Puffbox

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

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    Sky News pressing for TV debate

    Sky News letter calling for TV debate

    Sky News has launched a high-profile campaign calling on the leaders of the main political parties to commit to a televised debate – or strictly, several – at the next election. They make a compelling case – pointing out that even Afghanistan managed it. Why on earth, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten, can’t we?

    David Cameron responded almost instantly to Sky’s letter; Nick Clegg has also backed the idea in the past few weeks. Then again, of course they would. So ultimately, it all comes down to the Labour response – although Sky don’t seem to be ruling out the ‘tub of lard’ option.

    meerkatI find it quite remarkable that we’ve made it to 2010 without TV debates becoming part of the British electoral process. How dare they refuse the electorate a neatly packaged opportunity to ‘compare the market’? (Sorry.) It shouldn’t be about whether each leader thinks it’s strategically advantageous to him or her. Doesn’t the electorate have an absolute right to expect those who wish to lead it to come before them, and present their case using the electorate’s preferred communication medium? And isn’t it reasonable, in a world where media profile is all, for those leadership candidates to demonstrate their competence in that regard?

    For once, I think it’s in everyone’s strategic interests to have the debate this time round. Cameron’s good on camera. Clegg needs the exposure. And Labour can’t do any worse. Actually, if I were Labour, I’d be saying yes, specifically with a view to the long term. If we have a debate this time, it’ll be nigh-on impossible not to have one at every future election. And whilst it mightn’t actually help Labour on this occasion, they may well be grateful of the opportunity to embarrass Cameron (or whoever) in four or eight years’ time.

    But you know what? I almost think the most compelling reason for doing it, is simply to do it. Because it’s never been done before, and it might spark a bit of interest among the disinterested. And because it means we’ll never have to have this argument again.

    PS: Do I need to note that Sky might not be launching this campaign this solely out of a belief in the democratic benefits? It’s in their interests to ‘own’ the issue… otherwise the event would undoubtedly go to the BBC. (And probably still will.)

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    Ed's Pledge: when Ministers go it alone

    edspledge

    One of the few international set-pieces between now and the next general election is the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in mid-December. And the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is trying to drum up support among the population for – er, well, let’s not dwell on details. ‘A deal’ of some kind.

    He’s launched a website, EdsPledge.com asking people to declare their support for his campaign, and spread it round their social networks. It’s a pretty modest affair… too modest, arguably. An imported feed from his Twitter account, lots of calls to action – but in terms of substance, only a 67-second YouTube video.

    But you’ll need to be looking relatively closely to spot that EdsPledge.com (registered at the end of July) is actually a Labour Party website – which, in fact, sits within www.labour.org.uk. The Labour logo is in dead space in the bottom corner of the screen, and the footer text declaring the site’s ownership is light grey text on white. There’s literally zero reference to Labour in that 67 seconds of video – other than the choice of font, and who’s going to notice that? (Well, apart from me.)

    Meanwhile, in the gov.uk domain, we have ActOnCopenhagen.gov.uk – proclaiming, would you believe it, ‘the UK Government’s ambition for a global deal on climate change’, a joint DECC/FCO production, hosted by FCO but ultimately using a DECC subdomain. (Hey… Miliband and Miliband. Hadn’t thought of that until now.) And guess what? It too has a clock counting down to the conference, a bit of Twitter and YouTube, and a ‘100 days’ message from Ed Miliband – plus, it has to be said, a lot more detail.

    Of course it’s obvious why Labour should be trying to maximise the political potential of Copenhagen. And likewise, it sits perfectly within FCO’s wider public diplomacy remit, as well as the DECC portfolio. Nobody’s doing anything wrong per se, from a selfish perspective anyway. But I can’t help feeling we’re straying into dangerous territory here.

    For decades, centuries even, the Civil Service sat as a buffer between politicians and the populace. Mass communication required budgets and infrastructure which the political parties couldn’t readily lay their hands on, or afford. But just as the music and journalism businesses have seen their previously cosy arrangements challenged by the disappearance of those barriers to entry, are we now seeing the politicians challenging the authority of their own departments for their own purposes?

    There’s now nothing to stop a minister setting up his/her own website pushing his/her own line – beyond the control of The Department. In many cases, it could be much cheaper and quicker to go outside, rather than rely on the internal processes. And free from Civil Service rules on dispassionate discourse, it might be more effective too.

    Now, whilst there could be tension between these two web initiatives, I suspect there won’t be in practice. Wearing my cynical hat, the Labour site seems to have two objectives – visibility for Miliband, and harvesting the contact details of potential Labour sympathisers/voters. There’s no real duplication of functionality or content, nor any inherent clash with the weighty objectives of the DECC/FCO site.

    But this is the first time I’ve seen such an obvious attempt by Labour to mirror departmental responsibility; and it’s easy to imagine how other similar activity around other departments’ areas – let’s say Health? Defence? Treasury? wider foreign affairs? – might get a little more juicy. Keep an eye on it, folks.

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    Fair prices, fair penalties

    I’ve found it really hard to articulate my thoughts on this week’s hot topic, filesharing.

    There’s no getting away from the fact that freely distributing copyrighted work is wrong; and wrongdoing must attract sanctions at some point. And in the chaotic, decentralised world of the internet, the only party who could reasonably be asked to apply such sanctions is the ISP. But on one side, you’ve got the music industry demanding protection, after years of having a pretty sweet deal; on the other, you’ve got the ISPs less than keen on becoming a police force (see TalkTalk’s blogged response). Both have commercial interests to protect, and principles to defend.

    And of course, it doesn’t help if government is seen to be moving the goalposts midway through a consultation.

    Writing on LabourList, Tom Watson talks about ‘the choice of accepting [the new reality] and innovating, or attempting, King Cnut-style, to stay the tide of change’. The Open Rights Group talks about ‘letting the market solve the problems … This is the wrong moment to go in this direction.’ I think both are right.

    When Apple opened its iTunes store, I tried it, disliked it, and never went back. Nasty user experience, locked-down files in a non-universal format. But I made my first music purchases through Amazon.co.uk a couple of weeks back, and found it a very pleasurable experience. A fair price for a high-quality, unrestricted MP3 file. My purchases registered themselves automatically with Winamp and iTunes, and hence to my iPod (and anywhere else I might want to take them). Seamless, instant, perfect. I will be doing it again.

    The music business screwed up by not recognising the implications of online sooner. Filesharing became too easy; and when online music sales finally happened, they put all their efforts into making it more awkward for the punters – DRM, proprietary formats, etc. And they’re expecting us to pay the price now.

    But finally, the simplicity, convenience and fair pricing of Amazon’s model presents a challenge to the good people who found themselves filesharing even though they knew it was ‘wrong’. (And that’s without considering commercial, ‘legit’ sources of free online music like Spotify.)

    I don’t believe you can argue on principle against sanctions for ‘hard core’ copyright infringers – whatever those sanctions may be, and however they are enforced. But it does now feel like we’re reaching a fair market proposition. A reasonable price for doing the right thing – coupled, inevitably, with an appropriate penalty if you don’t.

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    Should Labour share the NHS love?

    lovenhs

    I’ve been a fan of Graham Linehan since he was a writer on Irish music (etc) magazine Hot Press. On Wednesday, he stuck a message up on Twitter reacting angrily against ‘rightwing wackjobs in the US lying about the NHS’. He starts using the hashtag #welovethenhs and asks celebrity chums to help spread the word. Soon it’s one of the hot hashtags on Twitter. And two days later, it still is.

    All of which puts the Labour Party in a slightly tricky position. They tried – and largely failed – to stir up similar levels of pride in the NHS for its 60th anniversary. Things have unquestionably got better since they re-took power in 1997 (at a price, admittedly). Should they get involved in this spontaneous ‘grassroots’ explosion?

    Initially, naturally, the involvement was as ordinary Twitter users; then yesterday, showing commendable responsiveness at least, a big splash on the Labour homepage, easy ‘tweet now!’ links to keep the momentum, plus a Facebook widget. But there have been a few expressions of concern that the Party shouldn’t be seen to hijack a grassroots thing like this.

    Personally, I think they’re handling it pretty well. Opportunities like this don’t come along very often; as the cross-party support for the hashtag demonstrates, there aren’t many opportunities to get angry about the NHS in UK politics – and if any party can claim the NHS as ‘theirs’, it’s Labour. So they’re entirely within their rights to make something of it. For the most part, they’re keeping it within Twitter, where it belongs. And to be fair, in bringing it over to labour.org.uk, the treatment is relatively neutral – no Labour branding on the embeddable Flash widget, for example.

    I’m already looking forward to hearing how the party leaders explain hashtags in their big conference speeches. 🙂

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    MPs who use WordPress

    I had a bit of a brainwave earlier, which led me to wondering how many MPs run websites on WordPress. Taking as my starting point the Total Politics directory of Parliamentarians’ blogs, I soon received a number of extra suggestions from Twitter folks… leading me to the following list of MPs whose blogs (or non-blog websites) are powered by WordPress:

    If anyone knows any more, I’d love to add them to the list. Oh, and for the record… with such low take-up (so far), my brainwave may be a little ahead of its time.

    Update: a special thanks to Danny Dagan (whose Blogminster project is in development) and PSF’s Ian Cuddy for providing a load of new ones I didn’t know about, even one or two at Cabinet level. I now count three Cabinet ministers on WordPress: Messrs Byrne, Bradshaw and Johnson… plus Nick Brown, who ‘attends’ Cabinet as chief whip, but isn’t ‘in’ it.

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    Who exactly owns 'Building Britain's Future'?

    BBF website

    If you take any interest whatsoever in stuff the government puts out, you’ll have seen the Building Britain’s Future logo a lot lately – it’s even replaced the big 10 on the Number10 website‘s header. It’s a cross-department brand intended to show the government has a positive programme of work in these negative times.

    It’s a risky strategy, given that we’re less than a year away from a general election – inviting potentially unhelpful use of the word ‘manifesto’ (eg Guardian). And yes of course, it’s sailing close to the wind, like all governments do on occasions. But in and of itself, I don’t have an inherent problem with government packaging its plans for the next year (and beyond) under a pretty logo.

    Then earlier this week, I saw this:

    Labour Party homepage, Jul09

    That’s 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.

    Now look, I’m not naive. Of course ‘Building Britain’s Future’ is an attempt to reinvigorate the Labour administration. Of course a governing party will always have one eye on its electoral chances, all the more in the final year of the Parliament, all the more when they’re badly behind in the polls. But this is pushing their luck too far.

    The BBF website links to the Cabinet Office terms and conditions, which state quite clearly:

    Copying our logos or any other third party logos from this website is not permitted without approval from the relevant copyright owner.

    So is this an infringement of copyright by the Labour Party? Or a breach of the Civil Service Code, clause 14 – using official resources, specifically graphic design, for overtly party political purposes? Was permission sought to re-use the logo, and was permission granted? (I’ve emailed the Cabinet Office to ask, and will let you know if/how they reply.)

    It’s fundamentally wrong that these questions should even have to be asked. Labour should do the decent thing, and get the logo off the website immediately. The Civil Service should think carefully about political impartiality, and stand up in its defence if necessary.

    Update, 30 July: I’ve received the following response from the Cabinet Office: ‘We are happy for another website to highlight government initiatives, provided that it is clear that they are government initiatives. The Building Britain’s Future story has been carried by a number of third party organisations in this way.’

    That doesn’t quite answer the question I posed, as to whether Labour ever asked permission. And if there’s a page explaining these different usage rules for the Building Britain’s Future logo, exempting it from the standard T&Cs, I haven’t found it.

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    Puffbox builds RSA's Bloggers' Circle

    BloggersCircle.net

    Some of the most fun projects come out of the blue. I’ve been following RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor’s blog for some time, and noted with interest his idea back in May to start some kind of ‘bloggers’ circle’. ‘There are too many bloggers and not enough readers so genuinely good posts can fall between the cracks,’ he wrote – correctly. So he suggested a ‘club’ whereby members would circulate their best posts, and would commit to writing about other members’ contributions.

    Then I got an email from Taylor’s ‘old chum’ Matt Cain, asking if I could help them build a website for the project. Matt sent me a logo, a rough set of wireframes – and a very tight deadline. We managed to turn the website around within a couple of days, and it went live today at bloggerscircle.net.

    It’s built on WordPress. OK, you didn’t need me to tell you that. But it’s got a couple of clever little touches, which probably won’t be immediately obvious.

    • When people sign up to join the circle, we need their name, a website URL and a contact email address. And when you’ve built as many WordPress sites as I have lately, that combination of form fields says only one thing – comments. So that’s how we’re handling the registrations, as comments on a (dummy) page. Using the built-in functionality, the coordinator receives an alert email each time someone signs up (ie submits a comment); and like any comment, it’s a one-click process for him to accept or reject.
    • There’s an RSS feed of ‘highlights’ from the Circle, which we’ll be running through Delicious, but I also wanted to offer a feed of each signup. We’ve done this, rather cheekily, using a custom page template containing a custom comment loop. It calls the comments (for a different page, incidentally), and presents the comment author’s details into an RSS template, rather than an HTML template. The title and content of that page aren’t wasted; we use these for the feed’s channel info.
    • And then, just to complete the Automattic connection, we call that same custom comment loop to generate the ‘rogues gallery’ of Gravatars that appears at the top of each page. In these early days, a lot of people don’t have Gravatars associated with their email addresses; but we hope they’ll see the good reason to do so.

    Having just come out of the longest project in company history, it was a real delight to take this on, and turn it around so quickly. I’m quite pleased with the presentation, particularly the way the membership itself is the focus of the page; and it’s always fun to do things with WordPress technology that it wasn’t ever really meant to do. A few rough edges have appeared since launch – inevitable given the sheer lack of testing time, but nothing we can’t handle.

    Taylor – whose blog really has become excellent reading – is frank about the project: ‘We are starting small and maybe we won’t succeed but it’s always worth having a dream.’ But he continues: ‘Imagine if there were hundreds or even thousands of amateur bloggers signed up.’ Well, er… if that happens, that design will have a few problems – but as they say, they’ll be nice problems to have.

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    Cameron pledges to free our data

    David Cameron has taken the Conservatives’ promises on availability of public data a few steps further, in principle at least, in a speech at Imperial College on taking ‘broken politics’ into the ‘post-bureaucratic age’.

    ‘In Britain today, there are over 100,000 public bodies producing a huge amount of information,’ he said; ‘Most of this information is kept locked up by the state. And what is published is mostly released in formats that mean the information can’t be searched or used with other applications… This stands in the way of accountability.’ Now I’m still not convinced that there’s that much deliberate, conscious locking-up of data; but certainly, the formats in which that data is eventually made available often has the same end result.

    OK, so we’re broadly agreed on the problem… what’s the solution, Dave?

    We’re going to set this data free. In the first year of the next Conservative Government, we will find the most useful information in twenty different areas ranging from information about the NHS to information about schools and road traffic and publish it so people can use it. This information will be published proactively and regularly – and in a standardised format so that it can be ‘mashed up’ and interacted with.

    What’s more, because there is no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new ‘right to data’ so that further datasets can be requested by the public. By harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, we can find out what information individuals think will be important in holding the state to account. And to avoid bureaucrats blocking these requests, we will introduce a rule that any request will be successful unless it can be proved that it would lead to overwhelming costs or demonstrable personal privacy or national security concerns.

    If we are serious about helping people exert more power over the state, we need to give them the information to do it. And as part of that process, we will review the role of the Information Commissioner to make sure that it is designed to maximise political accountability in our country.

    Now don’t get me wrong here, it’s great to have Cameron’s explicit sign-up to the principle of data freedom, standardised formats, the presumed right of availability, and a 12-month timeframe. But it’s not really anything that the other major parties aren’t already talking about – and in the case of the current government, bringing in the Big Guns to actually do something about. OPSI’s data unlocking service, for example, is nearly a year old, and effectively answers the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ idea. Now it hasn’t been a huge hit… but the principle is already established.

    And then there’s his unfortunate choice of public sector jobs as an example of what they might do:

    Today, many central government and quango job adverts are placed in a select few newspapers. Some national, some regional. Some daily, some weekly. But all of them in a variety of different publications – meaning it’s almost impossible to find out how many vacancies there are across the public sector, what kind of salaries are being offered, how these vary from public sector body to public sector body and whether functions are being duplicated. Remember this is your money being put forward to give someone a job – and you have little way of finding out why, what for and for how much. Now imagine if they were all published online and in a standardised way. Not only could you find out about vacancies for yourself, you could cross-reference what jobs are on offer and make sure your money is being put to proper use.

    Er, isn’t Mr C aware of the recently-upgraded Civil Service Jobs website – with its API, allowing individuals and commercial companies to access the data in a standardised format (XML plus a bit of RDF), and republish it freely? The Tories have talked about online job ads since December 2006; maybe it’s time they updated their spiel.

    So what does today’s pledge boil down to? On one level it’s just headline-grabbing, bandwagon-jumping, government-bashing, policy-reannouncing rhetoric. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If all the work is going on already, but it isn’t well enough known, or isn’t proving as effective as it could/should be,  maybe we should be welcoming any headlines the subject manages to grab. And if Cameron’s Conservatives do take power at the next election, and truly believe in what was said today, it would be the easy fulfilment of a campaign promise to yank these initiatives out of their quiet beta periods and into the limelight.

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    Visual aids in Parliament?

    Visual aids in .au parliament

    I wrote last year about the insanity of the annual Budget speech(es), in which the Chancellor stands up and reads off a list of numbers. In business, you’d never contemplate doing that without some kind of visual aid. But come on, visual aids in Parliament?

    Let me take you to Canberra, where there’s been an outbreak of visual aiding on the floor of the House of Representatives. In recent days, the ABC reports, Kevin Rudd and his government have been ‘taunting the Opposition by waving photos of projects funded with stimulus money’. The opposition have responded by wielding ‘a mock credit card to make its point about debt and a hard hat to mock Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s appearances at infrastructure sites’.

    But by common consent, things went a bit far on Thursday when, with the assistance of his front bench colleagues, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey unfolded a three metre-long chart, over six panels, illustrating the growth in government debt. The speaker ruled this was too much; Hockey responded by producing a pair of scissors, and cutting the chart into its constituent panels for individual presentation.

    ‘Pity they couldn’t have cut through the noise and silliness of a question time that added nothing to the sum of human knowledge,’ says Sky News Australia’s commentary on the ‘farce’.

  • i can has ur vote?

    West Berks LibDem leaflet 09

    It took me a while to spot it… but now I’m totally convinced our local Lib Dems are taking their design cues from icanhascheezburger.