technology – Page 6

24 Jan 2011

e-government, technology

chrischant, directorofdigitalengagement, ukgc11, ukgovcamp

Meet the new boss: Chris Chant at #ukgc11

http://vimeo.com/19270919

This year’s UK GovCamp, held on Saturday, felt markedly different to those in previous years. Still the same warmth, spirit and enthusiasm as in previous years – making it the only ‘government computing’ conference worth attending. But this time, things seemed much more serious. Partly due to its sheer scale, much larger than in previous years; partly because of the impressively lengthy list of commercial sponsors. And partly because, for the first time, we had a (de facto) keynote speaker to begin proceedings.

Regular readers will have seen various posts in the past couple of weeks about the appointment of Chris Chant, the new (‘interim’) head of digital stuff for government. One such regular reader, it turns out, is Chris himself: I remember at least two namechecks for Puffbox in the course of his talk. Mind you, I didn’t exactly help by introducing myself at the start as being ‘Directgov internal comms’ – although I’m not sure everyone got the joke. 😉

On one hand, it was the perfect opportunity for Chris to meet the community most committed to the work he’s now tasked with, and get us onside early. But equally, the audience’s passion could have posed a threat: say the wrong thing, and things could have turned nasty. So it’s entirely understandable that Chris seemed to take a while to settle into his flow: the first ten or fifteen minutes were a little dry, and seemed almost scripted.

But gradually, perhaps sensing the warmth in the room, with a character very different to the IT conferences he’s more used to – he warmed up. The anecdotes became more personal, the language more emotive and ambitious – not to mention fruity.

I won’t go into much of the detail – largely because Chris was at pains to stress he was speaking in a personal capacity, and that much of what he said was provisional, pending sign-off, etc etc. Suffice to say, there’s a significant document in the works already, which should see the light of day in a month or so. His focus, as I suspected, was on technology and its management – there wasn’t a lot said about the ‘digital engagement’ side. But I’m perfectly comfortable with that: technology is where the savings are to be found, and the improvements are to be made… and that’s where his priorities should lie.

So what did I think? To be honest, I don’t think I could have been more impressed. He said everything I could realistically have hoped he would: greater use of agile methods, a restated commitment to open source, etc. And whilst he didn’t set the room on fire, he came across as a serious man with a strong track record, experience of the front line, no fear of big projects, and perhaps most important of all – measured ambition. He didn’t over-promise, but left little doubt that he was capable of delivering. (Sorry Chris, I’m sure you don’t need that pressure.)

Even better, Chris seems to have gone away with a decent opinion of us:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/cantwaitogo/status/28792749482311680″]

Chris, welcome on board. We’re friendly, we’re on your side, and we’re here to help. Yes, even Puffbox – especially Puffbox. Let’s do this.
14 Jan 2011

e-government, technology

codeofeverand, foi, transport

+++ EXCLUSIVE +++: Transport's £2.7m spend on online game
In late November 2009, I noted the launch of Code of Everand, a multi-player online game commissioned by the Department for Transport, aimed at teaching kids road safety in an innovative way. I found it ‘a bit tedious and mechanical’, but I acknowledged that I wasn’t exactly its target demographic.

But all sorts of alarm bells were ringing. A site like this couldn’t possibly have come cheap – but that was only the start of my concerns. It had apparently taken more than two years to build. It was built by a US-based agency. It had apparently ‘been on the brink of cancellation twice.’ And by the time it finally launched, none of the Transport staff who had originally commissioned it were still in post.

I signed off with the words ‘I imagine an opposition PQ is already in draft.’ – but as if to demonstrate just how influential this blog really is, no such PQ was ever forthcoming.

When the site’s first birthday came and went without fanfare, I could no longer suppress my curiosity… and drafted a FOI request via MySociety’s What Do They Know service. Whether the site was a success or a failure, cheap or costly, it was going to be an interesting response.

I got the response yesterday. So here we go.

That’s a grand total of £2,785,695 from project inception until the end of the current financial year. By any standards, that’s a staggering amount of money to spend on a single campaign website. Was it money well spent?

I also asked for data on user registrations and site traffic. This is a chart of new user registrations per month:

That’s a dramatic drop from a peak of 54,500 new registrations in March, to just 6,500 in April; and it’s basically been flat-lining since June. A total of 170,000 registered users, 91.8% of whom were signed up before the end of the last financial year – and the spending of a further £700k.

There’s a similar pattern to the numbers of monthly Absolute Unique Visitors, as measured by Google Analytics – although it’s curious to note the differing extents of the peaks.

The Google data regarding average time spent on the site is worth noting:

From an understandably low base, as the site built its following, the average has hovered around the 10 minute mark. That’s much more than most websites could boast, and stayed remarkably constant even as the monthly visitor numbers crashed – before suddenly jumping to nearly 18 minutes in November. Similarly, in terms of page views, it has typically recorded around 16 per visit, already very high in comparison with most sites – before shooting up to 28 in November.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that the project has social media presences in all the obvious places. And as I’m writing this, in January 2011, Code of Everand has 568 friends on Facebook – and 82 (let me confirm that: eighty-two) followers on Twitter. It’s even worse on the more child-friendly networks, where you might expect it to perform better with its notional target audience: Habbo (18 friends) and Bebo (10 – yes, ten).

Whatever interest it might have generated in those first few months, and however well it has engaged its hardcore following, it’s surely impossible to say the site has been a sustained success. Since April, its audience has all but disappeared. And yet believe it or not, just as I was writing this, there was an update on its Facebook account:

So it’s an outrageously expensive failure, right? Believe it or not, I’m still withholding judgment. Yes of course, it’s a huge amount of money: £16.33 per registered user. But it’s conceivable, just about, that it’s had its desired effect in terms of educating the youngsters it’s aimed at.

We’ll find out in due course. Transport confirmed in their response to me that:

A contract to evaluate the game was let to the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) in March 2010. The evaluation team consists of TRL, the Serious Games Institute based in Coventry University, and Simon Christmas Ltd, an independent social researcher. We are currently in the planning stage and do not yet have a date for publishing the work and final report.

Given the collapse in visitor numbers, and the continued spending of public money on a project which would seem to have had its day – if it ever had it at all, they might want to get a move on.

Data on road casualties during 2010 are scheduled to be published in June 2011.
- If you fancy crunching the numbers for yourself, you can access the source data at What Do They Know. Thanks to the MySociety crew for making it all so easy.
- Note: I’ve since found info from the Serious Games Institute regarding their ‘five strand’ evaluation research, being led by Dr Adam Qureshi (contact details here). Sadly no publication date is quoted for their report.
10 Jan 2011

e-government, technology

commons, pasc

Commons committee's IT inquiry

Announced shortly before Christmas, and closing next week, the Commons Public Administration Select Committee is running a consultation on ‘the way in which Government develops and implements technology policy’.

They have produced an ‘Issues and Questions’ paper, posted online in PDF format; and they would like you to submit your responses ‘in Word format or a rich text format with as little use of colour or logos as possible.’ Oh – and they’re claiming ownership of all submissions, ‘and no public use should be made of it unless you have first obtained permission from the Clerk of the Committee.’ Not a great starting point, then.

The questions are as follows:

1. How well is technology policy co-ordinated across Government?

2. How effective are its governance arrangements?

3. Have past lessons from NAO and OGC reviews about unsuccessful IT programmes been learnt and applied?

4. How well is IT used in the design, delivery and improvement of public services?

5. What role should IT play in a ‘post-bureaucratic age’?

6. What skills does Government have and what are those it must develop in order to acquire IT capability?

7. How well do current procurement policies and practices work?

8. What infrastructure, data or other assets does government need to own, or to control directly, in order to make effective use of IT?

9. How will public sector IT adapt to the new ‘age of austerity’?

10. How well does Government take advantage of new technological developments and external expertise?

11. How appropriate is the Government’s existing approach to information security, information assurance and privacy?

12. How well does the UK compare to other countries with regard to government procurement and application of IT systems?

The thing is, this is a subject I feel passionately about. But I don’t see where I’m going to find the time – within effectively a two-week window – to give the Committee a free 3,000-word consultancy report. The only people who will find the time are those professionally engaged in the subject: and in a lot of cases, that means lobbyists (whether that’s their job description or not) from The Big Consultancies. And those turkeys won’t vote for Christmas.
17 Nov 2010

e-government, technology

twitter, wordpress

To tweet or not to tweet?

A bit of a first today: meeting with a new client, I found myself – for the first time – insisting that they get a Twitter account. I think they were rather taken aback by the suggestion: so was I, to be honest.

But I think it’s important to recognise that Twitter has reached a certain scale now, where it can’t be ignored. And even if your account isn’t likely to attract huge numbers of followers, you need to be aware of the wider potential community, and the potential audience for a retweet: this particular organisation is in the international development space, also populated by DFID (9,000 followers) and NGOs such as Oxfam (80,00 followers). Make it easy for them to spread your message: give it to them in a format which allows them to pass it on with a single click.

As we’re using WordPress (inevitably), it can be a zero-effort addition to your online offering: there are plenty of plugins which will send automated tweets, based on a pre-defined template, to your Twitter account. Alex King’s Twitter Tools tends to be the most popular, but I tend to avoid it – it’s been a suspect (although never formally charged) in a couple of site failures. Instead, at the moment, I’m recommending WordTwit – which isn’t perfect, but does seem to do the job reliably.

And maybe it’s just me, but where I used to react quite negatively to automated ‘hey! look at my blog!’ tweets, I actually quite welcome them now. A blip in the flow of my daily Twitter stream isn’t enough to derail my train of thought, and it might be something I want to read (otherwise why did I follow the account in the first place?).

Three years ago, I wrote a post suggesting that Facebook would become the RSS consumption tool for the masses. I think the fine detail of my prediction may have been wrong, but the substance was right. The social network has become the notification channel for the masses.

Setting up the Twitter account costs nothing. Sending the automated tweets costs nothing. If it helps even one person, on one occasion, you’re in notional profit. And there’s unquestionable potential to go much, much wider.
5 Nov 2010

technology

twitter, wordpress

Useful WP plugin for embedding tweets

The announcement of a new function in WordPress.com led me to discover the existence of the Twitter Blackbird Pie plugin, which does this:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/wordpressdotcom/status/600049276948480″]

I’m finding a growing number of my blog posts being sparked by tweets, and this should be a cute method for embedding them, rather than simply linking out. Let’s see how it goes.
3 Nov 2010

e-government, technology

australia, hosting, rationalisation, wordpress

Aussie govt's shared WP platform

Courtesy of a retweet via @DirDigEng, I see the Australians have launched a shared WordPress platform for use by government agencies. The installation, known as Govspace, was apparently opened in May this year, and currently claims to be supporting 30 ‘spaces’ (ie blogs) – some of which, I think, have been imported from other installations.

At first glance, it seems to be a pretty straightforward v3.0 multisite build, running on Apache – so I’m not sure I’d agree with the suggestion that it’s its ‘own version’ of WordPress. But there’s some nice customisation in terms of themes: agencies are offered a selection of government-branded custom themes, although many appear to have brought their own; and there are some quite nice-looking (but sadly unreleased) in-house plugins – plus a set of pre-installed third-party plugins (not all of which I’d agree with, FYI). Full details on the Features page.

(They’ve helpfully included a screengrab of an options page: here, and in a few other front-end areas, you can see a continued reliance on pre-v3 workarounds, where new features such as custom menus, post types and taxonomies would probably help. And I’m not sure I’d have left sign-up so open, but there you go.)

As some of you will be all too aware (!), I’ve been lobbying for precisely this kind of setup in the UK for more than three years – see this post from 2008 as an example. Perhaps three years ago might have been too early; but now, with multisite built into ‘normal’ WordPress v3.0, and with the drive to cut costs, surely it’s an idea whose time has come.

I’m still hearing rumours of greater centralisation for government web activity, probably within an expanded Cabinet Office operation: that would be the natural home for any such initiative. And as I’ve written here before, a well-structured, well-managed multisite install could offer a perfect blend of control and flexibility.

Of course I’d be keen to discuss it. 😉
21 Oct 2010

e-government, technology

cabinet, directgov, marthalanefox

Lane Fox review hints at further rationalisation

Martha Lane Fox’s review of Directgov appears to have taken a slightly wider view than simply how well everyone’s favourite orange website works. Speaking at a conference in Birmingham, Cabinet Office director of digital delivery Graham Walker said:

We’ve been doing a review of Directgov and most of government on the web. We can see that there is a need to massively simplify it, with a lot more rationalisation and to improve the user experience.

Most of government on the web? More rationalisation? I’ve been hearing rumours that Ms LF’s recommendations may include a stronger role for Cabinet Office in departmental / policy publishing, much as it already has (through Directgov) in citizen-facing material. Are we looking at a single super-site for departments?

On a superficial level, that’s a return to the Dark Ages of 1994, when departments used to send floppy disks in the post to Norwich, where someone from CCTA would mark them up into HTML, and FTP them over to the Government Information Service (aka open.gov.uk). It’s also a return to the expensive and ultimately unsuccessful notion of The Club / DotP, which would have seen all departments running on the same (bespoke) CMS as Directgov and DH.

But a lot has changed in the past year or two – and it’s possible to envisage more modern publishing infrastructures, based on a managed multisite approach. You can look at what we’ve done on WordPress for Defra as an example: a centrally controlled environment, with the root level defining aspects like primary navigation and plugin selection, but with a high degree of flexibility and freedom given to the various child sites.

So yes, I can see why such a move would seem desirable – Directgov has been a success, at a very high price of course, and consistency of presentation and UX wouldn’t be a bad thing. (Indeed, I’ve written here previously, in praise of greater presentational consistency.) And yes, I believe it’s now technically realistic, in a way it never was before.

The precedents give plenty of reason to be pessimistic, though.
20 Oct 2010

technology

drupal, wordpress

Thoughts on Drupal 7

Things are happening on the Drupal front. There’s a new drupal.org website up today; and the first beta of the long-awaited v7 emerged a fortnight ago. I hear talk of Drupal-based projects and proposals in the vicinity of Whitehall, including various staff moves. There may be big announcements on the immediate horizon.

It’s been a while since I ventured into Drupal – so I downloaded the v7 beta, to give it a spin. And whilst it looks a bit prettier than previous versions, it still feels like the same old Drupal underneath. A rather tortuous installation process, requiring much chown’ing and phpmyadmin’ing, and manually shifting files from folder to folder. And at the end of it, an empty shell, with little guidance as to what you might do next.

Let’s just imagine for a moment that you want to start creating a page. You click on the ‘Add content’ button, which now lives in an admin bar across the top of the page. This generates an overlaid window offering various content types: choose one, and you end up on an authoring screen – with no WYSIWYG text editor. That’s right – out of the box, you’re expected to code your own pages in HTML.

Of course, you can have WYSIWYG: but you need to add it as a plugin – er, sorry, module. You can choose from a dozen different WYSIWYG editor functions, all of which have various benefits and drawbacks. And then, you’re probably going to have to put them in the right folder manually.

This rather encapsulates the Drupal mentality. Perhaps you’re someone who gets very worked up about the use of one particular WYSIWYG component over another: well, Drupal gives you the choice. And for a certain type of person, that’s just what you want.

The WordPress mentality, on the other hand, favours sheer simplicity. Install WordPress, and a WYSIWYG component is already installed. (TinyMCE, since you asked.) It’s more than satisfactory. There are certainly a few things it could do better. But it looks and feels like Microsoft Word – and for the vast majority of my clients, that’s precisely what they want.

Geeks love Drupal; people love WordPress. The Drupal guys know this. In kicking off the Drupal 7 user experience process, Drupal founder and project leader Dries Buytaert wrote:

Drupal’s steep learning curve filters out far too many smart, motivated people who could benefit from Drupal. We see it all the time in the Drupal.org forums, in my “State of Drupal” surveys, on Twitter, when talking to customers, and on the web. Even though we’ve made significant progress with making Drupal easier to use, a lot of work is left to be done. With other content management systems such as Joomla! and WordPress making strides to catch up to Drupal in terms of development flexibility, if we want Drupal to remain competitive, we have a challenge we have to face: we need to create a user experience that makes it easier for people new to Drupal to discover all of its richness and power.

Oh – and which platform did the Drupal 7 user experience team use to blog their work? You’ll never guess. Leisa Reichelt writes:

We know Drupal is amazing and we love it … but unfortunately, for the time being, it is too broken for us to be able to do the work we need to do on this project at the pace that we need to do it. We don’t have time to ‘learn’ Drupal, nor the skills to bend it to our will (and make it look acceptably pretty), we can’t even get a blog post on the homepage. We appreciate all the offers of porting this blog over to Drupal, but to be honest, I really like using WordPress and nothing I’ve seen of Drupal makes me want to switch over at the moment.

We know that Drupal is not WordPress, and we have no intention of making it so, but using WordPress helps us get our work done faster and easier for the time being, and it helps us maintain perspective and distance – and for now those things are really important to us. But if, this time next year, this blog isn’t running on Drupal and if it doesn’t look amazing – then please come and shout #fail as loudly as you can. Because then you’ll be completely right, we will have failed.

That was written in March 2009. The blog is still on WordPress, by the way.

Leisa later hints at some of the underlying tensions in making Drupal more human-friendly:

Drupal developers are … the most important audience. What this audience wants is not Drupal as a product that (ordinary users) can use out of the box, they want a developer toolkit that gives them more and more flexibility and capability to build cool stuff, and to push Drupal way beyond the realms of a simple Content Management System. And so we have this tension. Drupal as a ‘Consumer Product’ and Drupal as a ‘Developer Framework’. Currently, the official direction is that the project is going to attempt to be both. I think this is a serious problem.

I know that for many people the idea of making a Drupal that (ordinary users) can love, making something that can actively compete from a UX perspective with the likes of WordPress, is a grand aspiration. So it is, but unfortunately I also think it is the wrong aspiration for Drupal core. The sooner we focus on the core target audience of Drupal core – the developers – and commit to making a user experience that supports them in their use of Drupal, the sooner we’ll really have actually achieved a really Great User Experience for Drupal.

Now let me be absolutely clear. Drupal is an excellent platform. Great things can be done with it. And on some levels, comparisons between Drupal and WordPress are pointless. They are currently aimed at different types of people, and different use cases – so it’s ridiculous to say that one is materially better than the other. Besides, they’re rapidly converging: Drupal with its UX improvements, WordPress with its custom post types etc. They can both do clever things like multisite installs. They both have thousands of user-created plugins/modules. They can both be whatever you want.

But if I were contemplating a large-scale decentralised publishing platform for mainly text-based information, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind: it has to be WordPress. Our recent work with Defra is a perfect case in point: multiple independent child sites, with tweaked themes as appropriate to the subject matter, giving relatively non-tech-savvy authors considerable creative freedom and flexibility, within bounds permitted by a central administrator.

If you’re listening to the users of that platform, you’d build it in WordPress. If you’re listening to the geeks, you’d build it in Drupal. It’s your choice.
18 Oct 2010

e-government, technology

An alliterative summary of Word Up Whitehall

There’s no point writing a session-by-session summary of last Wednesday’s Word Up Whitehall event, when Julia Chandler has done such a fine job of it already. So instead, here are my memories of the common themes which came out of the various sessions and fringe discussions. And picking up from one of the day’s presentations, they all begin with the letter ‘S’.

Speed. Almost every presentation referred to the speed with which a WordPress-based site could be cobbled together. Some had special theming code, to assist with this; others went with what was already out there. A few hours, and you would almost certainly have something up and running. What a different expectation, compared to the more traditional route of commissioning (conventional) external suppliers – or worse, contracted IT providers.

Specialism. But there was a gap – ‘gulf’ is perhaps too strong a word – between those instant templated sites, and the much more involved (infra)structures discussed by Simon Wheatley (re Defra) and Mike Little (re No10). It reinforced a sense I’ve had for some time, that no matter how advanced the internal skills base becomes, there will always be a role for the external experts.

Subversion. There’s definitely a skill – or is it an instinct? – in taking WordPress functionality meant for one thing, and using it for another. In his writeup, Steph mentioned the plans we’ve made with Defra, to use (unpublished) WP comments for user feedback. Mike had used WP’s foreign-language function to turn ‘I’m A Scientist’ into ‘I’m A Councillor’. Maybe it’s an early-adopter thing: we aren’t afraid of hacks and workarounds. But you’d need a certain degree of experience and expertise to understand how the functions work in the first place, before contemplating how you might subvert them.

Silos. Mark O’Neill’s presentation of Culture’s new transparency site encapsulated many of WP’s benefits: quick, cheap, multi-user, etc etc. Many departments would benefit from having such a service to call upon. And I’d argue, even where departments’ web platforms were up to the job, it’s beneficial for the user if departments were all using the same publication channel. This would have been a perfect opportunity for a Whitehall-wide WordPress project: a rare blank canvas. It didn’t happen, not this time anyway, and I think that’s a shame.

Sustainability. This is a tricky one to phrase appropriately. But the bottom line is this: government web development is in a much better place now than, say, two years ago – and that’s down to a small number of individuals and micro-agencies. We have developed solutions and strategies which allow government to save a fortune, doing things which would never previously have been possible or practical. We need to find balanced trading models which allow those small suppliers to keep earning decent livings: support contracts, packaged services, whatever.

Sequel. I think I can declare the event a success. Will we do it again? Yes, I hope so – as long as the ideas keep coming, and the sites keep developing. But it won’t be for quite a while. I dare say we’ll have a few WordPress-based sessions at January’s UKGovCamp, so that should keep things ticking over for a few months: maybe we’re looking at late spring, early summer for Word Up Whitehall II.
7 Oct 2010

technology

dns, hosting, opensource, wordpress

Always keep hosting, domains and email separate

A quick technical tip for my loyal and esteemed readership: when setting up a modest website, don’t buy your domains from your web host. And ideally, get your email from somewhere else too.

One of the second-order selling points for an open-source solution like WordPress is disaster recovery. In a worst-case scenario, you can simply export your content from one installation, import it into another, and change the DNS. I’ve had to help people do this twice in the last couple of months, when relations with hosting companies have soured – once due to repeated security problems, once because of a billing disagreement. The sites were live from their new homes within a couple of hours.

When things go wrong, you’ll probably want to turn tail and leave in a huff; and to be honest, for the amount you’re paying, most hosts won’t consider it worthwhile persuading you to stay. Transferring your DNS records to a different registrar is going to be a lengthy process, probably a few days at best. But if you’re already using a third party registrar, separate from your hosting supplier, they don’t ultimately care where your ‘www’ record is pointing. The change can be made in mere seconds.

The same goes for email. To be honest, with Google offering its standard-level Apps For Your Domain free of charge, there’s really no reason (excuse?) to tie yourself to your hosting provider’s bundled email service… which is probably inferior anyway.

Many hosting companies include a free domain as part of their package. Whether or not they do this deliberately, it’s a form of lock-in… and you’re probably only saving the price of a pint of beer (London prices) per year. The freedom to take your business elsewhere, at the drop of a hat, is worth a lot more.