Puffbox

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

2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005

Code For The People company e-government news politics technology Uncategorised

api award barackobama barcampukgovweb bbc bis blogging blogs bonanza borisjohnson branding broaderbenefits buddypress budget cabinetoffice careandsupport chrischant civilservice coi commentariat commons conservatives consultation coveritlive crimemapping dailymail datasharing datastandards davidcameron defra democracy dfid directgov dius downingstreet drupal engagement facebook flickr foi foreignoffice francismaude freedata gds google gordonbrown governanceofbritain govuk guardian guidofawkes health hosting innovation internetexplorer labourparty libdems liveblog lynnefeatherstone maps marthalanefox mashup microsoft MPs mysociety nhs onepolitics opensource ordnancesurvey ournhs parliament petitions politics powerofinformation pressoffice puffbox rationalisation reshuffle rss simonwheatley skunkworks skynews statistics stephenhale stephgray telegraph toldyouso tomloosemore tomwatson transparency transport treasury twitter typepad video walesoffice wordcamp wordcampuk wordpress wordupwhitehall youtube

Privacy Policy

  • ,

    DECC launches staff blogs on WordPress

    Congratulations to the Department of Energy and Climate Change on the launch of their new staff blogs platform; and particular congratulations for choosing the right software to power them. 🙂

    Like other Whitehall blogging initiatives such as those at DFID and FCO (both of whom already have their own group blogs on climate change – here and here respectively), the DECC site sets out to give readers an insight on staff’s day-to-day activity. Four bloggers kick things off: one Minister, Conservative Gregory Barker; and three (relatively senior) staff members.

    On a technical level, it’s not dissimilar to the work I did for DFID, in that although the four contributors’ entries are presented as independent, stand-alone blogs, they’re actually just multiple users writing into a single group blog.

    The work has been done by DECC’s existing digital agency, the Swansea-based S8080. Like their main corporate site, it’s running on a Microsoft IIS server, which may explain the lack of ‘pretty permalinks’ (although it doesn’t have to be like that). There are a few rough edges, and I hope they won’t mind me saying, they’ve done a few things in not very WordPress-y ways: entirely understandable, since they’re primarily a Microsoft-based company. But hey, it’s early days, and I’m sure it’ll all be ironed out soon enough.

    It’s quite a brave initiative on one level: you only have to look at the number of comments typically received by climate-sceptic Telegraph writer James Delingpole – always in the hundreds per post, and often well into the thousands! – to see what they could be letting themselves in for. There’s no explicit comment policy showing on the blog: I only hope they’ve given some thought to how they’ll handle the more confrontational comments they’re likely to receive. DFID’s is a great example to follow, if they need one.

    I know both FCO and DFID feel they’ve got a lot out of their blogging platforms: and I sincerely hope DECC have a similarly positive experience. But it may be a bumpy ride.

  • , ,

    The £585 favicon: explanation and justification

    The Guardian’s Charles Arthur followed up yesterday’s story about the Information Commissioner’s Office paying £585 for a favicon, and has managed to secure something of an explanation of how it reached such a price.

    Though the creation process is quite simple, confirming that it has been done correctly is not: what’s been generated has to be created against a set of “functional specifications” laid out in the contract for the job – colours, sizes, a long array of confirmations quite separate from the task of making the actual item.

    That bumps up the time taken to between two and three “billable hours” for the designer, who works at Reading Room based in Soho – one of the UK’s biggest web agencies, with turnover of £12m and 170 staff whose time is charged at £600 per eight-hour day, significantly lower than many in the business.

    But the favicon can’t now simply be sent to the ICO site ready for uploading. First the company has to get approval from Capita, which has the contract to manage the site, and which may make its own comments about what it thinks, and at the very least has to check that it’s the correct size; and then from Eduserve, which hosts the site and has to check it can in theory be uploaded; and from the Central Office of Information, which manages the ICO contract with Reading Room.

    All in all, getting everyone involved to approve the favicon that has been created means the time taken balloons to a total of nearly seven billable hours – which means Reading Room, as a commercial outfit, charges about £500; add VAT at the rate prevailing in 2010 and you reach £585.

    I’m not entirely convinced by the calculation: I wonder just how long that ‘array of confirmations’ could have been for a favicon; I wonder precisely what input Capita, Eduserv and COI could each have had; and I wonder if the £600-a-day designer was actually the member of a 170-strong company spending 4-5 hours on the phone, valiantly trying to push it live. But that’s beside the point: if £585 is commensurate with the effort Reading Room went to, then they should invoice it. There’s no argument there.

    The wider point here is that it simply shouldn’t have to cost that – as, indeed, Reading Room’s Margaret Manning seems to accept:

    “A lot of government contracts involve outsourcing the IT, which sounds like a great idea in many cases. But if you look at the hoops you have to go through … it can make the amount of time needed by outside organisations just go up and up to get anything done.”

    She thinks there is a culture within government which doesn’t try to reduce spending. Instead, she suggests, there is a culture of fear that something will go wrong whenever something is put on the web, which leads to a belt-and-braces approach that in turn pushes up costs and times above what any commercial organisation would spend.

    But she’s also perplexed by the choices the government has made. “What commercial entity has Capita running its IT?” she asks rhetorically.

    Fair points. And it leaves me wondering… what about those other links in the chain? How much did they bill for their contributions to the process, whatever they were? If Reading Room’s designer is spending 4-5 hours making phone calls, presumably Capita / Eduserv / COI will also be charging for answering the calls? Should we maybe double the £585 figure?

    It boils down to this. Process is an insurance policy. Like any insurance policy, you pay a premium. You decide what level of premium you’re prepared to pay, for what cover, and what level of excess. And if you aren’t happy with the cover or service you receive, you go elsewhere next time.

    If you bring in an insurance broker, you pay him or her a fee – on the understanding that he or she knows the market better than you, and will act on your behalf to ensure you get the best deal. If that doesn’t happen, you get yourself a new broker, or you do it yourself.

    Update: which, actually, makes this tweet from yesterday (which I’d missed at the time) all the more interesting:

    [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/ICOnews/status/33217532274028544″]

  • ,

    Er… how much for a favicon?

    Chins collectively hit the floor this afternoon, as word got round that the Information Commissioner’s Office had paid £585 for the creation of a single 32×32 ‘favicon’ graphic. Oh, and to be fair to them, adding a line to their pages’ HTML header referencing it.

    Mark Bowen used WhatDoTheyKnow to follow up a reference he’d spotted in a document published by the ICO, which doesn’t exactly leave any room for doubt:

    There it is, in black and white

    His enquiry revealed that the work was done by Reading Room, commissioned through COI. In their defence, ICO say:

    The work needed to put the favicon live was complicated by an old environment (which has since been updated) that caused issues and extended the time taken to carry out the work… Whilst there is no recorded information which would [explain the difference between the old environment and the new one that caused the extended time needed] I can confirm that that the old website development environment was upgraded from one server to two.

    … which, on the face of it, wouldn’t seem to have caused any direct ‘issue’ when it came to sticking a graphic in a given folder.

    But we shouldn’t rush to any rash judgments here. Yes, favicons shouldn’t normally take more than 5 minutes (as Mark notes) to produce. And yes, adding a standard line of HTML to reference it should be basic copy-and-paste… if it’s even necessary, which it usually isn’t. But we don’t know the full facts. Yet. The ball’s in your court, RR.

    [blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/simond/status/33191046527586304″]

    Continues…

  • , ,

    WordPress at Dept of Health

    Just a brief post to highlight Stephen Hale’s write-up about WordPress usage at the Department of Health, answering the question I posed in a tweet last week:

    Just how many WordPress based sites is @hmshale running over at @dhgovuk?

    … to which the answer is, one or two more than I had spotted.

    It’s all Steph Gray‘s handiwork, commissioned through Steria, with a child theme of the default Twenty Ten. I’m sure Steph would agree that it isn’t pushing the technology’s boundaries too hard; but it doesn’t need to. Stephen’s team’s needs have been met, allowing them to spin off high-quality subsites, quickly and efficiently, when requirements land on his desk – and indeed, Stephen observes: ‘I think the theme will exceed our expectations for it.’ I look forward to Steph’s write-up of the work; it’s highly unusual for him not to have posted something by now.

    There’s a very interesting sign-off to the piece, too:

    I don’t need to tell you that using a straightforward publishing tool like WordPress is fairly pleasing. Having dipped a toe in, it’s tempting to go a bit further than we originally planned.

    Whatever could he mean? 😉

  • ,
    , , ,

    DWP's Harley takes on CIO role

    Confirmation today of a promotion (of sorts) that’s been rumoured for the last couple of weeks at least: Joe Harley CBE, DWP’s corporate IT director since 2004, on a salary just short of a quarter of a million a year, is to take on the CIO role vacated by John Suffolk.

    As with many of the recent CIO changes, it’s what you might call a reverse job-share: he keeps his DWP job, in which he’s been credited with ‘carv[ing] £1.5 billion from operational costs’. Tony Collins at Computer World UK suggests he won’t be taking any extra salary for the added responsibility.

    But then again, and to put the two roles in some kind of context, Suffolk’s salary was around £210k, as opposed to Harley’s £250k. So it’s debatable as to whether it’s even a step up the ladder.

    The Cabinet Office press release doesn’t say anything to increase my excitement at the news:

    Joe Harley will be able to call upon a dedicated team in the Cabinet Office to implement the Government’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) agenda for data centre, network, software and asset consolidation and the shift towards cloud computing. This will realise financial savings, increase flexibility and reduce development timescales and risk. He will work closely with Chris Chant, the Government’s digital director, and also be able to call upon the commercial, procurement and programme management capabilities in the Cabinet Office to improve the delivery and cost effectiveness of government ICT projects.

    Zzzz. Oops, sorry. Where we we? Ah, yes. You can easily see how he might be perceived, to quote Tony Collins’s piece, as ‘a cut-price part-timer’, and it’s hard to imagine how much spare time he has to devote to these extra responsibilities. But those who know him say he’s an amiable straight talker, as you might expect given his Glasgow roots – Celtic fan, by the way – and he’s certainly done a lot to cut DWP’s IT spending in his time there.

    More interesting, though, is the press release’s reference to the recruitment of a ‘Director of ICT Futures’:

    This role will be responsible for implementing new ways of designing and developing systems using agile methods and skunkworks environments; increasing the drive towards open standards and open source software; change the terrain for SMEs to enter the government marketplace; and maintain a horizon scan of future technologies and methods.

    On the face of it, that’s quite a bold job description. Note the plural skunkworks environments, and the explicit commitment to a ‘drive towards open standards and open source software’. DCMS and DCLG CIO Mark O’Neill has been tasked with driving things forward in those areas up to now, and he spoke at Word Up Whitehall about some of the initiatives he was trying to kick off in that space: this new role should provide some very welcome high-level backup.

  • ,
    , , ,

    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.

  • ,
    , ,

    +++ 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.

  • , , ,

    Chant confirmed as new digital chief

    I’m told that Cabinet Office Efficiency and Reform Group chief Ian Watmore confirmed the appointment of Chris Chant as Director for Directgov and Digital Engagement in an all-staff email earlier this week. No mention of the word ‘interim’, as I understand it. We knew about the Directgov bit… but the news that he’s the new Andrew Stott is something of a surprise, given Chris’s almost exclusively technical background.

    I’m also told that the email contained a commitment to implement the ‘agreed findings’ of the Martha Lane Fox report: although the process of agreeing is still ongoing, so that could mean anything.

    The @dirdigeng Twitter account, incidentally, remains in the possession of Andrew Stott.

  • ,

    My GovCamp wishlist (and yours)

    A week and a half to go until this year’s UK GovCamp, bringing together 150 (ish) people prepared to sacrifice a Saturday to drop by Microsoft’s London offices, and talk about the web, government, and what happens when you force the two together. Messrs Gray and Briggs promise it’ll be ‘so awesome it’s untrue’ – for which I’d love to hold them to account, but I’m not sure how.

    So, anyway, it’s probably time to start thinking about what I can contribute to the event – and what I want to get from it. Let’s tackle those in reverse order.

    I want to hear from the new CEO for Digital. If widely-circulating rumours prove to be correct, the Cabinet Office has just appointed a new Director for Directgov and Digital Engagement. The timing couldn’t be more fortuitous. You couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to introduce yourself, explain your philosophy, and meet the gang. It would seem rather odd not to take it. Sold out or not, I’m sure a ticket could be found.

    I want the Cabinet Office to tell us about Drupal. At the very least, their move to a multisite Drupal environment will make for an interesting case study. But my instinct is that the commitment to Drupal goes deeper than that. I’m expecting Downing Street to cross over to the same platform soon (although I have no inside knowledge on that); and if we’re serious about Martha Lane Fox’s proposals, you have to assume Drupal will be the platform on which the future super-supersite is built. I doubt we’ll get an answer to that specific question, but I’ll be listening out for clues. (Note: 9 people on the guest list from CO.)

    I want to see the meat on the bones. Since the election, there’s been a lot of tech jargon flying around, but not a lot of visible progress. There’s going to be a skunkworks, and an app store, and everything’s going to be in the cloud. Apart from a full house in Buzzword Bingo, what the heck does it all amount to – in real life? Can someone please tell me what a government App Store actually is – specifically, what’s ‘on sale’? who does the selling? and who does the buying? Who are the skunks, and what will they be working on?

    I want to feel reassured. Frankly, the last six months have been a bit slow, with the biggest developments being the departures of senior people – John Suffolk, Jayne Nickalls, Andrew Stott, Matt Tee. We’re all feeling the chill of the spending freeze; there is understandable anxiety at talk of centralisation; and nasty tactics by the Big Consultancies to protect their positions in the long term. This doesn’t feel like an exciting or indeed a safe place to be right now. I hope I’m wrong. Inspire me, gang, please.

    I want our generous hosts, Microsoft to announce that they will use a third-party, open-source HTML rendering engine in future releases of Internet Explorer. Yeah, well. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

    As for what I can contribute…

    Advanced features in WordPress v3.0 / 3.1. Six months ago, I wrote a post about the significance of the new functions in WordPress v3.0:

    The most significant aspects … only become available to those prepared to get their hands dirty in the PHP code. You won’t see them, or perhaps even know they exist, until you start hacking. … And as such, that feels like a subtle departure from the previous scenario, where a ‘power user’ could accomplish almost everything via the WordPress interface and a few plugins.

    In other words, WordPress is now able to do a lot of things that many people won’t ever have heard about, or seen in practice: multisite setups, custom post types, custom taxonomies. And in v3.1, which shouldn’t be more than a few days away, we’ll have complex multi-taxonomy queries and post formats. So I’m wondering if there might be interest in a hands-on demo of some of these concepts – using sites I/we’ve already built, or taking a vanilla WP install, and wreaking some havoc with it.

    Project Defra. I know Simons E & W talked about this at the Word Up Whitehall event, but I know there’s been quite a bit of subsequent interest in it. If there’s interest in a reprise, or perhaps a more detailed hands-on run-through, I’m sure we can oblige.

    Something else. If there’s something you’d like me to lead (or contribute to) a session on, please do let me know.

  • ,
    ,

    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.