Puffbox

Worthy of note from Gordon Brown’s speech to yesterday’s big conference on public service reform:

And let me emphasise just how much importance I attach, and the Treasury attach, to matching local setting of objectives in new ways that will be proposed by the coming Local Government White Paper with the flow of publicly available data, real time data on what is actually happening on the ground, real time information that enables the professionals who run public services to use their experience to best effect, transparency that empowers citizens to make informed choices about how they use public services and the standards they expect. And I think we are seeing the potential of this new approach and the new technology that makes it possible. We will be examining in America the Compsat model pioneered in New York, the Citistat model in Baltimore, applied not just to policing but across a whole range of local services.

The same potential exists in Britain as we role out neighbourhood policing right across the country, publishing more police performance data. We are interested in how local authorities across the country can use the internet and web portals to allow people to customise the information they receive about the services they use. I have looked at Shoreditch and Tower Hamlets at the digital bridge that allows police to alert residents as events happen, and residents to alert them about abandoned cars, about graffiti, about vandalism; in Lewisham texting to report and then texting back to say if the problem has been addressed.

Those working in government, take note. When he says ‘the importance I attach’… that’s an invitation to bid for some money. Quoting this speech in your proposal wouldn’t do any harm.

How many people actually knew about this? 'Tony Blair took part in a special interview with the Downing Street website today to answer questions from the public. Journalists Michael White and Sarah Sands chose the questions, selected from hundreds sent in to us, and put them to the PM in the State Dining Room of Number 10. The interview was a chance for members of the public to quiz the Mr Blair on any topic, just like MPs do every Wednesday during Prime Minister's Question Time.'

Fair play to Downing Street: they do like to try things like this… but they don't seem to stick at them for long. Anyone remember the White House-style series of weekly 'radio broadcasts'? Thought not.

Yes – it’s absolutely true. The US government has just launched a new design for its ‘front door to usability information from across government’, usability.gov. And there it is, in the right hand margin: Navigation: Left is Best. You can’t make it up.

Initial coverage of today’s report on last July’s London bombings is pretty negative. Inevitably, I suppose… there’s no news in the things that went right, only the things that went wrong. So it’s worth highlighting the compliments paid to two particular organisations:

Transport for London recorded 600,000 visitors compared to the usual number of around 100,000. Transport for London sent out more than 600,000 e-mails on 7 July between 3 pm and 5 pm to people registered on its e-mail alerting system, and more than 50 per cent of these were opened within an hour. The Metropolitan Police Service updated its website 27 times during the day, and received 1.5 million ‘hits’.

We would like to record the remarkable achievement by both Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police Service in maintaining their systems despite the peaks in the numbers of visitors to their websites.

There’s interesting talk of something called ‘CasWeb’ in the Met’s Casualty Bureau:

When it became operational, there were 42,000 attempted calls to the Casualty Bureau in the first hour. Each call lasted between seven and twelve minutes. We understand that, to handle the volume of calls that were received, 2,500 call-takers would be required. It is obviously not possible to put in place a Casualty Bureau of that size within hours of the onset of an incident. There will always be capacity issues. However, we have been given reassurances that the new ‘Casweb’ technology being introduced by the MPS will significantly increase the capacity of any future Casualty Bureau to answer large volumes of calls.

Does this sound like a searchable database of who’s definitely OK, and who isn’t? Great idea if it is. With so many people working in offices, a website (assuming it’s well enough publicised) would be a great way to reduce the strain on call centres and phone networks. I’m not sure what the site would tell you if you searched for someone confirmed as ‘dead’, though.

Press releases like this annoy me. Ordnance Survey have commissioned some consultants to assist someone else to create a strategy, advise government, encourage more effective, extensive and systematic use of Geographic Information, facilitate a coordinated position on potential legislation, and promote a coherent approach, taking in a wide range of stakeholder views. Very little actual ‘doing’, apparently.

Leaving aside whether this justified a press release (clue: no), we are at least three steps away from any tangible results. And how long will it take to make those three steps – months? years? In the meantime, Google Maps gets up and running, and Ordnance Survey gets left behind. I’m currently working on a (rather neat) map ‘mashup’ using some government data. Guess which I’m using: Google Maps, or Ordnance Survey?

A little project I (finally!) managed to put live today… ‘hot topics in education and skills‘, on behalf of the Department for Education and Skills. The ‘hot topics’ series of web-friendly articles had been running for some time, but the page management and presentation left a lot to be desired. As a series of short text items, with freshness a key element in the presentation, they were a perfect candidate for a blogging platform.

So is this a second ‘government blog’, following in David Miliband‘s footsteps? I say ‘no’. Certainly, it uses a blogging engine, in this case Typepad. And it uses blogging tools and techniques, such as permalinks, date-based archives, RSS and categories. But I think people take the word ‘blog’ to mean a personal soapbox… and it certainly isn’t that.

I’m really pleased with the project. It was remarkably quick to put together, and once I got used to Typepad’s quirks, very easy. We’ve done some quite nice little touches, like mapping a dfes.gov.uk domain on top of Typepad’s own, and redirecting all old page addresses using Apache’s mod-alias. But there are still a few rough edges to smooth out, not least in the design.

I’m fascinated to see how it all pans out. I remain convinced that blogging platforms have many other uses beyond what we know as ‘blogs’. Don’t be surprised if you see more DfES content being served in similar ways, in the near future.

I didn't see a tremendous amount of coverage for David Cameron's speech to a Google conference at the start of the week. In fact, virtually none. I'm indebted to Radio 4's Friday night comedy The Now Show for tipping me off.

It's a long speech which centres (more or less) around the notion of a 'desire for capitalism with commitment'. The Radio 4 comics made fun of his reference to Craigslist – which, for those who don't know it, is principally a classified ads site, principally personal ads, most notably 'casual encounters'. He also quotes Innocent Drinks and 'environmentally conscious casual clothing and sportswear' company Howies as examples of companies 'expressing a profound dissatisfaction with rootless, rampaging globalisation and a passionate desire for capitalism with commitment, for work that has meaning and for relationships that are about more than just money and markets.'

There's lots of aspirational, visionary stuff – and almost no attempt to attack Blair's Labour government, which probably explains the lack of media interest. So what's in it for Cameron? I think it's quite simple… anything which connects him to such a powerful and 'cool' brand as Google, with its 'don't be evil' motto, is a positive.

And just as importantly, it's an easy area of distinction between him and Blair – who never seems to miss an opportunity to tell us how terrible he is with computers, as if it's something to be proud of. This could be the start of Cameron positioning himself as the tech-literate younger man.

Update, and confession: I'd never heard of Howies before I read this speech. But I love what I read. 'Whenever a real nice day comes along, it'd be a shame to waste it. So if you phone up and no-one answers, don't worry. We are out there doing what we love. So leave a message and we'll get back to you in a while.' Brilliant. Just a shame the stuff is frighteningly expensive. £25 is a heck of a lot for a t-shirt, albeit organic cotton, particularly when the logo is an anti-capitalist statement.

Worth noting another new BBC blog – this time Open Secrets, by Martin Rosenbaum – 'a BBC journalist who specialises in freedom of information', based in Westminster. It's a nice touch for the government transparency specialist to be transparent about his own work.

As it happens, I'm currently working with one particular Whitehall department on its own Freedom of Information web pages. I'll point to the work when it goes live, hopefully in a matter of days… but suffice to say, RSS does feature.

A quick check-up on e-government’s response times, as of 3.45pm on Friday afternoon:

• Full marks to DTI, the Ministry of Defence and my current employer, DfES for having full biographies and photos of their new secretaries of state on their respective sites.
• Home Office has a story on its front page about John Reid’s appointment, and whilst the ‘organisation‘ page has purged all mention of Charles Clarke, there’s no biography of Dr Reid as yet.
• Transport has (just about) got Douglas Alexander‘s name on their pages, but that’s yer lot.
• DEFRA hasn’t yet removed Margaret Beckett’s name… and the FCO hasn’t yet added her, either. Has she definitely moved?
• As for the Office for the Deputy Prime Minister… well, that one’s going to be tricky. I notice that a newly written description of the Office’s structure has been tactically removed from the homepage since this morning. The list of ministers now includes John Prescott’s name among the ‘former ministers’ – and whilst the page ‘is being updated’, it doesn’t yet feature Ruth Kelly.

Special mention to DEFRA’s new man, David Miliband – who posted a farewell message on his ODPM-hosted ministerial blog at lunchtime. His status as Britain’s only blogging minister is apparently on hold: ‘I’m very much hoping this won’t be the end of my presence on the blogosphere…please keep an eye out.’

Cabinet reshuffles are a great opportunity to see just how on-the-ball government websites really are. How long will it take for the website to reflect any ministerial changes? And is it an indication of the real status of the web in each department? I’ll certainly be looking at sites like the Home Office and FCO to see when they get details of their new secretaries of state up there. With the reshuffle coming a few days earlier than expected, and the departures of Charles Clarke and Jack Straw coming as quite a surprise, you have to assume that the various web teams won’t have been too well prepared. Given it’s a Friday, there’s a risk they may not be able to react until next week… and that isn’t good.