Puffbox

Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

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    Liveblogging the election results

    Interesting to note some of the attempts to ‘live blog’ the election results last week – with Guido Fawkes, Slugger O’Toole and ConservativeHome all using CoverItLive‘s fantastic liveblogging ‘app’. Needless to say, there’s significant variation in the tone of each site’s usage.

    Of course, it’s ironic to note both having a pop at Gordon Brown’s leadership when, dare I mention it, it was a Downing Street website – produced by yours truly – which first brought this technology to the attention of the UK political scene.

    Now Iain Dale’s gone a bit CoverItLive-crazy, using it as an ad-hoc chatroom facility. It’s not really what it was intended for, and it’s probably quite hard work for Iain and colleague Shane Greer to moderate, but it does the job I suppose. They’re making good use of the popup polling mechanism, it must be said.

    Correction: It took a heck of a lot of digging to find it, but I discover that ConservativeHome did use the CoverItLive tool back in January. My apologies; a straightforward Google search didn’t reveal it. I’m grateful to Guido for the advice to the contrary.

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    The perfect ballot battle

    In all the analysis of Ken’s downfall and Boris’s triumph, one element I hope doesn’t get ignored is the turnout. The RSA’s Matthew Taylor blogged on Friday suggesting it was the most interesting result of all, and I’m inclined to agree – although possibly for the opposite reason.

    The London mayoral contest should have been the perfect electoral tussle. With all due respect to Paddick et al, it was always a two-horse race. Two instantly recognisable figures, well known by both broadsheet and tabloid readerships. A posh bloke versus a champion of the working class, neither of them ‘party men’. Plenty of real local issues to focus on. Plenty of media exposure too. A fairer electoral system, allowing you a ‘free vote’ for your first preference (with all the possibilities that offers) before casting your ‘proper’ second vote. And most importantly, an end result that was genuinely in the balance.

    Yet it only stirred 45% of Londoners to bother to vote. Granted, this was up from previous years: 34% in 2000, and 37% in 2004. But it falls well, well short of the 70% we used to expect at general elections. And it means that, even taking both first and second preference votes into account, the winner only won the active support of 21.5% of the total electorate.

    Of course we should be happy to see turnout rising. But it’s hard to imagine an election that could have been easier to ‘sell’ to the voters; and we only managed 45%. It’s not great, is it.

    PS: Interesting to see the Tories heavily promoting their Twitter account on the conservatives.com homepage. We knew it was official, but I guess this makes it a formal comms channel for them… although I note the promo goes for the ‘subscribe via SMS’ approach, watering down the commitment to Twitter a bit.

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    No10 Twittering is front-page news

    A bit of a surprise this morning to discover that the venerable Today Programme is on Twitter… with its first tentative tweets as far back as September last year, and a (more or less) daily service since December. The username ‘todaytrial’ doesn’t imply that it’s being taken too seriously… although it’s built into their BBC website pages. I suspect someone may now be regretting that choice of username. And it’s a rather incestuous ‘Following’ list, consisting solely of other BBC services.

    Downing Street‘s Twitter efforts are front page news in the Guardian this morning – see the actual text here – which should help them pass the 1500 friends mark imminently. Meanwhile, it looks like the Tories are taking Twitter more seriously, with updates being written in Twhirl – and, intriguingly, nothing from Twitterfeed in a few days. Still only a modest 60-odd friends, though. That Labour account is still nothing more than Twitterfeeding, with no indication if it’s official or not, and an even more modest 21 followers.

    PS: I see a few other recent political additions to the Twittersphere include Boris Johnson – who appears to be texting them in; and Comment Is Free, for whom Twitter might be the key to making the whole CiF experience more practical. @brianpaddick has been at it since January; if it’s official, @kenlivingstone is leaving it a bit late.

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    Playing party politics with hyperlinks

    From the ‘you can’t win’ department… Guido today picks up on a piece by Shane Greer last week, claiming that ‘Brown uses Downing Street (web)site to promote Labour’. And what incendiary partisan material are we talking about, precisely? An external hyperlink.

    The No10 site has a page of Gordon Brown’s speeches. Or strictly, as it states in the page’s first line, non-political speeches. If you heard that Gordon Brown had made a speech, it’s the logical first place to look. But what if the speech had been made in a party-political capacity? It would be wrong for No10 to carry that speech on their website. And nobody’s suggesting otherwise.

    So what do you do – present people with a dead end, or try and be helpful? It’s not as if they don’t (or rather, didn’t) make clear that you’re crossing the line from government to politics. As Shane’s screengrab shows, the link stated: ‘political speeches at the Labour Party website’. And in keeping with the site’s approach to external links, it opened in a new window. Hey, there’s even a page explaining why they have to be selective about the material they carry, with links to both the Ministerial and Civil Service Codes.

    Shane asks: ‘What exactly is the justification for using taxpayer (sic) money to drive traffic to the Labour Party website?’ Well, there are two.

    1. Good customer service. If you walk into a shop to buy something, and they’re out of stock, you expect the salesperson to suggest somewhere else you might try. It costs them a sale, but they do it because of plain common decency.
    2. More efficient use of taxpayers’ money. If you don’t tell people where else to look, they will contact you to ask. They will call the press office, or send emails. It’s much more time-consuming, and hence much more expensive, for a civil servant to have to respond personally to those calls and emails.

    The link has now gone. Party politics 1, common sense 0.

    But let’s not pretend this is a Labour thing. I worked in government comms as far back as 1995. People would call up, asking for speeches by Conservative ministers – notably during the party conferences, but not exclusively. We either produced a transcript scrubbed clean of party-political material; or we gave them the number for Conservative Central Office. It was the right thing to do. Were we using taxpayers’ money to help promote the Tory Party? By Shane’s argument, yes. Sorry.

    Disclosure: Although I’m doing some work for/with the No10 web guys, I don’t have any inside knowledge of this matter. I haven’t spoken to them about it, and was not involved in this decision in any respect.

    Disclaimer: Although I’m linking to their websites in the text above, I do not endorse the views expressed by Shane Greer or Guido Fawkes. My company, Puffbox Ltd, is not using its proceeds or resources to promote either Mr Greer or Mr Staines. Just so we’re clear.

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    New Statesman nominations now open

    Nominations have opened for the 2008 New Statesman new media awards. Although they’ve been running for a decade now, I’m not sure they’re as prestigious as they might be, and Bill Thompson argues that it’s a shame they still exist… but I bet the winners, which last year included MySociety, David Cameron and MySociety, wouldn’t agree.

    Five categories up for grabs this year: ‘Democracy in action’, ‘Inform and educate’, ‘Community activism’, ‘Campaign for change’ and ‘Innovation’. Nominations close on 1 June, giving a couple of obvious award candidates some time to prove themselves; the trophies get handed out in July.

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    Anyone see Gordon Brown's live webcast?

    Did anyone log on to the live Labour Party webcast last night? Or indeed, did anyone know about it? The party claims 3000 questions were sent in by text (or via the web, I believe?), to be put to the PM by comedienne Arabella Weir during the 30-minute Q&A session. The Labourhome website appears only to have posted word at 2pm, which doesn’t exactly ooze engagement with the grassroots.

    In principle, it sounds like a clever use of a Party Political Broadcast, as an immediate call-to-action. But I didn’t see it live… and disappointingly, there’s no recorded footage on the Labour site, or on YouTube. All I’ve found so far is one blog posting, which talks of a ‘ghastly problems with mics’. So if any of you were among the ‘thousands’ who apparently logged on for the event, please, tell us more.

    Update: it’s now been posted on YouTube. Thirty-three minutes long, I notice. Whatever happened to the 10-minute limit??

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    PoliticsHome: overwhelming and soulless

    ‘Staying on top of modern politics has become a full time job,’ declares the long-awaited PoliticsHome on its About page. ‘Things move too fast: it is too much for any single person to track.’ Unfortunately, the same can be said about the site itself: load up the homepage, and a torrent of headlines hits you head-on.  It’s overwhelming, and it leaves me dazed. I complained that the new Foreign Office site didn’t guide the eye: I take it all back.

    There’s no doubt that, if a political story is out there, PoliticsHome has it in here, somewhere. Most of it is well-intentioned: the whole ‘live reporting’ aspect, a few ‘ticker’ areas, a nice grouping of the various sources’ coverage of the day’s big stories, a diary, a bit of story categorisation. A couple of ideas look familiar – the ‘newspaper front pages’ is a direct lift from my work at Sky News, for example.

    But it looks like an ugly big database, more like a stock market terminal than a ‘super blog’, or an online magazine / newspaper. It’s hard to imagine a less engaging design; maybe they don’t consider that a priority. But having brought some famous faces on board, such as Andrew Rawnsley and former BBC man Nick Assinder, I’m surprised not to see them making more of the faces and their original material.

    The idea of scrolling 100 items horizontally, in the window at the top of each page, is ludicrous; it’s utterly unusable. I’ve got a few issues with the technicals too: some page elements seem to refresh randomly, then there’s a brutal full-page refresh if you leave it five minutes. Quite simply, there are better ways these days.

    I fear PoliticsHome has miscalculated. Politics is increasingly about personality, warmth and engagement. That’s why the blogs’ visitor numbers are growing (regardless of the accuracy of the specific figures). But PoliticsHome feels cold, functional and soulless. I don’t expect to use it.

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    Maybe if I was a Londoner

    I’m actually a big fan of ‘fill in this questionnaire and we’ll tell you who to vote for’ websites. Granted, it’s all a bit unscientific: it’s close to impossible to boil the key policy issues down to a series of multiple choice answers (never mind agree/disagree), then assess how each candidate’s policy correlates to the available options. But at the very, very least it makes you think. It makes you question what you thought were your natural leanings. And it may even change your mind. In these days of political disengagement, and plunging voter turnout, that could be pivotal.

    Unlock Democracy has just unveiled such a site for the London Mayoral elections. Although I spend a lot of my time in London, I no longer live there, so I don’t have a vote. (But that’s for another time.) This allows me to approach the exercise with a degree of detachment. It genuinely is just a bit of fun.

    Twenty-five agree/disagree questions later, the site gives me a response. Two candidates came joint-top of the list: one I probably expected, the other I probably didn’t. And curiously, I’m pretty sure the two don’t consider themselves to be in competition for my (non-existent) vote. Something for me to think about… and arguably, something for the candidates to consider too.

    No, I’m not going to say which two candidates: I try to keep my own party politics (such as they are) out of things here. But feel free to offer your own guesses. 🙂

    And by the way… if anyone (eg Tom Steinberg) has a URL for the similar Dutch ‘Stem-viser’ website that Tom Steinberg always quotes as an example, do pass it on. An accurate spelling would be a start.

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    Innovation, innovation, innovation

    Over at the Telegraph, Mick Fealty rightly reflects on the ‘fascinating confluence of ideas cascading into the body politic at the moment’, with both right and left suddenly making an issue of innovation, open source, and all that good stuff. The latest contribution was David Cameron’s speech at NESTA this morning:

    Indeed, the odd thing about the Government’s innovation policy is how un-innovative it is. More spending, more state control, more reliance on the levers of bureaucratic intervention. The chapter on public sector innovation in Government’s “science innovation” document, has this as its centrepiece: the proposal to create a “Whitehall Hub for Innovation”. Something about that doesn’t ring true. Whitehall and innovation don’t go together, for the simple reason that innovation is the product of many heads not a few, and free thinking not state control.

    We accept that innovation requires a culture of risk-taking, of trial and error, of flexibility in thinking and often of collaborative effort. So I have also asked Adam Afriyie to identify ways a Conservative government could tackle the corrosive sense of risk-aversion which holds back innovation within our society.

    To be fair, it’s been an uplifting week in terms of online innovation, across the political divide(s). The sudden rush into Twitter – by No10, and (apparently) by both major parties – isn’t a big deal in terms of audience numbers, but it’s certainly symbolic: a recognition that there’s clearly something interesting going on, and a readiness to just get stuck in.

    I’m hoping that the weekend’s Progressive Governance summit microsite, which I’m constructing on No10’s behalf, can take that momentum forward. We’re throwing as many 2.0 tricks into the mix as we can: some will undoubtedly work better than others. (And yes, as Guido helpfully notes, we’re cutting it fine. We know.)

    But the value of the social connections fostered by blogs and Twitter is already revealing itself. Last night I talked about my search for a live blogging / chat solution. Paul Bradshaw suggested CoverItLive, a service I hadn’t seen before. I played around with it, and it looked great. But I wanted to see what others thought – so I threw out a plea for assistance on Twitter. Within a couple of minutes, I had two friends in the ‘chatroom’ with me, giving the product a proper test. It passed – and it’s looking like we’re going to use it on Saturday morning to ‘live blog’ the summit’s proceedings. This stuff works.

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    Tories hit Twitter; where's Labour?

    It really is Twitter week in Westminster. Barely ten days after the first MP began tweeting, and only a week after Number 10, the @Conservatives have launched an official channel – although so far, it’s precisely the one-way Twitterfeed-powered channel we all expected @DowningStreet to be (but wasn’t).

    Likely to be more interesting is @conhome, the Twitter feed of the influential ConservativeHome website. It’s being written as a joint effort by the look of it, with identified authors: not a normal way to run a Twitter channel, but more likely to generate two-way tweeting, I guess.

    Meanwhile there’s no stopping LibDem Lynne Featherstone, who started all this: she’s even been tweeting from the benches of the House of Commons chamber. And of course, her LibDem mates first tweeted back in May 2007, with an experimental election night service. The account is still active, with occasional alerts.

    All of which brings us back to the age-old question of the Labour Party‘s general underperformance in new media. @Labour does exist, but it’s the Irish Labour Party. I’ve guessed at a bunch of possible Twitter IDs which Labour HQ might use; and all are still coming up as unregistered. Hey, even a basic Twitterfeed-powered channel would be a sensible starting point, and a defensive claim of the best ID.

    BREAKING NEWS: Looks like there’s movement on the Twitter front. @uklabour is now pumping out Twitterfeed-powered updates from various sources. Thanks to Paul in the comments (below).

    Instead, Labour seems to have been putting its efforts into a special homepage for its local election efforts. It has a campaign blog whose RSS feed doesn’t know what character set it’s sending, and thinks an appropriate story description is the first four words. There’s a box to make an online donation, which asks for your name and a donation amount, then seems to do nothing sensible with them. It’s terrible.