Some excitement this morning at the publication of names, positions and salary bands of the civil service’s top 172 earners. A few names familiar to anyone reading this blog – Matt Tee, John Suffolk, Vanessa Lawrence, Alex Allan (one for the old-skool there!) – but mostly, it’s departmental Permanent Secretaries, and very obviously senior staff. The MoD and Cabinet Office have the most people on the lists: the former mainly ‘top brass’, the latter mainly lawyers. In truth, I’m not sure there’s an awful lot to get excited about.
Names, grades, job titles and annual pay rates for most Senior Civil Servants and NDPB officials with salaries higher than the lowest permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale to be published from September 2010.
And according to the Civil Service website, the bottom of the SCS band 1 payscale is £58,200. That’s going to mean the full salary details of many mid-level managers – quite a few of you reading this blog, I’d guess? – being published in full. Brace yourselves.
We’re getting a new committee – to include Messrs Shadbolt, Berners-Lee and Steinberg – tasked with ‘setting open data standards across the public sector and developing the legal Right to Data’; and a promise that full departmental organograms will be published in October.
But perhaps the most intriguing line is the one buried near the bottom of Cameron’s letter: ‘From July 2010, government departments and agencies should ensure that any information published includes the underlying data in an open standardised format.’ Open? Standardised? Would one expect Microsoft Office formats to meet those criteria? I’m not so sure.
Some fine detective work by Nick Booth aka Podnosh, to uncover Birmingham City Council’s report into the development of its reported – but denied – £2.8m website (mentioned previously here). The executive summary’s list of recommendations makes for painful reading:
The new CMS ‘requires further work before it can be said to function effectively for its users.’
‘There are questions over the extent to which the FatWire CMS system was customised unnecessarily.’
‘The system is currently viewed as unstable by the BCC Web Team and requires remedial action.’
‘More needs to be done before the Council’s stated [accessibility] policy is achieved.’
‘requires a look more in keeping with the vibrant city which Birmingham is. Navigation and design could be improved as part of this process.’
All that time, all that money… and it still sounds like there are significant problems with the fundamentals. Ouch.
In the comments on Nick’s post, Will Perrin makes a daring – albeit, I’d suggest, a bit impractical – proposal:
there has to be a strategic communications and business case case for the council to cut its losses, ditch the site, write off the contrators, publish all the inevitable embarrasing internal emails and adopt BCC DIY, the subsitutue site built by volunteers in a few days reusing the council content. this would gain the council and Birmingham remarkable credit around the web as a world first and most importanly, give citizens and staff an easy to use reliable website. could probbaly be done beneth the EU tendering limit. the council leaders could speak on platforms around the world about brimingham’s crowd sourced web miracle.
But it’s not all bad news in Brum. The ultra-cheap WordPress-based BirminghamNewsroom.com site (covered here) was recognised this week at the Local Government Association’s Reputation Awards. And rightly so.
Out of the blue last week, I got a call from COI: was I available for an immediate, rapid turnaround WordPress job? I was a bit startled, and detail was lacking; but since this was precisely the kind of rapid-response thinking I’ve been trying to foster around WordPress for a couple of years, I couldn’t really say no.
As it turned out, the project in question was the Coalition Programme for Government: and the mission was to build a commentable version of it, by the next morning. COI’s initial proposal was to use Steph’s Commentariat as a base; but given the document’s structure, it didn’t feel like a good fit. Plus to be honest, I knew I’d be more comfortable working with my own code, as opposed to unpicking Steph’s – and time was too tight.
The theme came together fairly quickly, helped in no small part by the source document’s fairly plain design – which I basically mimicked, with a couple of tweaks for better web usability. Extracting the text from the supplied PDF was excruciating, as you’d expect. But by the time I got to bed at about 2.30am, having barely left the keyboard since lunchtime, the site was ready, and my part of the work was basically done. It went live at 9:30 the next – well, technically the same – morning.
Now… I’m going to skip over the next bit, because I’m not the right person to tell the story. Suffice to say, people came in their many tens of thousands. And although measures had been taken to handle the expected load, the platform wasn’t ready for quite that volume of interest.
But now, a couple of days older and wiser, the site has been re-enabled: and the comments are starting to come in. This in itself presents some interesting challenges: the document is, by its very nature, more party-political than most, and the comments will be too. The civil service’s usual get-out clause – about the government being democratically elected, on the basis of its manifesto (singular) – doesn’t really work this time. Thankfully, applying the moderation policy is someone else’s problem.
Of course it’d be nicer if things had gone perfectly smoothly on launch day. To some extent, we’ve missed the boat in terms of the immediate wave of interest; but arguably, the comments might be more considered, with the benefit of a weekend to reflect and cool off. (Well, not ‘cool off’ given the mini-heatwave, but you know what I mean.)
And regardless of what went wrong, there’s still a great story to tell, in terms of what went right. An interactive document, designed and coded from scratch, and delivered by bedtime. That’s why we love WordPress.
I’ve written here before about the British National Party’s website, and its impressive use of WordPress – and more recently BuddyPress, the add-on which turns it into Facebook. So it’s only fair that I note how things have changed in the past few weeks: the site now appears to be running on Drupal, and has – for now at least – abandoned most of the social features which made it so interesting.
The circumstances of the migration seem somewhat, well, chaotic. Webmaster Simon Bennett reportedly pulled the website down a couple of days before polling day – why? It very much depends which account you read. Intellectual property infringement, personal vendettas, a jar of Marmite, commission payments, far-leftist collaboration, a South West Conspiracy… make of it what you will. I’m staying well out of it.
Point one: producing documents is hard work. Producing documents in government circles is even harder. Too hard.
I remember once hearing of another European government – Denmark, was it? – where they had a policy that documents and publications had to be closed down two days before publication. In the UK, we have allowed ourselves to get into a habit of last-minute, indeed last-second revisions.
We need to break that habit; but until we do, and it’s going to take a very long time, we should be taking other steps to make production simpler. Unless something has to be in the process, and that may have to include ministerial whim – it should be eliminated.
Point two: design is expensive – very expensive. Don’t get me wrong: it’s often money well spent. But it soon adds up. And the country just doesn’t have the spare cash to keep on changing government departments’ branding, or giving each individual document its own colour scheme.
Point three: the NHS, the BBC, London Transport. All British success stories, recognised internationally. All applying rigidly consistent branding. Could the two be connected?
All of which leads me to the conclusion that it’s time Britain – or more accurately, Whitehall – seriously considered the notion of a common government brand for all communication. And right now, we have both an opportunity, and an incentive.
Designer Paul Robert Lloyd summed the situation up beautifully last year in this blog post reviewing other countries’ common governmental branding. He could also have looked at numerous other countries too: in fact, if you look across the major industrialised nations, the UK’s design anarchy is the exception rather than the rule. (Almost as interesting as Paul’s post are the comments which follow – indicating a sense that the design community would actually welcome it on an aesthetic level too.)
We have a new government, and we’re (apparently) going to have it for another five years – maybe ten, maybe fifteen. We have a completely new set of faces at the Cabinet table, none of whom will have strong attachments to what has gone before (good point Jeremy). There is a desire in the population to start things afresh. And the new administration needs symbolic measures which say ‘look how we’re eliminating all that wasteful government spending of the past’.
It’s an idea whose time has come, and will not come again for some time.
The biggest surprise about the transition to the new coalition administration is how few surprises there actually were. A quick tour of the departmental websites reveals, for the most part, the exact same websites that were there before – albeit a little lighter on content, and with new faces in the About Us section. It’s all gone commendably smoothly.
But one or two departments have taken advantage of the situation to revamp their web presences: and it’s been our pleasure to assist with one of these already – with more, perhaps, to follow.
In the run-up to Polling Day, we were asked by COI to provide cover for any ’emergency’ web building which might result from the arrival of a new administration. Steria provided a hosting environment, with WordPress MU pre-installed; and I worked with Zed1’s Mike Little to develop a theme which could be deployed and managed centrally, ideally very rapidly – but still be easily customisable for each individual site which used it.
In the end, there weren’t any major Machinery of Government changes which required it: but Defra recognised the opportunity, and are using it as a base on which to start rebuilding their corporate website. They’ve worked with Puffbox on a few WordPress-based microsites already this year, so it’s familiar territory for them – and in truth, I think it’s been coming for a while.
The theme is fairly plain, sober and generic: inevitably, given that we had literally no idea who might need to use it, or how. There’s a rather nice homepage carousel, managed via the WP media library; a widget-ised sidebar and ‘fat footer’; plus special page menus at the top and bottom. It makes for quite a nice little site: certainly enough to get things started.
But whilst the design itself might not win awards, the behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty smart. We’ve enabled WordPress’s ‘custom header’ functionality on the theme: users simply need to create a graphic of predefined dimensions, upload it into WP, and it’ll be used as a full-width banner across the top (with the search form and – optionally – department name overlaid). In Defra’s case, they’ve gone for a fairly plain black logo on white; but it could have been a lot more creative if they’d wanted. When we’ve tried this in test, we’ve found it can produce quite dramatically different ‘feels’ to the theme.
And then there’s the colour palette. The theme’s style.css file avoids defining most of the colours used on the page. Instead, there’s an options page in the WordPress backend, where you can enter the colours to be used for specific page elements: links, the ‘blobs’ in the sidebar and ‘fat footer’, and so on. These are saved in the database table of options for that specific blog only; and the custom CSS gets added to the top of each page as it gets generated. (It’s effectively an evolution of the work I did for BIS on Science & Society, but it takes the concept to a whole new level, and opens up all sorts of possibilities.)
But of course, the most significant aspect is the centrally managed hosting environment, and the official recognition of WordPress as a suitable tool for the job. Precisely what I’ve been proposing on these pages for ages. And you know what? I think it actually worked.
The BBC published a very nicely balanced, sober article yesterday by Brian Wheeler, noting the ‘web revolution sweeping Whitehall‘. It’s been widely retweeted around the e-gov community, and is being seen as highly complimentary of civil service efficiency.
Which makes it all the more curious to see the pictures they’ve chosen to illustrate the story: and the presumably humorous captions added beneath them.
As you may or may not know, I was the individual responsible for the FCO web presence during those formative years. I designed and built every page of the 1997 site with my own two hands; and led the development of the 2000 (actually, 1998) site. And I’m going to defend them.
The 97 site was redesigned, top to bottom, during purdah… and launched on the morning after the election. Never mind ‘few frills’: its design was pretty close to cutting edge at the time. That image of Munch’s The Scream was actually an animated GIF, which morphed into a globe – OK, maybe that was a bit pretentious on reflection. We even had RealAudio clips of Robin Cook’s comments on arrival at King Charles Street, thanks very much. Grr.
The 98 site had a hell of a lot more than ‘a dropdown menu!’ (sic). In fact, it was absolutely groundbreaking, internationally speaking: and it had more functionality than the majority of Whitehall departments’ sites have now. Actually, if it launched now, it would still be one of the top handful.
You could register to receive email alerts, based on news items ‘tagged’ with certain policy areas, or updates to country Travel Advice notices. And the list of latest news on the homepage was then personalised according to those same preferences: so you’d instantly see news items of interest to you, and a chronological list of changes to country Travel Advice for countries you cared about.
On the back end, it was the first in government to use a web-based content management system – a custom-built thing, courtesy of a truly heroic developer called Ian Lathwell at Bates Interactive (later known as XM London). And if you’re not impressed by that, maybe I should tell you about the several large Whitehall departments which still – a dozen years later! – haven’t evolved that far. We had a simplified markup language – […] for bold, {…} for italic – which was flexible enough for our purposes, and yet simple enough to explain to those who had never seen the web. Nothing too extravagant, but it just worked. We won enough awards to justify a trophy cabinet.
And you won’t believe how little we paid for it. Buy me a coffee and I’ll tell you.
So, less of the smart-alec captions, Mr/Mrs/Miss BBC Production Assistant. Thank you.
It’s worth noting that only Hague and Pickles have been active since polling day; and judging by one recent tweet, Pickles seems intent on maintaining pre-poll levels of activity. I wonder how many others will restart… has Twitter served its purpose, now they’ve been re-elected?
Some of the senior Tories have made frequent contributions to the Conservatives.com site’s Blue Blog – among them David Cameron and Eric Pickles.
The case of Sir George Young is worthy of special mention: his ‘on a lighter note’ writing goes back as far as 1999. And whilst it wouldn’t really meet the definition of a ‘blog’ – no feed, no commenting, etc – he surely deserves some credit for getting started so early. And indeed, for publishing his full constituency diary, ribbon-cutting by ribbon-cutting!
Update: Although not strictly Cabinet, it’s also worth noting reports that the Conservatives’ head of press, Henry Macrory is to take ‘the same role at Downing Street’ (although his Twitter biog hasn’t yet been updated). Henry has been a prolific tweeter, and as you might expect from someone in his position, they’ve usually been rather partisan in nature. Can’t quite see that continuing somehow, especially not the anti-Clegg stuff.
Last Christmas, I decided to ‘crowdsource’ my wishlist. As a well-settled man in my late 30s, there wasn’t much (in the price range!) that I really wanted; so I decided to look down the various Amazon bestseller lists, and choose anything with even a modicum of appeal at the £10-20 mark. I ended up with a list of things I’d probably never have chosen. But by and large, they’ve been excellent.
One item was the XMI X-mini II audio speaker. It’s about the size of a tangerine, with a standard 3.5mm audio jack and a mini-USB socket for recharging the internal battery. And when you unscrew its two halves, it opens up concertina-style into a speaker with a surprising amount of welly.
I wasn’t sure how I’d find myself ever using it. But it’s proving useful in all sorts of circumstances: be it plugging into the iPod Touch for some bedtime podcast listening, or following live TV in the kitchen via the BeebPlayer Android app, or – most useful of all – plugged into a secondary PC in the office, allowing me to listen to streamed audio/video coverage of the week’s political developments.
The Amazon write-up promises 11 hours of playback: if anything, I’d say it feels like longer. I’ve only had to recharge mine a couple of times in the past few months – although of course, I’m not using it continuously 24/7. And besides, it seems to charge up very quickly.
For £14, I have no hesitation in recommending it very, very highly. You might not think you’ve got a use for it: but I bet you find one. Or several.
One way or another, it’s going to be a momentous week for UK government. A lot of people will be leaving their Whitehall offices on Thursday evening, not quite sure who they’re going to be working for – in terms of the boss, and the organisation – on Friday morning. I’ve had calls from literally all my government clients over the past week or so, just checking that I was going to be around in case of changes needing to be made. And that’s before we get into the short-term chaos of any large-scale departmental reconfiguration.
All of which makes it a good moment for a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for some time now, on the subject of WordPress in government.
I’ve been banging the WordPress drum up and down Whitehall since late 2007. At first, it was small tactical builds: the Darzi NHS Review in November, followed by the Wales Office in February 08. From there, over the road to Downing Street, and thence to half of central government departments – thanks in no small part to Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme, first published in February 09.
So what exactly is it about WordPress in particular, that makes it so attractive for government in particular?
Cuts out (the worst excesses of) procurement: In my experience, procurement teams are very good at explaining why their role is crucial, and why they need to be invited to all your meetings. But when the best available product is available free of charge, you can instantly cut out a large portion of your project schedule.
Cheaper and friendlier suppliers: So far at least, WordPress has been the domain of the small-scale agency, or even the solo operator. We don’t have tiers of business analysts and project managers. We don’t have CMS solutions we built at significant expense several years ago, from which our product executives are trying to milk every last penny of profit. Generally speaking, the guy you speak to is the guy doing the work. No intermediaries, and minimal overheads.
Speed of implementation: WordPress’s finest hour in government circles surely came in June last year. One Friday, two departments – BERR and DIUS – were unexpectedly forced together by a Cabinet reshuffle. By the Wednesday, and for minimal cash outlay, the newly merged web team had built a WordPress-based site for the new department. An almost incredible achievement, given the usual glacial pace of Whitehall web development. It just shows what can be done.
Focus on content, not process: For me the key strength of WordPress is that, as soon as you log in, you’re looking at an authoring screen. If you haven’t seen many CMSes, that may sound odd. But believe me, most platforms would much rather you waded through several layers of menu before you even get close to writing some words. And that’s what policy officials and press officers are paid to do: not worry about taxonomies or systems admin.
More than you bargained for: Time and again, I find new things WordPress can do, which I hadn’t previously known about. Things I’d never have thought to request in a tech spec; but because someone else did, or because it was a happy bi-product of something else, or because a geek somewhere fancied coding a quick plugin to do it, it’s in the package. And one day, you’ll suddenly be very grateful.
And last, but definitely not least:
The ‘open source’ principle: Open source does mean cheap code, but its true merit lies in what comes next. When government spends public money on IT development, the public has a right to expect to derive the maximum benefit from it – and that can mean so much more than simply getting a prettier or more efficient website out of it. In the same way that taxpayers now have a right to raw data, the same can – and I’d say, should – apply to software development. The use of other people’s code – in the form of themes and plugins – is fundamental to WordPress; and it provides an easy framework to introduce the notion of releasing HMG-commissioned code.
If you’ve ever wondered why I’ve pushed WordPress so hard all these years, the answer is encapsulated in that last point. It represents a gentle introduction to some potentially huge concepts. I’ve seen too many people trying to pitch the concept of open source in philosophical terms; it rarely works. WordPress makes it real, and has already delivered tangible results. And we’ve only just got started.
Footnote: this post was prompted by Dave Briggs’s reference to this video of author and blogger Aaron Brazell talking about ‘WordPress and government’ – which doesn’t really say anything specific to government. Still worth watching though.
