politics – Page 4

22 Mar 2010

e-government, politics

conservatives, datasharing, gordonbrown, labourparty

Brown's big picture of the digital future

Gordon Brown’s speech, describing a vision of Britain’s digital future, is stirring stuff, with its pledges to make Britain a world leader in terms of digital jobs, public service delivery and ‘the new politics’.

The announcements and commitments came thick and fast – from the £30m to create an Institute of Web Science, to be headed by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, to confirmation of the release of ‘a substantial package of information held by Ordnance Survey … without restrictions on reuse’, to a ‘Domesday Book for the 21st century’ listing all non-personal datasets held by government and arms-length bodies, to an iPhone app for Number10, to an API on Directgov content ‘by the end of May’.

And then there’s MyGov – ‘a radical new model making interaction with government as easy as internet banking or online shopping.’ On the face of it, this seems – finally – like recognition that citizens’ expectations have jumped ahead of government’s delivery in the last decade. There wasn’t much detail in the speech – but it sounds to me like the first hint at Vendor Relationship Management, where the citizen shares his/her data up to suppliers. That’s certainly where the Times seemed to be pointing on Saturday, when it described the creation of a ‘paperless state’:

The aim is that within a year, everybody in the country should have a personalised website through which they would be able to find out about local services and do business with the Government. A unique identifier will allow citizens to apply for a place for their child at school, book a doctor’s appointment, claim benefits, get a new passport, pay council tax or register a car from their computer at home. … Over the next three years, the secure site will be expanded to allow people to interact with their children’s teachers or ask medical advice from their doctor through a government version of Facebook.

As I’ve written here before, I’m convinced this has to happen at some point. We build up personal profiles on Facebook, and allow Amazon and Tesco to analyse our purchasing habits – in return for much improved service. I just don’t think it’s sustainable on any level for government to continue to demand that we fill in lengthy forms, whether on paper or online, to get what we’re due.

But of course, that’s a huge government IT project, isn’t it? And by definition, that’s doomed? Well, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line which suggests things might be changing:

This does not require large-scale government IT Infrastructure; the ‘open source’ technology that will make it happen is freely available. All that is required is the will and willingness of the centre to give up control.

Blimey: recognition that open source is ready to deliver the most visionary of government policy.

And with my WordPress hat on – do I ever take it off? – I can’t help smiling at his pledge that ‘no new [government] website will be allowed unless it allows feedback and engagement with citizens themselves.’

Of course, the speech has to be seen in context. Without ever mentioning the Tories, the speech was quite unashamedly party political in places: portraying the differing views of broadband expansion, or trying to match or trump Tory pledges on data transparency. It was also the speech of a Prime Minister staring at a huge public debt problem: and with neither tax rises nor spending cuts being palatable, that really only leaves technology-driven efficiency savings.

And it’s the context that’s stopping me getting too excited about it all. We’re probably a fortnight away from government pulling down the shutters for a month. In six weeks, Brown may or may not be Prime Minister, and may or may not be in a position to deliver on these promises.

Comparisons with the Tories’ technology manifesto are inevitable. In this speech, Brown blended small-scale but symbolic measures, like a Directgov API within weeks, with big-picture principles such as VRM. It’s both shorter- and longer-term than the Conservative document – attempting, perhaps, to outflank Cameron, Maude, Hunt et al on both sides at once.

But whilst they may differ on certain matters of implementation, both are heading – rushing actually – in the same basic direction. On the face of it, no matter who wins, we can’t lose.
21 Mar 2010

politics, technology

libdems, lynnefeatherstone, seo, wordpress

SEO as a political campaigning tool

I’ve mentioned this before, but it still brings a smile to my face.

One consequence of the rebuild of Lynne Featherstone MP’s website, which we launched last September, has been a marked improvement in Google performance. And it’s arguably my greatest personal triumph that if you search Google for ‘haringey council’ – the top suggested search query if you just type in ‘hari’ – here‘s what you (currently) get:

So the first five results on a standard Google results page are: two pages from the council itself – the council’s own homepage and one of its most popular individual pages (as you’d normally expect for such a targeted query); a page from Wikipedia; a page from Directgov; and at slot number 5, LibDem MP Lynne’s automated page detailing everything that’s wrong with the Labour-run council… with a particularly arresting excerpt.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, isn’t something I typically find myself paying much (conscious) attention to. In my experience, it’s usually enough to have followed the basics of web page construction: and I’ve been coding HTML for 15 years now, so it’s all fairly instinctive. WordPress helps by encouraging you to use significant elements such as the page title – presumably including significant keywords – in both the HTML <title> and the page URL; plus there are a couple of plugins I tend to activate for all clients which help Google ranking, install instantly, and never trouble you again.

But because it’s baked into the process, albeit subconsciously, the results are there to be seen: and will come to the fore over the next few weeks.

Naturally, with an election imminent, MPs and candidates are looking for every possible opportunity to get their messages in front of voters and journalists. For zero extra effort, and at zero cost, we’re getting one of Lynne’s core messages in front of the tens of thousands of people searching for ‘haringey council’ each month. (According to Google’s Adwords keyword tool, 22,200 people searched for ‘haringey council’ in February 2010… far more than the 1,300 who searched for ‘lynne featherstone’ specifically.)

Lynne is defending a relatively modest majority of 2,395 – notionally putting her in Labour’s no39 target seat. We’ve had plenty of favourable feedback regarding her website already: Iain Dale, I’m reliably informed, called it one of the best political websites he’d ever seen. But it won’t surprise you to learn that we’re looking at a couple of possible enhancements for the election campaign period. Stay tuned.
13 Mar 2010

e-government, politics

bis, notwordpress

BIS website grows up

There’s a new website for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – aka BIS – this weekend; and as I reported here back in November (sniff!), they’re waving farewell to WordPress as their core publishing platform. The new site is built on Sitecore, and is appearing bang on the published schedule.

Visually it’s really nice: a very open feel to the design, good solid navigation and a very fashionable ‘carousel’ slideshow at the top of the homepage. It still doesn’t feel like a large site, although it’s clearly much deeper than its WordPress predecessor – and that’s definitely a compliment. As you might expect, given they’ve got some of the most web- and social-media-savvy people in Whitehall, it’s a fine piece of work.

It’s going to be a bumpy ride for them though. With purdah probably only 4 weeks away, with Lord Mandelson as your minister, in the wake of the Tory technology manifesto, given controversy over the Digital Britain bill, given the possibility (likelihood?) of Machinery of Government changes in a couple of months, etc etc… well, you can imagine what headlines it might prompt. But the BIS team aren’t stupid; I’m sure they’ll have a comms plan ready.

On the WordPress front – yes of course, it’s a pity to lose a ‘trophy user’. It’s been great to quote the main corporate web presence of one of Whitehall’s highest-profile departments as a WordPress-based site. But remember why it was on WordPress in the first place: a small-scale, stop-gap website, thrown together within (literally) a couple of days. Precisely the kind of lightweight, tactical context where we’ve always said WordPress excels.

And whilst WordPress might not be right for a single department-wide site, with thousands of pages and dozens of authors, I refer you to our recent work with BIS on Science and Society, and its testing of the concept of a ‘network of blogs’ making up a larger site. This model is already starting to happen in a few places: I know of one Whitehall departmental site which is steadily hiving off various bits to stand-alone WordPress sites. And of course, BIS have quite a few WordPress-based sites which remain live, even after the parent site ‘grows up’.

Now… chances are, on 7 May, we’re going to have a few new or rejigged entities keen to get web presences up and running: certainly quickly, probably cheaply. As BIS has hopefully proven beyond all doubt, WordPress is up to the task: at least in the short term, and probably longer – ask the Wales Office, now into year 3 of operation. And for the record, it ticks a good number of the boxes on BIS team leader Neil Williams’s Fantasy CMS wishlist. We’re ready when you are.
11 Mar 2010

e-government, politics

conservatives, skunkworks

Tories promise IT skunkworks
If there’s one commitment in the Conservatives’ Technology Manifesto, billed as ‘the most ambitious technology agenda ever proposed by a British political party’, which makes my heart leap with joy, it’s this:

We will also create a small IT development team in government – a ‘government skunkworks’ – that can develop low cost IT applications in-house and advise on the procurement of large projects.

For those unfamiliar with the term, ‘skunkworks’ was devised by aircraft maker Lockheed Martin – and is still jealously guarded by them as a trademark. It describes a small, almost secret unit within a large organisation, protected from all the internal bureaucracy, and given carte blanche to be creative. Among Lockheed Martin’s 14 rules for its operation are:
- Unit manager to be answerable directly to a very senior member of the organisation.
- An ‘almost vicious’ restriction of the numbers of people involved.
- Minimal reporting requirements.
- Strict access controls.
- Mutual trust, with close cooperation and daily liaison, allowing correspondence to be kept to a minimum.
All very ‘web 2.0’… until you learn these rules came together in the 1940s.

I detect the influence of Tom Steinberg. Eighteen months ago, at MySociety’s 5th birthday celebration, Tom gave a speech in which he said:

So long as the cult of outsourcing everything computer related continues to dominate in Whitehall, and so long as experts like Matthew [Somerville] and Francis [Irving] are treated as suspicious just because they understand computers, little is going to change.

Government in the UK once led the world in its own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire’s worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.

But equally, as I argued at the time, bringing those kinds of people back into Whitehall and then dumping them inside IT departments wasn’t going to help either. This skunkworks concept – where you’re effectively a startup within the organisation – should offer the best of both worlds.

I’ve been one of numerous people – inside and outside government – who have suggested such an approach in the past. And no matter how positive a hearing the idea received, it didn’t happen. Its time may well be coming.

My suggestion is that this unit needs to be created very, very quickly after the election. I remember the uncertainty and sheer chaos which followed the handover from Tories to Labour in 1997. Radical, dramatic, shocking, good things happened. For a while, you went into work each day not knowing what was coming next. It was magnificent, wonderful chaos – for a while.

There’s also a specific paragraph on government websites:

The Conservative Party believes that government websites should not be treated like secure government offices or laboratories, where public access is to be controlled as tightly as possible.

We see government websites as being more like a mixture of private building and public spaces, such as squares and parks: places where people can come together to discuss issues and solve problems.

Where large amounts of people with similar concerns come together, for example filling in VAT forms or registering children for schools, we will take the opportunity to let people interact and support each other.

Again… Mr Steinberg, I presume? I’m not sure quite what that’s getting at; discussion forums? opening up Sidewiki-esque comments on ‘standard’ pages? (That idea was first aired at the 2008 Barcamp.)

There’s a commitment to ‘a level playing ?eld for open source IT’: welcome words, but we already have an on-paper commitment to a level playing field… or arguably, ever-so-slightly slanted in favour of open source. I haven’t changed my mind since January this year, when I concluded that we need a ‘specific high-profile victory for Open Source, to give it real momentum in government’. And those mythical 100 Days could be the time to deliver that.

Elsewhere there’s confirmation of notions already floated: transparency of senior salaries and contract spending, a ‘right to data’, online publication of expenses claims at Parliament and council levels, and so on.

In some aspects, there’s little to separate the rhetoric between Labour and the Tories. But whereas Labour has had the opportunity to make ambitious changes happen – and hasn’t always taken them, you get the sense of energy and ambition in the Tories’ promises.

There are specific actions and measurable commitments in this document: and it must be said, there’s evidence of the Tories practising what they’re preaching – use of WordPress and Drupal, publication of government IT policy (admittedly, someone else’s) in commentable form, publication of front-bench expenses via Google Spreadsheet.

Things could be about to get very, very interesting.
8 Mar 2010

politics

conservatives

Tories: always big City fans

Hot on the heels of the BNP apparently (?) taking design cues from Obama, here’s the new homepage for the Conservatives‘ website… and the Manchester City FC homepage, with which – you’d have to say – there is a remarkable similarity.

For the avoidance of any confusion: one is returning to prominence after a long period out of the limelight, thanks in no small part to a wealthy foreign-based backer; however, some poor results over the last few months have shaken fans’ confidence of a breakthrough at the highest level – leading to tricky questions being asked of their unquestionably photogenic manager who has yet to truly win over the hardcore support.

The other is… 🙂
22 Feb 2010

politics

labourparty, labourspace

Flogging a dead horse. Again.

I feel obliged to note that LabourSpace, Labour’s attempt to build a social network around policy discussion and campaigns, has relaunched. Again.

It’s less appalling – downplaying, quite dramatically, the voting up and down of campaign ideas which has failed over a two year period now to spark into any kind of life. But I’m genuinely amazed it’s still there at all.

Instead, the core content is now a pretty straightforward set of commentable pages, nothing you haven’t seen on a million blogs. Except that those million blogs handle it better. You don’t see the comment form until you press the ‘Leave a comment’ button… and then, you’re immediately presented with boxes for first name, surname, and email address. That’s right: no actual comment box.

Presentationally, it’s curious. It managed to spell the surname of its lead sponsor, Ed Miliband wrong at the very top of its homepage – corrected shortly after I tweeted about it, but even so. Its HTML page title and ‘hero’ graphic can’t even be consistent in the capitalisation of A Future Fair/fair for All/all. (Then again, the HTML page titles are universally awful: SEO clearly not a priority.)

(Update: there’s an interstitial page at www.labour.org.uk which introduces yet another different capitalisation: ‘A future fair for all’.)

Oh, and the site logo introduces a whole different slogan – ‘Be the change’. What’s the point of launching a campaign slogan if you’re not going to use it yourself?

LabourSpace has flopped. Several times now. Surely the best thing they could have done at this point was quietly ditch it – and put the effort into a ‘manifesto blog’, or a concentrated push on Facebook. Instead they drag the dead horse out for another public flogging.
9 Feb 2010

politics

buildingbritainsfuture, civilservice, labourparty

Building Britain's Future revisited

Spotted in Francis Maude’s article on Comment Is Free yesterday (8 Feb 2010):

Then came the first instance of Labour breaching the impartiality of government’s communications; we discovered that “Building Britain’s Future”, a brand conceived and promoted by the civil service, is used extensively on the Labour party’s website.

From PR Week article dated 29 October 2009:

Whitehall comms experts have denied any revolt. Permanent secretary for government communications Matt Tee insisted Building Britain’s Future was a government brand, and said he would ensure it was not used by the Labour Party… ‘I am clear that Building Britain’s Future is a government brand – if we reached a position when someone else used it, I’d have to consider the risk that citizens could be confused about where the messages are coming from.’

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) director of comms Russell Grossman said: ‘All civil servants are keen to ensure the line isn’t crossed into political sloganeering. This slogan doesn’t cross that line at all – The Labour Party hasn’t used this.’

And finally, on Puffbox.com in July 2009:

Earlier this week, I saw this… the front page of the Labour Party website. And there it is, right up front – ‘Building Britain’s Future’ in large letters, the same logo in the corner.

Sorry Mr Maude. Sorry PR Week. Sorry Mr Grossman. Sorry Mr Tee.

It’s still there, by the way.
8 Feb 2010

politics, technology

markpack, nadinedorries, twitter

Yes you can change your Twitter ID. Don't.

A while back, Mark Pack wrote a couple of articles noting that if MPs were worried about breaking election campaign rules by running a Twitter account with the letters MP in it, they probably needn’t be. The authorities tended to be ‘sensibly flexible’; and besides, it was dead easy to change your Twitter account name. In the piece which appeared on LibDem Voice, I commented:

But is there a risk that someone grabs your temporarily vacated username? I can’t see anything in the Twitter documentation to suggest there’s a ‘grace period’ between one person giving up a username, and someone else claiming it… as is often the case, say, with domain names.

Funny I should ask. Last week, colourful Conservative MP Nadine Dorries changed her Twitter name to ‘Nadine4MP’, apparently following Tom Harris’s lead. But somebody swiftly jumped in, and bagged the newly vacated NadineDorriesMP identity. Tim Ireland at Bloggerheads.com insists it wasn’t him, and has done some further digging into who it might have been. The account is currently reporting ‘that page doesn’t exist’. Accusations and conspiracy theories are flying.

Yes, if you leave your main MP-labelled account dormant for a few weeks and switch to a new non-MP-labelled account, you’ll lose a good few followers. But to be honest, if they don’t follow you to your new location, they weren’t following you very closely, were they?

Instead, where are we? No1 result from a Google search for ‘nadine dorries twitter’, and in the top 10 for plain ‘nadine dorries’, is the vacated, possibly hijacked, currently defunct @NadineDorriesMP account page. And this on the evening when said Ms Dorries is getting primetime terrestrial TV exposure for an hour.

You have been warned. Again. 🙂

that page doesn’t exist
5 Feb 2010

e-government, politics

Payment on results

WeAreSocial’s Robin Grant tagged me (and various others) on Twitter, asking for opinions on Conservative proposals from Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne:

A Conservative government will require all public bodies that want to launch marketing campaigns to state precisely what behaviour change the advertising is designed to bring about, and an element of the advertising agency fee will be made contingent on achieving the desired outcome.

Like Robin post author Simon Collister, I can see good and bad in this. I’m inclined to agree with anything which makes government think much harder about its communications spending: the whole reason I started down the open source technology route with Puffbox was because I felt we were spending too much money, and receiving too little in return. I’m all for bad projects being held to account, and good projects to be held aloft as exemplars.

But it’s going to be incredibly difficult to make such a rule make sense. Too many factors involved, too much hard cash at stake.

If marketing operated in a vacuum, with no external factors – and, by the way, no client involvement / interference – then maybe you could compare the situation before with the situation after, and say that any difference was solely down to the quality of the campaign. But of course it doesn’t. And even if it did, you’d be assuming absolute trust in the measurement of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ – which would, in many cases, be government statistics. You can imagine the worries around conflicts of interest, potential and perceived. And where potentially large sums of money are at stake, lawyers gather.

And what would happen if the target were exceeded, perhaps considerably? No reward? All stick, no carrot?

Robin wonders if any such rules would be applied to websites and other social media. I’d draw a distinction between scenarios where you are doing the communicating on behalf of the client, and where you’re enabling the client to communicate themselves. Virtually everything Puffbox does is the latter: more’s the pity, sometimes. So the only metrics my output can be judged on are the deliverables: did we do what we said we’d do, in the agreed time and for a reasonable budget. And on those, I’ve got no worries whatsoever.

Bottom line: I doubt this would change much for me, and others in similar situations. We’re only as good as our last job, as they say; and it would only bring the threat one step closer. Same threat though. And that’s fine.
5 Feb 2010

politics, technology

captcha, conservatives

Captcha yourself on

There’s always a risk attached to using automated text-generating services. For example, this ‘captcha’ I was presented with by the Conservatives’ Blue Blog website:

Not one to raise on the first trip to Camp David, perhaps.

that page doesn’t exist