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

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    Open source advocate's Cabinet Office role

    Liam Maxwell is head of ICT at Eton College, and a Conservative councillor in Windsor & Maidenhead. He co-wrote a 2008 paper for the Tories on ‘Open Source, Open Standards: Reforming IT procurement in Government’, plus the 2010 paper ‘Better for Less‘ for the Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age, in which he declares:

    British Government IT is too expensive. Worse, it has been designed badly and built to last. IT must work together across government and deliver a meaningful return on investment. Government must stop believing it is special and use commodity IT services much more widely. As we saw with the Open Source policy, the wish is there. However, the one common thread of successive technology leadership in government is a failure to execute policy.

    There is at last a ministerial team in place that “gets it”. The austerity measures that all have to face should act as a powerful dynamic for change. Let’s not waste this great opportunity to make British government IT the most effective and least expensive service per head in Western Europe.

    And as from September, according to Guardian Government Computing, he’ll be taking a sabbatical from his day job, and advising the Efficiency and Reform Group [ie Ian Watmore] and the government chief information officer [Joe Harley] ‘on new ideas for the government’s use of technology’.

    Maxwell was the Windsor & Maidenhead councillor who drove the debate a year or so back, on councils switching to Open Document Format (‘OpenOffice’ to you and me, although there’s more to it than that)… with savings in the tens of millions promised. There’s a nice interview with Charles Arthur from last summer, in which he talks through his ideas, with one rather interesting quote in the light of today’s news:

    [Office software procurement is] a dysfunctional market because it’s set by standards which are set at the centre. Only the Cabinet Office can set this standard. It does sound a bit wet [to be waiting for that instead of just doing it in the council] but this is what’s actually stopping it happening.

    A case of being careful what you wish for, perhaps? 🙂

    I find it very hard to find much in Maxwell’s writing that I disagree with; and indeed, you’ll find many similar sentiments through the archives of this very blog, going back several years. It could get very interesting from here.

    Update: it turns out this was announced on the Cabinet Office website last week. They’ve listed the areas he’ll be looking at:

    • develop new, more flexible ways of delivery in government
    • increase the drive towards open standards and open source software
    • help SMEs to enter the government marketplace
    • maintain a horizon scan of future technologies and methods.

    Update 2: Liam is on Twitter, and has just tweeted:

    Sad to be resigning as a councillor http://bit.ly/m09Uhi but its for a good reason http://bit.ly/keH94z

    The new appointment means he has to resign his council seat. He’s also putting his (admittedly rarely updated) personal blog on hold ‘for now’… but with a promise to restart a new blog out of the Cabinet Office.

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    £874,000 on a website that couldn't be rescued?

    From the Telegraph:

    Britain’s human rights quango spent £874,000 on a new website that was scrapped and replaced less than two years later after suffering “grave technical difficulties”, it has been revealed.

    After 18 months of ‘repeated crashes and other failures [which] meant it “could not be restored or used further”’, the story continues, they dumped supplier Parity and switched to ‘a new system which it’s understood was considerably cheaper and remains in place today’. A happy ending of sorts, I suppose.

    Parity still lists the EHRC work on their website – and what do we discover?

    Of course, it’s far from the first time we’ve seen nearly £1m spent on a short-lived website: DIUS (remember them?) spent £953k on a site which barely lasted 2 years, although in their defence, it did actually work.

  • How did I ever cope without BuiltWith?

    Least surprising news of the day… 🙂

    A site I’ve found myself using a lot recently, is BuiltWith.com – several times most days in fact. Basically, you give it a URL, and it churns out a nice list of the web technology the site uses.

    You can go to builtwith.com and enter the URL, like Google; or you can drag their bookmarklet into your web browser interface, to give yourself one-click access to the report on whatever site you’re looking at.

    What I’ve done, though, is add it as a ‘Tool’ within the must-have Web Developer toolbar for Firefox. And if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re well used to that particular add-on. It’s dead easy to configure:

    • On the toolbar, click on Tools > Edit Tools > Add
    • Enter a sensible name, plus a keyboard shortcut if you want one
    • Change the ‘tool type’ from Application to URL
    • Paste http://builtwith.com/? (with the question mark) into the URL box
    • Then press OK, and you’re done

    You’ll now have an option for BuiltWith in your Tools menu, along with services like HTML and feed validation.

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    Transport website relaunched on WordPress (not by us)

    There’s a new website at the Department of Transport; and it’s running on WordPress. Sadly, it’s not one we’ve been involved with; we weren’t even approached, in fact. (I wonder why.) However, there are definite similarities with the work we’ve done for Defra; so we’ll console ourselves with the knowledge that we’ve at least been influential.

    Transport issued a tender document in March, with an explicit requirement for open source-based solutions, specifically either WordPress or Drupal. The target launch date was 20 June, making for an aggressive schedule; and to their great credit, and that of developers Bang Communications, they made it with more than a week to spare.

    I haven’t yet seen a total cost quoted for the work; that will come in due course, of course. But I’ve been told what the budget was, as quoted in the tender document – and I have to say, it was pretty generous. I’ll be keeping a close eye out for the next departmental spending data (as it’ll be well above the threshold); or if any MPs fancy drafting a PQ, that’ll make life even easier.

    The site bears all the hallmarks of a WordPress v3.x build. Multiple subsites being stitched together, as we did for Defra, with liberal use of custom post types and taxonomies. The design is fairly low-key, based on the YUI grid system, with a bit of jQuery front-end gloss, but not too much. It declares itself to be coded in HTML5, but doesn’t make much use of 5’s new features, so there are no rendering problems in older versions of IE (that I’ve spotted myself).

    But there’s one major problem with the site: performance.

    Each page’s source code includes, at the bottom, a statement of how many database queries were required to gather up the information, and how long it took. Naturally, for better user experience, and to keep your server from falling over, you’d be looking to minimise both of these.

    If you look at the homepage, for example, you’ll see it requires over 1,000 queries, and seems to take between 3 and 5 seconds to generate. The News homepage quotes 300-odd queries, and 4-6 seconds. If you then try to filter news items by Minister or topic, you’re looking at as many as 1,800 queries; and I’ve seen times as long as 15 seconds. To put it bluntly, that’s just too much. (By way of comparison: the Defra news page also includes this data at the bottom of its source code: 87 queries, 0.6 seconds.)

    It might be OK if you were then caching the pages, and delivering static copies for a defined period afterwards, hence only taking the hit once per hour (or whatever); but we can see no evidence of that. Each time you refresh a page, you’ll see a different generation time at the bottom. There may be some caching going on that we can’t see from outside; but even then, those high numbers and the often slow response times are ominous.

    You’re looking at a server which is in real danger of falling over as soon as there’s a significant spike in traffic. It doesn’t have to be like that; any WordPress veteran reading this will be thinking of the same couple of plugins, which would help instantly. And you’ll find them with one Google search.

    But that’s enough criticism for now. It is of course great news to see another major government department moving to WordPress. Some may question the timing, given Alphagov’s stated intent of eliminating departmental websites within a year. But if there’s a net saving to the taxpayer, that’s reason enough to go ahead… and a challenge to other departments to do likewise, too.

    Welcome to the world of WordPress, guys. Just sort out the caching, please, before you live to regret it.

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    On government organograms and RDF files (includes free WordPress plugin!)

    There was an initial buzz of excitement yesterday, at the launch of the new data.gov.uk interactive organograms… and then, by teatime, a bit of a backlash. I can see both sides myself. Yes, it’s a very cool rendering of potentially quite dull data, and it’s nice to see it done in javascript (jQuery) rather than Flash… but it’s actually a bit fiddly to navigate through. That isn’t to understate the significance of the achievement, though: such a coordinated leap forward, in both technical and bureaucratic terms, is no small task. And there’s so much to it, most of which is beyond me, that I can’t begin to explain it in depth. Hopefully someone else will oblige.

    As part of the initiative, departments have been instructed to upload raw RDF files to their websites, from which the organograms can be generated… which caused a bit of a problem for one of our clients. But it’s a problem we’re happily able to solve.

    The Wales Office was the first Ministerial department to move everything over to WordPress, back in early 2008; and they’ve been running very happily on it ever since. About a year ago, we helped them build a new Transparency section, which acts as a download area for (mostly) Word and CSV files. It’s all rendered via a custom page template, and managed via the standard WordPress ‘media library’ functionality. Unspectacular perhaps, but quick and easy for all concerned.

    However – when they tried to upload an RDF file, they couldn’t. WordPress has a surprisingly long list of file types it’s prepared to let you upload (look for get_allowed_mime_types() in wp-includes/functions.php): but RDF isn’t on it. So it throws up an error message like this:

    We could upload it as a zip file, which would have the added benefit of reducing the file size by 90-odd per cent… but then the orgchart generator wouldn’t be able to process it. Dilemma.

    But as ever with WordPress, there’s a happy ending to the story. We – by which I specifically mean my technical partner, Mr Wheatley – were able to write a quick plugin to ‘hook’ on to approved filetype list, and stick RDF on the end. Problem solved, file uploaded, everyone happy. You can see the successfully uploaded file here.

    And given that there are a good number of government departments running WordPress sites, including at least one other using WordPress specifically for its transparency information, we thought we’d do the decent thing, and offer it up for others to download. Here you go. There’s no configuration interface needed; just upload it, activate it, and start chucking up RDF files to your heart’s content.

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    Rishi Saha leaving government

    Rishi Saha: pic by gooliver (Flickr CC)

    Rishi Saha, the former digital chief at the Conservative Party who slipped very quietly into the role of Head of Digital Comms at Number10, is on the move again. It’s been announced that he’s joining PR agency Hill & Knowlton, part of WPP, becoming its new ‘Regional Director for Australia, the Middle East, Africa and South & Central Asia’.

    Based in Dubai, he will also ‘be responsible for leading H&K’s digital strategy across Europe and AMEASCA, developing H&K’s global content creation capability and business development with a focus on the emerging markets.’

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    Our new site for London mayoral candidate Mike Tuffrey

    Today saw the launch of Liberal Democrat member of the London assembly, Mike Tuffrey‘s campaign to secure the party’s nomination for 2012’s Mayoral contest. Puffbox has been working with Mike for the last couple of weeks to put together a digital package that’s fairly modest for now, but with scope for expansion depending on how the party membership votes in August.

    There isn’t much to say about the technical side of the new website: it’s a fairly straightforward WordPress custom theme, with posts for timely content, pages for background, and a custom homepage template. There’s an automated photo gallery, where you can access the full-size versions of any images uploaded to the site, but that’s about as clever as it gets. But it does everything it should, and all hangs together nicely.

    The design is a bit of a departure, though: bigger, bolder and more vertical than usual, influenced to a significant extent by iPad apps. I’ve been particularly keen to experiment with presenting the text in columns, using a custom plugin which reclaims the WordPress ‘more’ button (which nobody ever uses). With the initial tranche of content, there aren’t too many examples of this, but you’ll have to trust me; it’s there.

    Of course there are issues with columns on the web: they only really work when there’s ‘the right amount’ of text per page, with the column height fitting the (likely) screen resolution. Of course, this is where the iPad, and indeed the Kindle, benefit: you know exactly what screen size you’ll be dealing with. On the web, there’s no such luxury, so we can only base it on assumptions. But my instinct is that the benefit to readability makes it worth the risk.

    Supporting the website, we’ve sorted out Google Apps accounts for the campaign team; and there’s a Mailchimp-based mailing list, only doing RSS-powered alerts for now, but with scope for specially-written mailshots in due course. Thinking ahead, we’re asking people to indicate where they live in London, which will allow us to run geo-targeted campaigns further down the line.

    Now… thus far, Puffbox has a 100% record with political candidates: everyone we’ve built a site for has been successful in the electoral campaign they were fighting. Mike faces competition for the LibDem candidacy from Lembit Opik, with rumours of one or two others throwing their hats into the ring before nominations close at the end of the week. Of course, if Mike wins this initial contest, you wouldn’t perhaps be too confident about us preserving our perfect record against both Boris and Ken. But Mike’s keen to make full use of online in his campaigning; and his position as the inevitable underdog might give us scope to have some fun with it.

    The result of the candidate selection is (currently) due to be announced on 12 August. Will it be glorious?

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    Microsoft thanks WordPress for dropping IE6 support

    As I noted here a while back, there could be bad news on the way for government people running WordPress sites: the next release of WordPress, version 3.2, will discontinue support for Internet Explorer version 6. Here’s how the new WP dashboard will look, courtesy of Automattic’s Jane Wells:

    Ouch. Now, Microsoft has published its official reaction on the Exploring IE blog – and it might come as a bit of a surprise.

    Last week, WordPress dropped support for IE6 and joined the hundreds of other web sites that are working to move enterprises and consumers alike to a modern browser platform. Thank you! … The additional developer work supporting IE6 and even IE7 is something we would love to see be a thing of the past. More than that, however, is the security concern.

    Of course – and I say this as someone who used to work there – it wouldn’t be Microsoft if there wasn’t a sales message dropped in somewhere; and the blog post turns into a pitch to upgrade to Windows 7 on security grounds. But the point about developer effort is still entirely valid – trust me.

    Out of interest: are any government readers facing a crisis next month, when the upgrade happens? Anyone running websites on WordPress, with only IE6 available to them? (Feel free to contact me directly.)

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    WordCamp UK tickets now on sale

    Tickets have just gone on sale for this summer’s UK WordCamp, to be hosted by the University of Portsmouth in mid-July. If you fancy coming along for two jam-packed days of chat, code and creativity, and you fancy saving yourself a few quid, head over to the site and buy your tickets before 3 June – the price goes up by a tenner after that.

    We’re delighted to confirm that Puffbox is continuing its sponsorship of the event; we’re the only sponsor to have been there since the very beginning.

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    Guardian man is government's new digital director

    I have it on very good authority indeed It’s now been confirmed that the new (£142k pa) Executive Director Digital, filling the post currently held by Chris Chant on an interim basis, and advertised back in April, is to be Mike Bracken – digital director at The Guardian until last week.

    Computer Weekly makes some interesting – and quite exciting – observations about the management culture he built up:

    While GNM has outsourced some IT roles, the company has brought in information architects, analytics and product development managers as a discipline. GNM uses an agile environment for developing web applications and has scrapped project management and business analyst roles to replace them with product managers.

    In fact, he sent a tweet to Steph Gray yesterday which seemed to suggest he sees a similar role for ‘product managers’ in government:

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/MTBracken/status/71234171762262016″]

    To get a flavour of what to expect, fasten your seatbelt and watch this five-minute breakneck presentation on innovation, which he gave to a WPP event last year:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt3IdfdvwSI

    … or this slightly more corporate presentation on deriving benefits from social media, at a Gartner symposium in October. (Fast forward eight minutes to skip the extended intro.) You’ll like what you hear.

    Interestingly, in both presentations, he uses the same quote from Simon Willison. How exciting is it to have a new digital director who actually appreciates that:

    You can now build working software in less time than it takes to have the meeting to describe it.

    Those who know Mike are very complimentary about him: I note William Heath’s description of him last week as ‘one of the UK’s very best new-style CIOs’. On the downside, though, he’s a Liverpool supporter.

    Mike’s personal website is at mikebracken.com – and he’s done a post formally announcing the appointment. He runs a couple of Twitter accounts: you’ll probably want to follow his ‘work’ account, @MTBracken.

    He starts on 5 July.