Puffbox – Page 35 – Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

20 Jul 2009

e-government

downingstreet, twitter

Congratulations @downingstreet

It doesn’t matter how they got there, and it doesn’t matter if a significant proportion are spammy. The @downingstreet Twitter account hit one million followers on Sunday afternoon – making it surely the biggest e-government hit in a couple of years at least. At zero setup cost. And zero marketing spend.

The question is – still – what do we do with them all?

For anyone needing background, here’s an easy link to all the posts I’ve written on the subject. To anyone I met WordCamp who’s reading this: check out the URL construction. Did you know you could do that??
17 Jul 2009

company, politics

bloggerscircle, matthewtaylor, rsa, wordpress

Puffbox builds RSA's Bloggers' Circle
Some of the most fun projects come out of the blue. I’ve been following RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor’s blog for some time, and noted with interest his idea back in May to start some kind of ‘bloggers’ circle’. ‘There are too many bloggers and not enough readers so genuinely good posts can fall between the cracks,’ he wrote – correctly. So he suggested a ‘club’ whereby members would circulate their best posts, and would commit to writing about other members’ contributions.

Then I got an email from Taylor’s ‘old chum’ Matt Cain, asking if I could help them build a website for the project. Matt sent me a logo, a rough set of wireframes – and a very tight deadline. We managed to turn the website around within a couple of days, and it went live today at bloggerscircle.net.

It’s built on WordPress. OK, you didn’t need me to tell you that. But it’s got a couple of clever little touches, which probably won’t be immediately obvious.
- When people sign up to join the circle, we need their name, a website URL and a contact email address. And when you’ve built as many WordPress sites as I have lately, that combination of form fields says only one thing – comments. So that’s how we’re handling the registrations, as comments on a (dummy) page. Using the built-in functionality, the coordinator receives an alert email each time someone signs up (ie submits a comment); and like any comment, it’s a one-click process for him to accept or reject.
- There’s an RSS feed of ‘highlights’ from the Circle, which we’ll be running through Delicious, but I also wanted to offer a feed of each signup. We’ve done this, rather cheekily, using a custom page template containing a custom comment loop. It calls the comments (for a different page, incidentally), and presents the comment author’s details into an RSS template, rather than an HTML template. The title and content of that page aren’t wasted; we use these for the feed’s channel info.
- And then, just to complete the Automattic connection, we call that same custom comment loop to generate the ‘rogues gallery’ of Gravatars that appears at the top of each page. In these early days, a lot of people don’t have Gravatars associated with their email addresses; but we hope they’ll see the good reason to do so.
Having just come out of the longest project in company history, it was a real delight to take this on, and turn it around so quickly. I’m quite pleased with the presentation, particularly the way the membership itself is the focus of the page; and it’s always fun to do things with WordPress technology that it wasn’t ever really meant to do. A few rough edges have appeared since launch – inevitable given the sheer lack of testing time, but nothing we can’t handle.

Taylor – whose blog really has become excellent reading – is frank about the project: ‘We are starting small and maybe we won’t succeed but it’s always worth having a dream.’ But he continues: ‘Imagine if there were hundreds or even thousands of amateur bloggers signed up.’ Well, er… if that happens, that design will have a few problems – but as they say, they’ll be nice problems to have.
17 Jul 2009

e-government

datasharing, freeourbills, houseoflords

Free our data, says Lords info committee
I blogged previously about the House of Lords Information Committee’s inquiry into ‘People and Parliament‘: their final report came out this week, and couldn’t really have been more in favour of the ‘free our bills‘ agenda. Among its recommendations, as listed in the press release:
- information and documentation related to the core work of the House of Lords should be produced and made available online in an open standardised electronic format (not pdf) that enables people outside Parliament to analyse and re-use the data
- the integration of information on Parliament’s website, eg biographical info on Members to be linked to their voting record, their register of interests, questions tabled, etc
- Bills should be presented on Parliament’s website in a way that makes the legislative process more transparent and easier to understand
- an online system enabling people to sign up to receive electronic alerts and updates about particular Bills
- a requirement on the Government to start producing Bills in an electronic format which both complies with ‘open standards’ and is readily reusable
- an online database to increase awareness of Members’ areas of expertise
- an online debate to run in parallel with a debate in the Lords Chamber
- greater access to Parliament for factual filming
- a trial period during which voting in the Lords is filmed from within the voting lobbies
- all public meetings of Lords committees to be webcast with video and audio
- a review of the parliamentary language used in the House of Lords to make it easier for people outside the House to understand
But there’s a lot more good stuff in it than just that (!). I note in particular the recommendation to take the Lords Of The Blog website further – incidentally, its recent facelift is a dramatic improvement (and I’ll be mentioning it in my WordCamp talk at the weekend); and the explicit commitment to allow people to embed video clips on their own websites, in a direct challenge to the existing (YouTube-centric) ban. (In fact, in their list of ‘action already taken’, they say ‘We have approved members uploading their contributions to the House’s proceedings onto YouTube.’ – so maybe the ban’s gone already, at least on the Lords’ side?

Never let it be said that politicians as a whole don’t get it.
14 Jul 2009

e-government, technology

civilservice, internetexplorer

Govt depts in no rush to upgrade from IE6

Former e-government minister Tom Watson has tabled a string of Parliamentary Questions, asking various government departments what plans they have to upgrade their default web browser from Internet Explorer v6. The answers are starting to come in, and they aren’t pretty.

… no plans to change …

… in the process of reviewing the options… no decision as to which web browser the Department will update to or when any update might take place …

… currently reviewing our options …

… the upgrade to IE is planned to be completed prior to Microsoft ceasing to support IE6 …

But the most depressing response so far comes from the Ministry of Defence:

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is currently implementing the Defence Information Infrastructure (Future) (DII(F)). DII(F) will, once delivered in full, incorporate around 140,000 terminals supporting some 300,000 users at over 2,000 defence sites worldwide, including on ships and deployed operations. DII currently uses Internet Explorer 6 and at the current time does not have a requirement to move to an updated version.

So maybe it’s worth running through precisely why it’s such a bad thing that government departments aren’t being systematically moved off IE6. It’s partly technical, partly design – but mostly, I think, it’s the symbolism of departments refusing to move forward.

On the technical front, IE6 has security holes that just aren’t being fixed. Analysts Secunia say there have been 10 security alerts in the last year; and that there are 21 unresolved problems. Now to be honest, day-to-day, this probably doesn’t amount to much more than a theoretical risk, but it’s a risk nonetheless.

It’s also slow: IE8 is twice as fast at running Javascript, whilst the latest versions of Firefox and Google’s Chrome are at least 4x faster. This hasn’t mattered much until the explosive growth of Ajax techniques in the last year or two. But now, a lot of the revolutionary ‘web 2.0’ sites simply aren’t usable on IE6. And with more and more stuff happening in the web browser (‘G-Cloud’?), it’s only going to get worse.

Then there’s the design issues. Most web design these days is (or should be) based entirely on CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. And frankly, IE6’s handling of CSS is appalling. Ask any web designer, they’ll tell you the same story:

If you follow the W3C rules, designs will generally work perfectly (ish) first time on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and in all fairness, IE8. Then you hold your breath, and test it in IE6… and goodness knows how it’ll come out. Things might be the wrong size, or in the wrong place, or might not be visible at all. The layout you spent weeks crafting could be a complete mess. You then have to spend ages bastardising your code, often breaking those W3C rules – and sometimes defying all logic! – to make it come out right, or near enough, in IE6. It takes time, it costs clients money, and it makes designers sad.

In reality, everyone in the industry knows this. We’ve been living with it for long enough, and we’ve all got our various workarounds. We factor the IE6 delay into our timescales. We know not to be too ambitious sometimes, ‘because it’ll never work in IE6’.

But the reason it’s such a sore point for us government hangers-on is that IE7 (released in October 2006) is free of charge, and Microsoft’s formally recommended course of action is to upgrade. Dammit, that’s what HM Government itself tells people to do. Yet departments are quite happily burying their heads in the sand – ignoring the sound technical, financial and qualitative reasons for upgrading.

They think doing nothing is the safe option. They’re wrong.
13 Jul 2009

technology

fonebank, mobilephone

'Cash for your old phone': it works!

It turns out that not all bankers are greedy b*%@!#s. Having gathered quite enough dust in an upstairs drawer, I finally decided it was time to get shot of a couple of old mobile phones I’ve had lying around for (literally) years. Coincidentally, both were Windows Mobile smartphones: an Orange C500 and a T-Mobile MDA Pro. Both had served me well: y0u couldn’t argue with the C500 in its time, a candybar smartphone which did it all; the MDA was really too big to be a phone, but it found plenty of use as a pocket laptop.

Having checked a few of the phone recycling sites, I settled on Fonebank.com: not solely because they were prepared to give me the best prices, but because their website seemed more professional than some others – it’s easy to imagine how you could easily get ‘done’ by one of these sites, deciding your phone wasn’t quite in the mint condition you claimed.

The phones were duly bubble-wrapped, and sent to a Freepost address – thus avoiding the hassle of paying postage by weight and dimensions. A week later, and I’ve got a genuine, actual cheque in my hands. So I’ve now got a bit more room in my drawers, and enough cash to pay for a half-decent meal out. On that basis, I’ve got no problems recommending you give your old mobile a new lease of life through Fonebank, either in a less developed market, or in bits. And if you do, quote the referral code RkVnxJ – it might be enough to get us our pudding too.
9 Jul 2009

e-government

benbradshaw, skynews, twitter

Breaking news: minister tweets

It’s just a small thing; but for the first time this morning, I noticed a Twitter message prompting a ‘BREAKING NEWS’ ‘strap’ on Sky News TV. Specifically, culture secretary Ben Bradshaw’s tweet about the Andy Coulson phone tapping thing (sent, I notice, from ‘mobile web’).

Now I don’t know if Sky were tipped off via conventional channels that the Minister was going to tweet something significant; or if it was picked up by the Press Association first… that’s usually where Sky’s breaking news straps come from. Sky’s Millbank studio should probably be keeping an eye out for precisely this sort of thing, but I don’t know if they are yet. It doesn’t really matter how it got there, though: there it was, word for word, on my TV screen, and being read out by the presenter. That’s the kind of media coverage press releases just don’t get.

Press officers in government, you’d better get into the social web thing before your minister does.
8 Jul 2009

technology

bbc, javascript, opensource

Why the fork does the BBC need its own jQuery?

Of course it’s good news that the BBC’s in-house Javascript library, Glow has been released as open source. It’s a very respectable chunk of code, with some quite nice built-in widgetry. But why on earth should the BBC have its own Javascript library in the first place? Its ‘lead product manager’ – itself a worrying job title – justifies its existence as follows:

The simple answer can be found in our Browser Support Standards. These standards define the levels of support for the various browsers and devices used to access bbc.co.uk: some JavaScript libraries may conform to these standards, but many do not, and those that do may change their policies in the future. Given this fact, we decided that the only way to ensure a consistent experience for our audiences was to develop a library specifically designed to meet these standards.

They’re clearly sensitive to this question, as there’s a whole section about it on the Glow website itself, specifically referencing my own current favourite, jQuery. ‘On reviewing the major libraries we found that none met our standards and guidelines, with browser support in particular being a major issue,’ they explain.

So why not contribute to something like jQuery, to make up for its deficiencies? Isn’t that the whole point of open source? ‘Many of the libraries had previously supported some of our “problem” browsers, and actively chosen to drop that support… Forking an existing library to add the necessary browser support was another option, and one that might have had short term benefits. However, as our fork inevitably drifted apart from the parent project we would be left with increasing work to maintain feature parity, or risk confusing developers using our library.’

I’ve written here in the past in praise of the BBC’s browser standards policy, and I stand by that. But I’m afraid I’m not buying this defence of their decision to reinvent the wheel – and, it must be noted, ending up with results remarkably close to jQuery. The best argument seems to be the risk that libraries which currently meet their standards might not in the future; or that they might have to do work to keep a fork in sync. And even if that should happen, the worst case scenario is that they’d have to churn out a load of new Javascript. Which is what they’ve chosen to do anyway.

Plus, crucially, this isn’t about a bunch of geeks directing their spare-time volunteering efforts in one direction, rather than another. These are people being paid real money, taxpayers’ money, to do this, at a time when the BBC is supposed to be trimming its ambitions. If they’re at a loose end, perhaps they might want to address the News homepage’s 416 HTML validation errors, and abandon the ‘table’ markup.
7 Jul 2009

company, e-government

bis, dfid, wordpress

Puffbox's social intranet for government

Last week, we finally completed the longest-running and most ambitious WordPress-based project in Puffbox history. Back in February, with snow on the ground, we started developing the concept of a self-contained ‘social intranet’ platform to be used by staff across government – DFID, BERR (as was), FCO and elsewhere – involved in the many facets of trade work. And with temperatures soaring at the end of June, we finally saw the site get off the ground.

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky in my career, but I’ve never seen an intranet I didn’t dislike. So the opportunity to design one, based on the experience of the 2.0 Years, was quite appealing. Inspired in particular by the work of Jenny Brown and Lloyd Davis at Justice, we based our thinking on the notion of an RSS dashboard. Since the biggest problem with most intranets is that they aren’t reliably updated, we thought, why not build an intranet that updates itself? So at its heart, the site is a huge RSS archive – pulling in news releases and media commentary from UK government, international organisations, expert analysts and humble bloggers. And since it’s all sitting on top of a WordPress MU installation, it’s easy for us to make each item commentable – on the platform itself, rather than at the originating site.

Of course, there’s a risk of information overload. So we’ve built a ‘collaborative editing’ function – along the lines of Google Reader’s shared items, but done as a group thing. If you read something which you think your colleagues ought to see too, you click the star icon, and it gets promoted to a ‘daily highlights’ list on the site homepage. Then, at the end of each day, there’s a Daily Email which rounds up all the ‘starred items’ – so even if you never look at the website, and we’re realistic enough to accept that some won’t, then you can still get the benefit from it.

We’ve used various WordPress plugins to add calendar functionality; to allow users to upload (non-restricted) documents; to put their faces against their contributions, making the place feel a bit more human; and even to allow senior staff to blog on the site via email. You could probably accuse us of throwing the entire 2.0 playbook at the project, and you’d be absolutely right. But apart from the core aggregation and recommendation functionality, everything else uses off-the-shelf open-source plugins, installed and configured (generally) within a few hours. So if they don’t work out, what have you lost?

This project has taken up most of my time for the past four months; working with my regular co-conspirators Simon Wheatley and Jonathan Harris, we’ve pushed the boundaries of the technology, and tested the limits of the civil service mindset. Although many of the individual elements have been tried before in government, I believe it’s the first time anyone’s tried to do all of it, all together – and crucially, all on an in-house system, which opens up some very interesting possibilities. (And yes, as ever, you might be pleasantly surprised by the price tag, too.)

So is this finally an intranet I like? I’ll offer a provisional yes for now, but maybe it’s better to ask me again in a few months. Since it’s a closed system, there’s limited scope for me to demo it… but if it’s something you might be interested in, ask me very nicely, and I’ll see what I can do.
6 Jul 2009

e-government

dius

DIUS corporate site: almost £1m for 2 years

The Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (2007-2009) did some great things on the web – and not just from Steph Gray’s social media desk. They were exceptionally quick to get a corporate website up and running: nothing particularly clever, but it was there on the day the department came into being [citation needed]. And when it (eventually) came, their ‘proper’ corporate site was clever, attractive and very well executed.

But at what cost?, LibDem MP Paul Holmes asked. The answer came in Hansard at the end of last week: ‘the Department spent £953,911 on the creation of a new website. This included the design of both an initial website launched shortly after the creation of the Department and a later improved version. This total covers the purchase of hosting and content management system as well as project management and content migration (i.e. staff) costs.’ Yes folks, nine hundred and fifty thousand… and taking the answer at face value, that doesn’t include day-to-day running costs.

(Incidentally, you might want to cross-reference this answer against Sion Simon’s response to Oliver Heald last November: £100k for design, £240k for hosting and content migration, annual maintenance of £85k. None of them small figures by the way, but they still only get us half-way to that £950k total. Hmm.)

Now listen, I’ve worked on the inside, and I know how the costs mount up. By the time you factor everything in – from staff costs to stationery cupboard – you’re left with a surprisingly high figure for ‘what a website costs’. But no matter how pretty your website is, no matter how clever it is, £953,911 over two years is too much… before we even get to the cost of then ditching it, in the wake of a reshuffle. I’m sure there are reasons, and I’m sure there were good people doing their best. But it’s very telling to look back over DIUS written answers, at references to how the website cost was lumped into larger IT outsourcing contracts, and couldn’t be separately costed.
29 Jun 2009

e-government

facebook, powerofinformation, richardallan

Power of Info chairman joins Facebook

Slightly more exciting than the headline might suggest… Richard Allan, the former LibDem MP who chaired the Power Of Information Taskforce has been hired by Facebook. The Guardian reports that he left his job as Cisco’s head of European regulatory affairs ‘to lead [Facebook’s] efforts in lobbying EU governments.’ Allan hasn’t had a lot to say about the move on his own website, apart from a Twitter reference to starting a new job.

As for Facebook itself? – if you try to access the obvious vanity URL, facebook.com/richardallan, you get forwarded to /richard.allan (note the dot), which is someone else entirely. Nice touch, Facebook HR.