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

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    Martha's vision taking shape

    [blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/Marthalanefox/status/47206064797659136″]

    Monday saw a meeting of the ministerial working group tasked with considering Martha Lane Fox’s vision of a ‘single domain based on agile web shared web services’… resulting, as I understand it, in across-the-board approval. So it’s with commendable speed that just two days later – to prevent me revealing it first?! 🙂 – the Cabinet Office has announced the creation of the Government Digital Service, created by merging ‘Directgov and the Cabinet Office Digital Delivery and Digital Engagement teams’.

    The Cabinet Office blog post states:

    This new organisation will be the centre for digital government in the UK, building and championing a ‘digital culture’ that puts the user first and delivers the best, low cost public services possible. To deliver this vision and the government’s digital priorities requires a new streamlined, agile organisation and an operating structure with an integrated, flexible team of skilled staff.

    According to FCO’s Jimmy Leach:

    [blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/JimmyTLeach/status/48078117000052736″]

    Things are getting interesting.

  • Conceived in Greater Manchester

    The Automattic gang have produced special t-shirts for the SXSW festival, declaring WordPress’s birthplace to be the festival’s host state of Texas. Which is nice, except that it’s not entirely accurate.

    As regular readers will know, the WordPress project was started by two people: Matt Mullenweg and our own Mike Little. And whilst Matt may have been in Texas when they first discussed starting something, Mike was in Stockport, greater Manchester, England. (In his kitchen, as far as he could recall.) In fact, since it was Mike who said:

    If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing.

    … I’m saying it was all Mike’s idea. 🙂

    Of course, as Matt says in his acknowledgement of Mike’s clarification, it’s all a bit meaningless anyway. But I can’t help feeling it points to something deeper: the UK’s – or Europe’s? – inferiority complex when it comes to tech and innovation. We’re pretty good at this stuff over here too, you know.

  • Cabinet Office's open standards survey

    With some unexpected free time in my schedule for today, I sat down to complete the Cabinet Office’s recently published questionnaire on Open Standards in government. To be perfectly frank, its 120 questions have left me reeling, and nervous.

    Screen after screen of acronyms and document reference numbers – ISO this, BSI that, W3C whatever – which you’re asked to rank as priority, mandatory, recommended, optional, or ‘should not use’. They swing from the insanely detailed to the laughably obvious. At one extreme: I can’t believe more than a handful of people on the planet understand the finer points of ISO/TS 16071:2003 as opposed to ISO 9241-171:2008… and I’m not entirely sure they would be the right people to be making decisions affecting day-to-day hands-on use anyway. At the other: yes, I think JPGs are probably a good image format to use.

    The thing about standards is, even a bad standard is a good standard.

    OK, I’m over-simplifying a little. There might be certain reasons why one particular refinement of XML is better than another for a specific purpose. But broadly speaking, as long as you’re giving me XML, I’m sure I’ll be able to deal with it.

    I don’t think we have the money to spend on librarians and uber-consultants, the only people who’ll really know or care about this stuff, holding talking shops about which particular ISO standard is just right. It’s the absolute opposite of the ‘Agile’ philosophy I thought we were all supposed to be moving to? And what if The Market decides that it prefers a different standard… or more likely, that it just doesn’t care? It should be perfectly possible to deliver well-structured data in whatever format people may require: be this, to take one specific web-related example, HTML4 or XHTML or HTML5 or RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 or Atom or NewsML.

    I can’t help feeling that we’re coming at this from the wrong angle altogether. The problem isn’t with the selection of a particular open standard. The problem comes when government chooses closed standards (er, MS Office?)… or even worse, decides to create standards of its own (eg IPSV).

    The end game on this, I’m convinced, is the centralised provision of open-source-based platforms, which are – by their very nature – standardised and open. Imagine if we had all government news output in a single multisite WordPress instance, and someone somewhere asked to receive material in NewsML. WordPress does a lot of formats ‘out of the box’, but not NewsML. However, WordPress is built with the expectation that you’ll want to add to it. It has an add_feed function, which would let you create a new feed output template, call out whatever data you needed, and drop it into the right place. A few days work to code a plugin, activate it network-wide, and you’re done.

    So Cabinet Office, I’ve answered your questions. You’ll end up with a piece of paper, ranking other pieces of paper in priority order. Will it answer the question? I fear not.

    Oh, and just for the record: neither the SurveyMonkey questionnaire, nor the Cabinet Office website’s page pointing to it, are [at the time I write this] compliant with the 11 year old XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard they both declare, according to the W3C’s validator. I know it’s a cheap shot, but it puts things in some kind of context.

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    Say goodbye to IE6, urges Microsoft site

    Internet Explorer v6 is the bane of any web developer’s life. You can build a web page, and it’ll look beautiful in every other browser – but then you look at it in IE6, and it’s a mess. Without getting too technical, IE6 interprets the web’s CSS design code in ways which are irrational, unexpected, illogical and sometimes just plain wrong. If it could simply be wiped off the face of the internet, the web developer’s job would be much easier – and frankly, projects would be cheaper, and prettier too.

    Microsoft has never made a secret of its desire to move people to more recent versions; but now, with IE6 approaching its tenth birthday – although strictly its birthday isn’t until late August – and IE9’s release imminent, they’ve started a proactive campaign to shame people into upgrading. IE6Countdown.com displays a map showing percentage market share for IE6 worldwide; and invites you to join its campaign ‘to get Internet Explorer 6 to 1%.’ In all likelihood, Microsoft is seeing this as an opportunity to sell upgrades to Windows 7 – but that doesn’t undermine the validity of the message.

    I know some of the straggling government departments have finally upgraded in recent months; so, it’s over to you, gang. Which departments are still on IE6… despite Microsoft’s own advice, and indeed, the advice of government’s own IT security campaign?

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    Downing Street behind open source push

    Computer Weekly’s public sector IT blog reports from Monday’s ‘Open Source Integrator Forum’, described bluntly as:

    a dressing down in which the big 12 systems integrators, who supply 80 per cent of all government IT, were told firmly that they were preventing the government from carrying out its policy and had better change their ways.

    The Home Office’s Tariq Rashid, described as ‘helping the Cabinet Office unearth the reasons why systems integrators have ignored the government’s open source policy’, told CW ‘there had been more pressure from Number 10 over open source than there had been from the Cabinet Office’. (A statement backed up by Sirius IT, who were also in attendance.)

    Slides from the event name Qamar Yunus (ex Identity & Passport Service) as the ‘Government Open Source Lead’, and refer to a Government Open Source Advisory Panel – although I’ve seen no membership list for the latter.

    CW has also published the government’s draft Assessment Model for open source, and list of ‘approved’ open-source software – although the latter in particular is very draft indeed. Take this entry on ‘web’ as an example:

    To be honest, it’s slightly depressing that the best example they could quote for Drupal or Joomla or WordPress (note: small ‘p’) was the White House – with a question mark, for some reason – since our own head of government blazed the trail for use of open source well before; and indeed, Cabinet Office themselves recently shifted over to Drupal. That’s before we get on to the countless examples of each one elsewhere in HMG and on its fringes. You’d almost think they never read my blog.

    But thankfully, there’s a direct quote from Tariq Rashid:

    If the Cabinet Office starts producing an assessment model to separate good software from bad software, looking at things like support, how established is it, is there good governance around development, these sorts of things. That would enable customers to say, ‘We want to use WordPress and according to this model it’s not going to fail’.

    When Chris Chant spoke at UKGovCamp, my question to him was: we’d heard various commitments to make greater use of open source over 3-4 years; what was going to be different this time? Well, to his team’s great credit, this is something we haven’t had before – in effect, an ‘app store’ of recommended open source applications. To anyone who knows the territory, it’s embarrassingly basic – but what matters is the Cabinet Office logo which will go on the front cover.

    To be completely frank, though, there’s a major concern for me in all this: the prospect of big ugly consultancies deciding to sell open source into government, in precisely the same way they’ve sold proprietary-based solutions beforehand. If we’re seeing open source as a way of not paying expensive software licenses – then yes, on one level, it is. But there’s so much more to it than that.

    Open source, fundamentally, is about the people. And it’s not just geeks in their back bedrooms these days: it’s about serious, commercial, profitable businesses – but businesses with a very different mindset to the conventional IT consultancy. Agile, innovative, collaborative, JFDI, call it what you will: I don’t often see examples of this approach among the major SIs.

    Have a look, for example, at the speaker lists at the BCS Open Source Specialist Group‘s two meetings on the subject: one earlier this week, one next week. Atos Origin, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu. Can we expect behemoths like these to offer the kind of response – and frankly, the total price tag – that you’d get from a small operation (yes, like Puffbox, but other suppliers are available) with roots already deep in open source? I’m afraid my own recent experience says not.

    This is the right thing to be doing. I’m afraid I remain to be convinced that these are the right people to be doing it.

  • WordPress v3.1: another step forward

    It’s taken quite a while to get WordPress version 3.1 out the door; and at first glance, you’d be forgiven for wondering quite why. You’ll run the upgrade process, then struggle to find what exactly has changed. In fact, there are a few significant – or more accurately, potentially significant – enhancements in this release; but a lot of the changes are fairly superficial or ‘nice-to-have’s.

    First thing you’ll notice is the new Admin Bar along the top edge of the screen, when you’re logged in – giving instant access to the admin dashboard, an ‘edit this page’ button (where applicable), and so on. In fact, as Puffbox clients will testify, I’ve been coding something similar into all my design work for years… but I’m happy to admit, theirs is better than mine. If you haven’t had the benefit of such a feature before, you’ll soon grow to love it.

    Then there’s Post Formats, which have caused some confusion among the developer community. These allow you to classify different types of post – for example: ‘status’, ‘image’, ‘gallery’, ‘quote’ – which can then be presented slightly differently by your theme. It’s really just a standardised taxonomy, meaning – in theory, and in the future – you can switch between themes, and maintain the differentiated presentation. But you’ll only be given the option to choose a Format if your theme explicitly enables it, and few do at this point.

    The feature with the greatest potential is multi-taxonomy queries – which, to borrow Simon Wheatley’s example from UKGovCamp, would allow you to find all pictures of cats (being a type of animal) wearing hats (being a type of clothing). This has been possible to a certain extent for some time, by hacking URLs, but now it’s official – and done properly.

    In simple terms, this lets you run WordPress more like a database than a blog – you might be a car dealer listing cars for sale, with drop-down menus to let people search by manufacturer, fuel type, size of engine, colour, number of doors, number of seats, etc etc – or any combination thereof.

    But to make use of this functionality, you’ll need to be a serious developer: no plugin is going to be able to lay this on a plate for you. So it’s continuing the trend I observed at v3.0’s release:

    But the addition of that extra power, underneath the surface, effectively creates a new higher echelon of ‘WordPress guy’. It becomes a platform on which you can do some very serious development, if you know what you’re doing. Graphic designers calling themselves WordPress experts might want to re-evaluate.

    There are a few things to look out for, particularly if you’re running a multi-site setup: there’s now a whole new ‘network admin’ view, replacing the ‘Super Admin’ menu box from 3.0 – you’ll find it by clicking the ‘Network Admin’ link in the top right corner. It’s definitely prettier and slicker once you’re into it; but I bet it’s going to confuse a lot of Super Admin users initially.

    There’s a new behaviour to adding links within your own site: you’re now presented with an ajax-powered search facility, meaning (in theory) an end to copying-and-pasting URLs from another browser tab. Quite nice I suppose, but it still just results in a hard-coded URL within the text: no DOIs or anything.

    And it’s good to see further refinement of custom post types and taxonomies. For example, prior to v3.1, there was no built-in way to present an archive list of custom post types – a curious omission, but it’s resolved now, and should encourage more developers to make use of this functionality.

    But as you’ll see from the detailed list of changes at wordpress.org, most of the changes fall under the heading of general housekeeping: a cosmetic tweak here, an update to an included software package there.

    Matt Mullenweg declares this release ‘more of a CMS than ever before’ – and of course, he’s right. We’re definitely edging further and further into ‘proper’ CMS territory; but, I think, still clinging on to the ‘I just want to write something’ mentality from WordPress’s early days as a humble blogging platform.

    It’s another step forward. Not perhaps the great leap forward that v3.0 represented, but that’s absolutely fine. The best just keeps getting a little better.

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    Another Cabinet Office WP consultation

    Has somebody at the Cabinet Office just discovered WordPress, or something? I see they’ve also just launched a WP-based site to consult on the proposed Public Data Corporation. This time, the site is running in the most vanilla, out-of-the-box configuration imaginable – using the TwentyTen theme, and without even tinkering with the sidebar widgets (albeit with the addition of Disqus for comments). It’s hosted at MediaTemple… despite the fact that the Office has its own hosting capability at Amazon, as demonstrated by today’s Public Bill Stage pilot.

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    Can Cabinet Office's WordPress-based commentable bills make a difference?

    The Protection of Freedoms Bill, published last week, has become the first piece of proposed legislation to go through a ‘public reading stage‘, as promised in the Coalition Agreement. The No10 website says it’s ‘the first step towards meeting the Coalition’s commitment to introduce a public reading stage for all Bills, allowing the Government to test the technology and ensure the system works well.’ And the technology in question is WordPress.

    It’s a fairly straightforward presentation, using a custom WordPress theme bearing the catchy name ‘Cabinet Office Commentable Document (non-core)’, produced by the Cabinet Office’s in-house digital team – in double-quick time, so I’m hearing. The government branding is very understated indeed, with only an HM Government logo, in the bottom right corner. It looks like it’s all based on pages, as opposed to posts, with a jQuery-based expand/collapse menu (which I suspect has been hard-coded) in the left margin. It’s sitting on the same Amazon account as the main Cabinet Office site.

    Can it work as an idea? I’m not convinced. The commenting technology’s certainly up to it, as we’ve proven time and again. But legislation isn’t exactly written to be read; you don’t have to dig too deeply into the site to find unintelligible passages, with every other sentence cross-referencing another subsection of another chapter of another Act… and no hyperlinking (even though all the source material should presumably be available in legislation.gov.uk). I just can’t imagine how an ordinary member of the public could be expected to make sense of it.

    A starting point would be a ‘diff’ tool, similar to a programmer’s code editor – showing the ‘before’ and ‘after’, with changes highlighted. If you’ve never seen one, they look something like this:

    One example: the open source tool, Meld

    … instantly allowing you to see where text has been added and/or changed, and how. Wikipedia offers something similar: if you click on ‘View history’ for any page, you’re able to compare various past versions of the page, and see the changes highlighted (albeit in a less-than-friendly fashion). And indeed, back in 2007 MySociety proposed a diff tool (of sorts) as part of their Free Our Bills campaign.

    Without this, I can’t imagine many ordinary people going to the trouble of decoding what’s actually being proposed… meaning I can’t see it doing anything to widen participation, if that’s the intention. So whilst it’ll be useful as a pilot exercise, I fear it’ll only prove the difference between green/white papers, which are text documents intended to be read; and bills, which just aren’t.

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    White House contributing back to open source projects

    Just over a year ago, I noted how the French government had contributed code back to the open source community, enhancing the Thunderbird email client for military purposes. I failed to not(ic)e that a few months later, the White House had done likewise – contributing a number of new modules for Drupal, based on development work done for its own Drupal-based site. And this week, they’ve announced the release of a few more modules:

    Today’s code release constitutes a few modules we developed for ourselves, as well as a recognition of our sponsoring the development of modules widely used in the Drupal community, which improve the administration of our site in a variety of ways… We also recognize that there are really good projects already embedded in the Drupal community and reached out to help support their development.

    In other words: not only are they recognising that off-the-shelf open source code is good enough for deployment at the highest conceivable levels… not only are they recognising the opportunity to build on top of it, to suit their own requirements… but they’re also getting actively involved with existing projects, in this case Open Atrium:

    Prior to launching its internal site on Open Atrium, the White House helped strengthen the platform’s core by investing in key modules … Investment like this increases efficiencies gained by government agencies utilizing a common platform like Open Atrium … It’s really exciting that the White House team is so committed to giving back to open source communities with code contributions and smart investments like this.

    It’s amusing to see the deliberate, repeated use of the word ‘investment’ in the piece: clearly, it’s in the interests of the product’s backers to do so, but I don’t think it’s an unfair choice of words. It’s public money being spent for greater long-term benefit.

    I don’t have a problem with open source being initially ‘sold’ into government on the £0.00 pricetag: and in the case of WordPress at least, and probably also Drupal, that argument was won some time ago. We’re now entering the second phase, as departments realise that it can be customised to suit their specific needs: we’re moving from ‘can it do this?’ to ‘can it be made to do this?’. But the campaign won’t be complete until we’re going full-circle, contributing back to the projects we’re using.

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    Tories' new packaged website service

    I see the Conservatives have followed in the footsteps of both Labour and the LibDems, in offering a ‘website in a box’ service to local constituencies. Known as Bluetree – not to be confused with website developers bluetree.co.uk* – it’s based on Drupal (plus multi-site management add-on Aegir) and was developed by the UK’s self-proclaimed Drupal specialists, ComputerMinds. It promises ‘state-of-the-art technology … at a cost well below market rate’ – although there’s no (publicly visible) indication of precisely what that cost is.

    It’s taking a little while to find its feet, judging by the first few examples I’ve come across – including WitneyConservatives.com, the constituency of one David Cameron. But the basic structure is obvious: about, events, news, people. Everything’s on brand, naturally, with promo boxes for the (national) party’s Twitter and Facebook accounts; and there’s a nice little arrangement, presumably RSS-based, to pull national news in from conservatives.com. The design is clear, if a little lacking in warmth.

    It’s a reasonable idea, but they need to be careful not to fall into the same traps as the Labour and LibDem party offerings: both of which have had widespread takeup, driven primarily by rock-bottom pricing, without winning the hearts and minds of party members and activists. Remember this tirade against Labour’s retained agency, Tangent? And I’m told there’s disappointment among LibDems at Prater Raines’s last relaunch, although it hasn’t seeped into the public domain.

    In case you’re wondering, the Tories’ last grand Drupal project, myconservatives.com, has been displaying an ‘under construction’ message for at least the past few weeks.

    * I did get in touch with bluetree.co.uk to ask if they were aware of this; but didn’t get a reply in time to include it here.