

Update: I’ve had a subsequent email from the LibDems’ Daniel Wilson, confirming: ‘PCS civil service wage statistics show that the two civil servants who work on Miliband’s blog cost up to £61,457 p.a. (for the senior member) and £40,500 p.a. (for the more junior member). As they spend up to 40% of their time on the blog, this equates to £40,782.80 p.a. in staffing costs.’ So even if those PCS figures are valid – and they aren’t too far away from my ‘add 50% for overheads’ numbers, the calculation is based on maximum figures across the board. Politics not mathematics, as I said…

Update, 25 July: grateful to Guido Fawkes for referring the traffic to my humble blog… but I didn’t ever claim it ‘costs the taxpayer a pound a word’. If anything, I think I did a reasonable job of undermining Chris Huhne’s initial claim. And Miliband told the (Newcastle) Journal on 17 June: ‘We are trying to bed down the ongoing administration costs as we speak but we know that they are going to be less than 10% of an existing junior civil servant’s time.’ Even applying the ‘add 50% for overheads’ rule, you’re talking £3,750 pa.

‘Ever wondered what happens when Europe’s political leaders get together? Well Eddie Izzard did, so he set off for Brussels to find out. The popular comedian, who has a passion for European issues, tagged along with the PM’s party for a behind-the-scenes look at what happens at a Council meeting.’

Eddie Izzard continues his bid to become ‘Britain’s favourite europhile’, with this remarkable contribution to the Downing Street website. The inclusion of amateur photos of the trip – and I mean that in a positive sense – is a really nice touch. Well done for mimicking Flickr’s ‘photo set’ presentation, too.

The BBC’s Nick Robinson covers the ‘shock news’ on his own blog. But he’s wrong to call it ‘No10’s first podcast’. In fact, it’s arguable that Downing Street actually invented the podcast?!

Starting in February 2000, Downing Street went through a phase of producing regular MP3 ‘addresses to the nation’ by Tony Blair – trying, I suppose, to mimic the US President’s weekly radio broadcasts. It started out as a weekly thing, then inevitably became a bit more sporadic over the summer break, and never really recaptured its rhythm. Was it a podcast? Depends on your definition. To a purist, it isn’t a podcast unless it comes in an RSS feed. But these days, the term is seemingly applied to any posting of audio content. In which case, Blair was there right at the beginning.

Oh… and just to make this even madder… Tony Blair will be co-hosting Radio Five Live’s football phone-in tonight. I thought I’d heard someone on the radio say so this morning, but then my brain said it couldn’t possibly have been what they said, and made me get on with my breakfast. Best listener-submitted question so far: ‘Are you going to be supporting England at this world cup, or will you just support the USA regardless, like you normally do?’

I’m really surprised at the sudden backlash against David Miliband, secretary of state for the environment, and Britain’s first blogging minister. A piece in Friday’s Independent, based on ‘research by the Liberal Democrats’ urbane front bencher, Chris Huhne‘ estimated the cost of the initiative at ‘somewhere approaching £40,000 a year.’

First off, let’s remember that Chris Huhne isn’t an entirely neutral observer here. The LibDems see the environment as ‘their’ territory, so it’s no surprise to see them having a pop at anything DEFRA does. And of course, in his role as shadow Environment spokesman, it’s Huhne’s specific task to hassle David Miliband.

And whilst I’m sure there is some convoluted calculation which brings the total cost to £40,000, I’m not buying it. By the time you factor in every overhead, as I imagine Chris Huhne has done, you could probably inflate the cost of any task to five figures (or worse!).

The other criticisms, rounded up by Antony Mayfield, seem a bit petty. It may or may not be true that every word is written and typed by Miliband himself. It may or may not be ‘widely ridiculed for its dull content’ (as claimed in Monday’s Independent). But folks, this is government. This is how it works. Virtually nothing happens without going through several layers of sign-off (sadly). And a lot of day-to-day government business is not sexy. Just how exciting did you expect the work diary of Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to be?

As reported here a couple of weeks back, I’ve been involved in setting up a blog-esque site for the Department of Education and Skills. It uses a blogging engine, specifically Typepad. It uses blogging methods, like permalinks, RSS feeds, categories and chronological presentation. We could choose to allow comments and trackbacks – but we chose not to, because we didn’t feel we could commit the necessary resources to do a good job. And so far, the results are pleasing: we’re getting respectable traffic and good search engine placement.

These are baby steps. The only way we will build the confidence within government to do these things ‘properly’, is to show concrete examples which dispel the scare stories.

Production company Ten Alps has announced plans for a new 'internet TV' channel, Public TV, aimed at the public sector. A holding page at http://www.public.tv/ says it 'will bring together information, training, and professional development videos from across the sector'. There are bound to be parallels with Teachers TV, in which Ten Alps has a sizeable stake – although there's no immediate hint at a broadcast channel.

It's an interesting idea, but I wonder if there's enough passion in the public sector to make it work. It can be a pretty passionless, 'leave on the stroke of 5pm' kind of place.