Puffbox – Page 10 – Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

11 Aug 2011

e-government

cabinetoffice, francismaude, govuk, tomloosemore

Cabinet Office finally confirms Alphagov transition to beta
If you’ve been following the whole Alphagov thing – and if you’re reading this, we can probably assume you have – then today’s Cabinet Office ‘announcement’ that the Single Government Domain project has now ‘progressed to the next stage’ won’t have come as any kind of surprise. I make it seven weeks since the team declared via Twitter:

We’ve moved on from developing the “Alpha” (prototype), so we’re no longer called @alphagov on Twitter. “Beta” now in development.

… followed soon after by Neil Williams’s revelation on his personal blog that he was now working half-time on ‘Betagov’.

Tom Loosemore’s blog post adds some detail, promising three things for ‘early 2012’:
1. Public beta test of the site delivering the mainstream, citizen-facing aspects of gov.uk.
2. Private beta test of a shared gov.uk ‘corporate’ publishing platform, aimed at replacing most of the activity currently hosted on numerous departmental publishing environments (see alpha.gov.uk/government for a flavour)
3. A first draft of a gov.uk ‘Global Experience Language’, to provide clear, consistent design, user-experience and brand clarity for those developing sites for the single gov.uk domain. (see BBC.co.uk/gel for an example).
There will be a certain amount of dual running of ‘the beta’ and Directgov – ‘it will be constantly updated in order to trial the essential behind-the-scenes administrator tools & processes’ – indicating, at the very least, how serious they’re now taking it. Constant updating means, in effect, a ‘proper’ staff – and that’s probably the most difficult thing to arrange in Whitehall terms.

I’m glad to see Tom’s apparent acknowledgement that the ‘single domain’ approach only goes so far, and doesn’t perhaps sit too neatly with departmental representation. He writes: ‘the audience for such content tends to be more specialist and already engaged with the work of government than most mainstream users.’ Would departmental subdomains still count as being within a ‘single domain’, I wonder?

Of course, given my own experience with departmental publishing, it’s this aspect which I’m most interested in – even though it’s not the most important from the citizen perspective. And, to be frank, it’s the area where I feel Puffbox can be of most help. Throughout the past year (ish) working with Defra, we’ve kept in mind the possibility – increasingly, the likelihood – that departments would start to share a platform, and ultimately, share code within it.

We’ve shown how WordPress can be configured to bear the load, whilst still maintaining an efficient balance between centralised control and devolved publishing responsibility. And if you’re wondering why the Puffbox name doesn’t appear in Defra’s spending data on the No10 transparency site: that’s because we came in (well!) below the £25,000 threshold for publication.

Meanwhile, as highlighted earlier this week, we’re now up to four Whitehall departments (plus No10) using WordPress as their primary web platform. Thus far it’s been somewhat opportunistic; now it’s time to get a bit more strategic.

Update: The Register’s piece on the subject refers to a ‘Betagov’ budget of £1.6m: author Kelly Fiveash tweets to tell me it’s ‘an accurate figure the Cabinet Office gave [her] this morning’. Subsequently confirmed by Tom Loosemore: ‘yup, that’s the overall programme budget for single domain‘.
8 Aug 2011

e-government, technology

health, stephenhale, stephgray, wordpress

Dept of Health switches to WordPress

Congratulations to Stephen Hale and the team at DH for finally making the leap, and moving their corporate web presence over to WordPress.

Stephen hinted at such a move back in February, when he blogged about their successful use of WP for a number of subsites: ‘having dipped a toe in,’ he wrote, ‘it’s tempting to go a bit further than we originally planned.’ Clearly though, Stephen’s plans have moved on quite a bit since the start of the year: in a blog post last week, he described this as ‘phase 2 of 4’ (!).

As with our work for Defra, they’ve opted not to redesign the site: it still looks (broadly) the same as it did, although not identical, and the trained eye will spot a more WordPress-friendly approach to sidebars and things. Nor have they migrated most of the old content: it will remain accessible until it’s out of date, at which point it’ll be moved to an (unspecified) archive. I don’t think anyone would call that a perfect solution, but these are cash-strapped times, and it’s almost certainly good enough.

The project – driven by Steph Gray, including some input from Mike Little – is based on HealthPress, the same TwentyTen-based child theme Steph developed for those aforementioned subsites. Back in February, I wrote that the code ‘isn’t pushing the technology’s boundaries too hard’ – and really, that’s still the case. But I stress, I don’t write that as a criticism. It’s to Steph’s great credit, and that of WordPress itself of course, that he’s made the site work with just a vanilla WP instance. Amazing what you can do with posts & pages, tags & categories, a bunch of widgets, and a few ‘usual suspect’ plugins.

Stephen very kindly referenced the Word Up Whitehall event from last October as having provided ‘a moment of epiphany’: if there’s a direct line to be drawn from there to here, then I’m absolutely delighted my little get-together served its purpose. Maybe it’s time for a follow-up.

That’s now four Whitehall departments running their primary websites on WordPress: Transport, Health, Defra and the Wales Office; plus Downing Street, of course, and several – Cabinet Office, BIS, DFID, DECC – using it for secondary elements of their corporate websites.

So does that make it the most used ‘CMS’ for Whitehall departments’ primary sites? I rather think it might. 😀
29 Jul 2011

e-government, technology

blogging, cabinetoffice, petitions, wordpress

The return of e-petitions; a new home for the Govt Digital Service; and an ironic footnote

Two site launches today worth noting: the return of e-petitions, and the ‘new’ Government Digital Service blog.

E-petitions used to belong to Downing Street; now it’s moved over to Directgov, and thence to individual departments, rather than landing everything on the PM’s desk. There’s very little to see just now: just a submission form, and a few information pages. We won’t be able to see or ‘sign’ other people’s petitions for another week or so.

It’s been built by the Skunkworks team, now under the more full-time management of Mark O’Neill – or to be more specific:

#epetitions was put together by an onsite agile team of 3 devs, 1 PM, 1 customer + 1 part-time analyst, over three iterations. RoR stack.

– tweet by @chrismdp

… and so far, (update: nearly) everyone’s been jolly nice about it, particularly as there’s so little to see. Maybe they’ve seen what else is coming.

The e-petition’s previous incarnation became notorious when 1.8 million people signed to protest against road pricing proposals. Its successor won’t have to wait long to face a similar challenge: the Guido Fawkes blog has already lodged a petition calling for the restoration of the death penalty for child and cop killers, and is planning a special campaign to reach the magic 100,000 signature barrier, (potentially) triggering a debate in the Commons. Good luck to whoever’s desk that lands on.

One slight downer for me is that fact that it’s been redeveloped from scratch, using Ruby on Rails, rather than extending the existing MySociety-built platform (now being taken up by dozens of councils throughout the land). Tom Loosemore tells us: ‘ if [the new] code base isn’t open sourced, it won’t be for lack of will or encouragement!’ – but I just can’t see that being enough to see the application being reused more widely, particularly at local councils. Mark assures me that they did look at using WordPress, which would have guaranteed a high degree of reuse; I’m looking forward to reading his blog post about why they opted for the alternative approach.

Speaking of which… the Government Digital Service has a ‘new’ blog, or rather, it has consolidated various previous efforts (including Alphagov and the Cabinet Office Digital Engagement blog) into a new home, located at wordpress.com (where it joins, among others, UKTI and both the Army and Navy).

They’re using the premium Linen theme, costing them $68, with a bit of graphic customisation; and a mapped domain for a further $17/year. And as it’s on wordpress.com, that’s pretty much all it’s cost them. (And purely because I’ve already been asked the question: no, I didn’t have any part in its creation. Well, apart from several years of ruthless evangelism.)

Meanwhile, with more than a little irony… the Cabinet Office has also published its list of the 444 government websites still in operation, 243 of which are marked for closure. Neither of these sites is mentioned.
28 Jul 2011

e-government, politics

blogging, downingstreet, pressoffice, wordpress

No10 proposal to replace press offices with a blog

The FT is getting all excited by apparent ‘proposals’ by Downing Street’s shaven-headed, shoeless strategy director Steve Hilton to abolish maternity leave and suspend consumer protection laws, in the interests of kick-starting the economy. Personally, I can’t believe either was suggested seriously: sounds more like the start of a brainstorming session.

But I can’t help smiling at one of his other reported ideas: ‘replacing hundreds of government press officers with a single person in each department who would convey all necessary information via a blog.’ – an idea which Guido Fawkes calls ‘half decent‘. I’d go further.

The fact is, it’s the logical conclusion to a process which is kinda happening already – and which started three and a half years ago. We already have Downing Street plus three Cabinet-level departments running their websites, their main public-facing presence, on (what used to be) a blogging platform, namely WordPress.

And frankly, any department which isn’t already running its News section using a blogging platform is missing a trick. I guarantee it would be easier to use, and would provide a much better service to the customer, than whatever Big Ugly Corporate CMS they’re using.

I’ve argued for a decade plus that the web would ultimately destroy press office work as we have known it: specifically, the day-to-day mechanical stuff, and most of the mundane telephone enquiries. I don’t think that means sacking every press officer: but it would certainly redefine the role of those press officers who remained, to become ‘press relations’ people. (Or is that the role fulfilled primarily – and arguably, correctly – by Special Advisors?)

Take a look at the website for COI’s News Distribution Service – and tell me why this shouldn’t be a WordPress multisite. With COI’s demise imminent, now would be the perfect time to rebuild it. And if it needs to do stuff that isn’t available ‘out of the box’ – that’s where people like Puffbox come in. The answer is almost certainly, yes it can. And yes, we’d be delighted.

If it’s true that ‘three-quarters of [Hilton’s] ideas fail to get off the drawing board’, this is one which – in some shape or form – definitely will. In fact, it already has.
28 Jul 2011

e-government

cabinetoffice, parliament

MPs call for 'urgent rebuilding' of government IT capacity
The Commons Public Administration Select Committee has published its report into government IT, and to be frank, it’s all a bit predictable. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be welcomed: the four highlighted points – better management information, greater transparency, more involvement of SMEs, agile working – are all good. But if we haven’t heard it all before, we probably should have done.

The report’s opening factoid – that ‘some departments spend an average of £3,500 on a desktop PC’ – will almost certainly grab the headlines. (Update: step forward Sky News, who do a textbook job of it, including under-informed talking head.) It shouldn’t – but the report doesn’t help itself by putting this figure in the second paragraph of its introduction, without any context (as Paul Clarke has already noted).

The real story, such as it is, is the Committee’s apparent recognition that the current process – reliant on a small number of large suppliers being given over-spec’ed, over-detailed, over-sized and over-priced projects – is the ‘root cause‘ of the problem. And it’s quite nice to see them challenging the Cabinet Office, about whether its initiatives are tackling that root cause, or just the symptoms (paras 10-11).

Para 13 goes on to list what the Committee sees as the ‘six underlying causes of failure in government IT’:
- Inadequate information, resulting in the Government being unable to manage its IT needs successfully;
- An over-reliance on a small number of large suppliers and the virtual exclusion of small and medium sized (SME) IT contractors, which tend to be less risk adverse and more innovative;
- A failure to integrate IT into the wider policy and business change programmes;
- A tendency to commission large, complex projects which struggle to adapt to changing circumstances;
- Over-specifying security requirements, and
- The lack of sufficient leadership and skills to manage IT within the Civil Service, and in particular the absence of an “intelligent customer” function in Departments.
It acknowledges that outsourcing has often gone too far, leaving Departments short of people able to manage suppliers – the ‘recipe for rip-offs’ which gives the report its inflammatory title:

Currently the Government seems unable to strike the right balance between allowing contractors enough freedom to operate and ensuring there are appropriate controls and monitoring in-house. The Government needs to develop the skills necessary to fill this gap. This should involve recruiting more IT professionals with experience of the SME sector to help deliver the objective of greater SME involvement.

I’m not sure about the need to hire too many new people: Whitehall already has a decent number of insightful specialists, dotted around various Departments, and it would certainly be a start to concentrate their skills and experience within the evolving Government Digital Service (as outlined in the engagement-centric contribution I made to Alphagov, along with Neil and Steph). Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t apply for any such recruitment exercise: for now at least, I think I can do ‘my bit’ better from outside, rather than inside.

On engagement itself, it’s good to see the report recommending ‘that Departments exploit the internet and other channels to enable users to provide direct online feedback both in the design of services and in their ongoing operation and improvement’ – as that’s broadly what we put in the Alphagov proposal.

Not for the first time, data transparency is presented as a silver bullet to eliminate the profligate spending – except that, as Paul Clarke notes, the report rather undermines itself by ‘intentionally’ (Paul’s word) throwing opaque figures around. Can transparency solve the problems? In theory, I want to agree – but a year into Cameron’s open data revolution, I can’t think of many grand successes.

And there’s surprisingly little about open source per se – although you could argue it’s probably implicit in references to greater SME involvement, supplier lock-in and use of non-proprietary data formats.

So, personally, I’m struggling to get excited by the report. It’s not the first time any of these things have been said: and the government response will contain a lot of ‘we’re doing this already’… which, in fairness, they probably are. If the report helps keep those plans on the straight and narrow, I suppose it’s done its bit. As long as we get there in the end.
15 Jul 2011

e-government, technology

cabinetoffice, catn, hosting, wordpress

WordPress-based hosting solution in final stages of Cabinet Office cost-saving contest

It’s great to see some positive coverage of the Cabinet Office’s Innovation Launchpad process at the Telegraph today; and with it, a very positive writeup for a company we’ve been building a partnership with.

CatN first came to my attention when their commercial director, Joe Gardiner blogged last year about how the Department for Transport could save more than £750,000 per year by moving its website over to WordPress, running on CatN’s vCluster platform. A man very much after my own heart, clearly. And of course, last month, Transport – quite coincidentally? – migrated their website to WordPress.

Joe worked his Transport calculations up into an entry into the Cabinet Office contest, with a tantalising promise to save government departments an average of 75% on their hosting costs – a minimum of £17.88 million per year – by moving over to WordPress. And as he tells the Telegraph in their article today, ‘one of their concerns is that we are offering to save them too much and that we can’t be a sustainable business.’

The thing is – and this won’t come as any surprise to anyone reading this blog – such savings are absolutely possible.

We’ve been working with CatN for a few months now, and we’re in no doubt that their services, costing hundreds of pounds per year, are at least a match for – and in most cases, far better than – the services departments are spending thousands on. And arguably more importantly, their heart is in it.

So we’re wholeheartedly backing Joe and CatN in their efforts next week. For all the innovation going on around WordPress in government, there isn’t yet a strategic approach to hosting. It’s an idea whose time came a good while ago.

CatN and Puffbox are both sponsors of WordCamp UK 2011, taking place this weekend in Portsmouth.
12 Jul 2011

e-government

appstore, directgov, gds, wordpress

Public services white paper promises GDS 'app store'

With all the tabloid shenanigans going on yesterday, you’d be forgiven for missing the publication of the new White Paper on Open Public Services – launched complete with a WordPress-based consultation site, developed by Harry Metcalfe’s DXW, with rather cheeky advertising in the source code.

It’s worth noting a couple of references to the Government Digital Service:

7.9 We want to shift the approach of government from ‘public services all in one place’ (focused on how departments want to deliver) to ‘government services wherever you are’ (open and distributed, available where citizens want to access them). To take this forward, the Government Digital Service (GDS) will have the authority across central government to co-ordinate all government digital activity, including encouraging the commissioning of the best user-centred digital services and information at lowest cost from the most appropriate provider. This commissioning process will identify those providers who are the most appropriate to provide content on a particular topic. For example, the Department for Education has already taken this approach in funding some of its parenting support services through the voluntary and community sector – these online services provide in-depth counselling and intensive support as well as information and guidance.

7.10 The GDS will develop a digital marketplace, opening up government data, information, applications and services to other organisations, including the provision of open application program interfaces for all suitable digital services. All suitable digital transactions and information services will be available for delivery through a newly created marketplace, with accredited partners, including charities, social enterprises, private companies and employee-led mutuals, all able to compete to offer high-quality digital services. In opening up this marketplace, the GDS will establish appropriate processes and consider a ‘quality mark’ to ensure that public trust in information and public sector delivery is maintained. This may go as far as including quality assurance of third-party applications.

Two concise paragraphs, but several interesting points in there.

The reference to ‘public services all in one place’ is a rather cheeky, and somewhat barbed reference to Directgov’s strapline, and is surely another nail in its coffin – well, in its current form anyway. I’m surprised to see the word ‘encourage’ for GDS’s role, as opposed to something stronger; and it’ll be intriguing to see how the trinity of best quality, lowest cost (note use of the superlative) and ‘most appropriate supplier’ plays out in practice.

The second paragraph puts some flesh on the bones of the ‘government app store’ notion. But the more I think about it, the more uneasy I get about the idea of QA’ing third-party applications. If an application hasn’t been approved, is it still permitted? Who exactly is doing the approving? Would the approval process become a bottle-neck?

I hate to bring it all back to WordPress (again), but it’s the best example I can personally think of, of a rapid, cheap and non-traditional solution being widely successful in government over the past few years. We – a word I use in the widest possible sense, covering myself and many other (rival?) suppliers – made our case, we delivered, and we didn’t let people down. The only approval we needed was the recommendation of the previous client.

We didn’t need no stinking badges. And if we’d have had to wait for delivery of our badges before being taken seriously, none of it would ever have happened.
11 Jul 2011

e-government

cabinetoffice, downingstreet, wordpress

Downing Street redesigned

Very quietly last week, Downing Street launched a new design for number10.gov.uk – but to my own great relief, and (happily!) contrary to my prediction of last December, it remains very much on WordPress.

Visually, I personally think it’s a great improvement, with bold use of the iconic 10, now complemented by the lion door-knocker. It looks a lot more head-of-statey: with the central alignment of the ‘logo’, and the capitalised primary navigation, I can’t help thinking of the White House a bit… but maybe that’s just me. It’s also nice to see a non-standard font in use – the free PT Serif.

One of the new site’s most striking aspects is the way it seeks to represent government policy across departments – see, for example, this FCO page. If we didn’t know that BIS’s Neil Williams has only just started looking at this area, you’d be left wondering if this was the next stage of the Alphagov vision, with No10 taking control of all policy presentation. These pages look like WordPress pages (or a similar custom post type), with the sidebar news stories being pulled in automatically via tags (or a similar custom taxonomy).

And it’s intriguing to see Prime Ministerial initiatives being represented up-front: ‘TAKE PART’ is one of the handful of primary nav headings, and includes some very Cameron-y elements (which one wouldn’t previously have expected to see on the No10 site):

Apart from the animating slideshow (which in my mind doesn’t count, somehow) there’s no actual ‘news‘ content on the homepage, and not that much of Cameron himself – which might be indicative of a change of target audience, away from the Westminster Village? And whilst static icon-based links point out to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, I note the virtual disappearance of video content from the site: no Number10 TV, not even a YouTube link. (Although to be fair, it’s still there on the sitemap.)

The front end doesn’t give much away, in terms of what lies behind (boo! not fair!); but I sense there’s a fair bit of hard-coding going on in certain page templates, not least because the source code is very neat. Plus the page generation times, as reported by WP Super Cache in the source code, also look extraordinarily quick… usually measured in hundredths of seconds, which is impressive by anyone’s standards.

My only criticism – and it’s a very mild one at that – is that there seem to be a few missed opportunities to do things ‘the WordPress way’. The primary navigation, for example, looks hand-crafted, where it could surely have been done as a custom menu – meaning changes are dependent on the technical team editing the theme code, rather than the editors using the admin interface. But we’re mainly talking about the potential for things to be problematic in due course, rather than already causing problems already.

I understand it’s been done almost entirely in-house: in which case, hearty congratulations to the Cabinet Office team. I never doubted you. 🙂
8 Jul 2011

company, politics, technology

coopparty, jonworth, wordpress

Puffbox develops new web platform for the Co-operative Party

It takes a special kind of political anorak to even know that the Co-operative Party exists; so you might be surprised to learn that it’s actually the fourth largest political party in Westminster.

Formed in 1917, it has been in a permanent electoral pact with Labour since 1927. In the current Parliament, 29 of Labour’s 250-odd MPs were actually elected as Labour & Co-operative candidates – including one Ed Balls. A good number of other Labour MPs are paid-up members of the Party, but aren’t actually sponsored by it. It depends on the Co-operative Group – yes, as in corner shops, banking, funerals, etc – for a large part of its funding.

And since I have a ‘loyalty card’ for my local corner shop, I suppose I should formally declare an interest: I am a part-owner of the Co-operative Group. A very, very, very small part indeed. But technically, still an owner.

For the past few months, Puffbox has been working alongside left-leaning digital specialist Jon Worth to help the Party up its game online. And in doing so, we had to up our own game too: it’s unquestionably the most intricate WordPress build I’ve ever done – with a multisite-based strategy, (double) wildcard DNS, four custom post types, two automated custom taxonomies, and a parent/child theme arrangement, both offering full visual customisation. See what I mean?

To give you some idea of how it all stitches together: each of the Party’s Parliamentarians has a ‘person page’. You can click on ‘People‘ in the navigation bar to see them all, or hover for various filtered views. Say, for example, Members of Parliament. Oh look, there’s Ed Balls.

Click on his name, and you’ll see a ‘person page’. At the top of it are links to his Twitter account, and his personal website. Then there’s a concise biography. And towards the bottom, a ‘snapshot box’ for his latest activity on Twitter, in Hansard, on Flickr, and on his personal website, plus any content on the site itself which mentions him… all populated and updated automatically.

For those interested in the technical side: ‘person’ is a custom post type, with an extra metabox for the various external content sources. There’s a custom taxonomy called ‘role’, which is how we know Ed Balls is an MP. (And of course, each person can have multiple roles: here’s an example.) We pull the tweets in via JSON, to avoid API limiting; the other external data comes via RSS feeds. And of course, there’s a custom display template to stitch it all together. Meanwhile, invisibly, there’s also a people taxonomy on posts, which syncs with any changes to the person record.

And, uh, there’s something similar for areas of policy. But you’ll just have to work that out for yourselves. 🙂

The ‘main’ site will be complemented by a handful of distinct subsites, within the same WordPress multi-site install. There’s still some fleshing-out to be done, but you can see sites for the party in Scotland and Wales starting to come together. They use the same core theme, with the ability to change the background and header images; but will be managed on a day-to-day basis by the Party’s regional operations. Regular readers will recognise the influence of our work with Defra

Visually, it’s not the richest design I’ve ever done, but that’s entirely in keeping with the ethos of a party which doesn’t actually have a logo per se. We’ve kept things nice and simple, concentrating on clarity and ease of navigation. But as it’s turned out, there’s been a lot of very positive feedback about the look and feel, so we’re confident we got it ‘right’ for the client and their audience.

Thanks go to my own co-operators on this project: Simon Wheatley, for his technical assistance and inspiration. Jon Worth, for putting the project together. Martin at the Co-op Party (see his person page), who’s been an absolute star – and is already on his way to becoming a WordPress expert. And finally, to WordPress 3.x, without which none of this would have even been conceivable.
7 Jul 2011

technology

polaroid

The many uses of a Polaroid Pogo printer

I’m amazed quite how much use I’m getting out of the Polaroid Pogo printer I bought out of sheer curiosity on a rainy afternoon a few months ago. Roughly the size of your hand, from wrist to fingertips, it prints photo stickers about the size of a business card. All done via Bluetooth, so there’s no need to even plug it in. Switch it on, send the file over, wait a minute, and bingo.

The quality, frankly, isn’t brilliant. But as the parent of two young girls, we seem to be finding regular excuses to use it. Illustrating school reports, enhancing greetings cards, that kind of thing. So much quicker and easier than printing, cutting out and Pritt-sticking. You’re looking at £30-40 for the printer (although I think I got mine for a bit less?), then about 12p per photo, which right now seems very reasonable.