Puffbox – Page 7 – Simon Dickson's gov-tech blog, active 2005-14. Because permalinks.

17 Nov 2011

e-government

barcampukgovweb, ukgovcamp

Friday is the new Saturday
If you were to ask me what has been the single most influential thing to have happened in UK digital government in recent years, my answer would be the annual BarCamp / UKGovCamp. That first event, in late January 2008, helped form a community of civil servants and external suppliers; and demonstrated a desire, on both sides, to use modern technology’s new opportunities to do Government better.

So much so, in fact, that people willingly gave up a Saturday to come along. In the civil service, that’s pretty much unheard of.

To me, that was its defining characteristic. We all had something ‘better’ to do: social life, family duties, supermarket trips, even just sleeping off the exertions of the week before. In my own case, it’s the weekend of my wedding anniversary. But we all felt this was more important.

Last year, I picked up rumours suggesting that some people had claimed a ‘day off in lieu’ to attend. In some respects, that’s a compliment to the continuing success of the event, and its perceived importance in the government webbie calendar. But it felt at odds with the idealism of the day. I didn’t like it.

And so to this year (or rather, next year)’s event. Tickets for UK GovCamp 2012 went on ‘sale’ on Monday – and promptly ‘sold out’ (of the initial allocation) in just a few short hours. Clearly it’s seen as being more essential than ever – which is good. But something has changed. Something significant.
GovCamp is back, BACK, BAAAAAACK for 2012 and it’s bigger and badderer than ever.

Not just one day of fab conversations, networking, sharing tales of woe and mass tinkering – but two!
- FRIDAY 20th January sees the usual GovCamp experience of crowdsourced unconference sessions where delegates talk about the stuff that interests them
- SATURDAY 21st January is the all new GovCamp Doing Things day, where everyone attending can dream come some cool stuff to do, whether it’s collaborating on the best social media strategy EVER, running some training sessions on creating video, or build some useful app or other with some data
Will Friday be the usual GovCamp experience? No, I don’t think it can be. It completely changes the ‘ask’.

The vast majority of the civil servants will, presumably, have had to ask their boss’s permission to attend. That means they’re effectively attending in an official capacity. In theory at least, they will have to be careful what they say. Gone is the freedom, both formal and perceived, of attending in your own time.

Myself, as an external attendee coming from a distance, I’ll have to make alternative domestic arrangements, to get the kids to school. I’ll have to pay for a weekday, on-peak train ticket. And of course, I’ll be sacrificing a normal working day, costing me a notional few hundred quid. A day when most clients, current or potential, will be at their desks. My phone will have to remain switched on.

In Steph and Dave‘s defence, there is still a Saturday element – although at first glance, it looks like a completely different event, and aimed at completely different people. It isn’t the only *Camp being organised on a weekday: a week from now, I’ll be en route to Paris for a vendredi WordCamp. And of course, I ran my own Word Up Whitehall event on a Monday – although I’d argue, the rules of engagement there are slightly different.

If it’s a sign of the GovCamp ‘movement’ growing up, then I suppose it’s a positive. But it’ll be sad if, in doing so, we’ve lost the thing which put its motives beyond any doubt.
15 Nov 2011

e-government

bonanza

More GDS vacancies

I see there are another couple of Government Digital Service job vacancies up for grabs: this time, they’re looking for two User Experience Researchers, with a quoted salary range of ‘£44,300 to £56,000 with potential to rise to £59,000 through performance related pay.’

The lucky winners will be ‘responsible for planning, designing and conducting all in-house usability testing sessions for GDS (and departments when relevant) [and] every step in the usability testing process from developing user recruitment briefs through to test moderation, analysis and report writing.’

The jobs are offered as ’24 Month Fixed Term Appointment with possibility of extension or permanency.’ Closing date for applications is the end of business on Friday 18 November. Once again, you’re urged not to fax in your applications, presumably because it isn’t 1995 any more.

More details at this laughably long address. Perhaps your first task might be to explore the usability implications of such URL structures. (Clue: #unacceptable.)
15 Nov 2011

e-government, technology

chrischant, unacceptable

Chant's warning to multinationals and client-side IT

Video from ukauthority.com

Chris Chant has given an interview to ukauthority.com, expanding on the shift to a product-centric, off-the-shelf model for government IT. SMEs, he says, are ‘absolutely front and centre to what we need… and it’s that market we’re really encouraging.’ It will be a bit challenging, he concedes – probably more than SMEs would like; but says they’re trying to make it as easy as possible.

Are we ready for ‘cloud’? ‘No, I don’t think we are at all. I think we’re quite a way away from that, and that’s something that we need to apply ourselves to. I think we are very well positioned to operate in a world where our IT is delivered by large multinationals, but that’s the way things have been. Now it’s a very different world. For a lot of what government does, it’s about commodity products, and we need to get people in who know how to handle that.’

‘We must bear in mind that we’re here for the citizens,’ he declares, ‘not starting from a departmental or systems standpoint. It comes to a very different model, and that means we’ll need to change the way we do things, we’ll need some new people I suspect, and we’ll need to do a lot of retraining. But above all, we’ll need a lot fewer people working on the client side of government IT than we’ve seen in the past.’

Inevitably, he’s asked about the recent ‘unacceptable’ speech. ‘IT is supposed to be an enabler,’ he says, ‘and quite often, in my experience in government, it’s actually a barrier to getting things done. And that’s no way to use IT. IT is supposed to support what we’re doing; we’re getting more dependent on it every day. And there’s no excuse to do anything other than get that right.’
11 Nov 2011

technology

wordcamp, wordpress

Paris go! Off to France's first WordCamp

France’s first ‘proper’ WordCamp takes place in Paris in a couple of weeks: and I’ve just bought my ticket.

I did French as part of my degree – although that was nearly two decades ago, and only a tiny part of it was ever computer-related. So I’m placing a lot of confidence in 1) my memory of the language, and 2) the likelihood of the most difficult words being derived from English anyway. 🙂

There’s a reassuring familiarity to the day’s provisional programme: the themes business, scale, security, optimisation, and so on.

But the star attraction, for me anyway, will be the appearance of Michel Valdrighi – the man who created the b2/cafelog blogging platform, and whose sudden disappearance led to a discussion between a kid from Texas and a bloke in Stockport, which ultimately led to… 😉

Also worth noting is the gold-level sponsorship offered by Microsoft. Yes, yet another one.

Alors… est-ce qu’il y en a parmi les lecteurs de ce blogue qui voudraient me rejoindre à Paris? Tickets are a very reasonable €25, and there are still plenty left. Come on, let’s help the neighbours build some momentum.
10 Nov 2011

news

bbc, breakingnews, toldyouso

BBC 'news jockey' experiment

By Steve Herrmann, writing on the BBC News Editors blog yesterday:

During the past few years the “live page” format has become a regular feature of our coverage around big breaking stories. The format has been a big success in terms of usage, so we’re thinking about what more we could do with it. We think the pages are not necessarily just about breaking news – they are also a real-time showcase of the best of what we (and others) are doing.

By me, writing in July 2007:

A ‘breaking news blog’, in my book, should look and feel more like Twitter. Activate it when a huge story breaks – maybe only a couple of times a year, maybe a couple of times a month. Short snaps of maybe only a couple of lines, written in an informal tone. Pretend you’re MSN-ing a friend. Be prepared to be vague – read between the lines if necessary, and don’t be shy about getting it wrong. Stream of consciousness, if you like, and proud of it. I haven’t yet seen any news organisation doing this systematically… but if they have any business in breaking news, then they should be.

I’ve also got an early idea for a ‘news jockey’ role, writing a running commentary on the day’s news blog-style. The USA Today thing is probably the closest comparison, but I’m thinking of something slightly different. It calls for a certain style of writing, and a certain style of writer, but I think it could be a winner.
10 Nov 2011

e-government

blogging, foreignoffice, toldyouso, wordpress

Foreign Office finally switches to WordPress

Earlier this week, the Foreign Office rebuilt its blogs.fco.gov.uk site. It doesn’t look much different. But the screenshot above isn’t the significant one. The one below is.

Yes, after some gentle encouragement on the pages of this blog, it’s great to see the Foreign Office moving off the Apache Roller blogging platform – What, you’ve never heard of it? Exactly. – and on to the blogging platform of choice, WordPress.

Like a lot of government projects, the brief has clearly been to keep the visuals almost exactly as-was. But Steph Gray has rebuilt the site using an HTML5-based theme, deployed on a multisite setup at Bytemark (by the look of it), and has managed to migrate 50+ blogs’ worth of content too.

I can see a few things we’d have done differently – notably around non-English content. But as Word Up Whitehall attendees will have heard, Simon Wheatley and I have been concentrating on precisely that subject for most of the past few months, so we’re probably deeper into it than most.

And so the highest-profile blogging platform in Whitehall comes over to WordPress, joining similar efforts at DFID (launched Oct 2008), Health, DECC and BIS. Well done to Ross & co for doing the right thing. You know it makes sense. That really only leaves the MOD…
9 Nov 2011

e-government, technology

health, transport, wordpress, wordupwhitehall

When WordPress gets boring, things get interesting

[Thanks to @JonAkwue for suggesting a vastly improved headline for this piece…]

The big moment of this year’s Word Up Whitehall came in the second presentation of the day: Gavin Dispain from the Department for Transport, telling the story of their hasty migration to WordPress.

It was already clear that we were in very different territory from last year’s inaugural event: Stephen and Francis from Health had opened with a presentation featuring the kind of technical architecture diagrams you just don’t see at WordCamps. We weren’t just talking about the potential for government departments to use WordPress, or sharing examples of little microsites they’d built: no, this was real corporate-sized heavy-duty stuff. And there, at the heart of it, increasingly so in fact, was WordPress.

Then came Gavin, and that slide. He didn’t really make a big deal of it. I think we all knew about the potential to generate massive savings. But there it was, in black and white: hundreds of thousands of real pounds, not notional pounds, saved at a stroke. With further savings to come, as more arms-length agencies come on-board. (Defra are a bit further down that track already, as David Pearson related later in the day.)

Technical architecture diagrams. PowerPoint slides with incomprehensibly large numbers on them. Weren’t these precisely the things which drove me out of ‘proper’ IT, and into the world of WordPress? What the hell were these doing at a WordPress event? For a moment I could feel myself switching off, as I’d done in countless meetings over the years.

And that’s when it all suddenly fell into place.

I’d reacted against such things in the past, because they were visions of the future – and for the most part, futures that never quite arrived. But something was different here. People weren’t talking about how they could or would do it. They were demonstrating how they had done it. Health had built that structure, and it was working. Transport had left behind one set of contracts costing £X, and were now in a new arrangement costing £Y.

To be frank, systems admin and accountancy can be a bit boring. But it’s a mark of the success of the WordPress mission¹, and the potential it has unlocked, that we’re now into that business-as-usual territory. When you’re getting stuck into the ‘boring’ bits, that’s when change is really happening.

And it turns out, I don’t actually hate technical architecture diagrams and budget forecasts after all.

¹ When I first drafted this, I wasn’t sure about using the word ‘mission’. But then, by sheer coincidence, Seth Godin posts a few lines on his blog, and I feel a whole lot better about it.
3 Nov 2011

e-government

accenture, chrischant, dwp

DWP signs 'unacceptable' £420,000,000 contract

Chris Chant, at the Institute for Government, Thursday 20 October 2011:

I think it’s completely unacceptable at this point in time to enter into contracts for longer than 12 months. I can’t see how we can sit in a world of IT, and acknowledge the arrival of the iPad in the last two years, and yet somehow imagine that we can predict what we’re going to need to be doing in two or three or five or seven or ten years time. It’s complete nonsense.

Reported by Guardian Government Computing, Wednesday 2 November 2011:

The Department for Work and Pensions has awarded a seven year application services contract worth £50m to £70m annually to Accenture, for work including the software needed to introduce its universal credit system.

Or to phrase it another way: something between £50,000,000 and £70,000,000 each year – let’s split the difference, and call it £60,000,000 – for 7 years. A grand total of £420,000,000.
1 Nov 2011

technology

wordpress

Coming up in WordPress 3.3

The next version of WordPress, version 3.3 is on the horizon: a second beta release came out a couple of weeks back, and a first release candidate is due in the next couple of days.

So what is there to look forward to? I’ll hand you over to Andrew Nacin, one of the core developers, and the presentation he gave at a recent New York meetup.

There are quite a few incremental improvements to the admin interface, but nothing to stop you in your tracks. The left-hand menu is now based on ‘fly-out’ submenus, more or less as the compressed view has always done, albeit with a nicer animation. There are tweaks to the Admin Bar (including pointy notifications), the ‘Help’ area, and the ‘welcome’ screen you see on an initial install. The file uploader is no longer Flash-dependent, favouring HTML5 where available, and adds drag-and-drop functionality.

Lots of little things, none of which sounds like much; but I’m told that once you’ve been using 3.3 for a while, going back to 3.2 feels rather dated.

Final release is currently scheduled for the end of November.
27 Oct 2011

e-government, technology

chrischant, unacceptable

Unacceptable, unacceptable, unacceptable

Even a few days after their initial publication, I’m still slightly stunned to read the comments of Puffbox’s best pal Chris Chant, now back in his role as Programme Director for the G-Cloud initiative, at the Institute for Government earlier this month.

It is unacceptable at this point in time to not know the true cost of a service and the real exit costs from those services: the costs commercially, technically and from a business de-integration standpoint. So, how do we untangle our way out of a particular product or service. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the discussion that says, we need to get away from that, and we can’t because of the complexity of getting out from where we are, and of all the things that are hanging on to that particular service, that we can’t disentangle ourselves from.

I think it’s completely unacceptable at this point in time to enter into contracts for longer than 12 months. I can’t see how we can sit in a world of IT, and acknowledge the arrival of the iPad in the last two years, and yet somehow imagine that we can predict what we’re going to need to be doing in two or three or five or seven or ten years time. It’s complete nonsense.

[…]

I think it’s unacceptable, not to know how many staff that we have in government working on the client side of IT. I’ve not yet met anybody who knows what that figure is. People know about small areas, but overall, we don’t know what that figure is.

And equally, it’s unacceptable that we don’t know what those people do. So we don’t have any idea of the breakdown of that number that we don’t know either, surprisingly, and I think that’s outrageous in this climate – and actually, in any climate.

It’s completely unacceptable not to know what systems we own, how much they cost and how much or even if they are used. I know there are organisations that have turned off tens of thousands of desktop services, merely to discover if they’re used any more. And when they do that, they discover maybe 1% of those are still being used. That’s completely unacceptable.

It’s unacceptable not to know when users give up on an online service. And it is unacceptable not to know why they give up. Of course it’s unacceptable that they have to give up, because the service doesn’t fulfil their needs.

And it’s unacceptable to have a successful online service that sends out reminders to use that service through the post. OK? It goes on. Millions of times. And linked to that, it’s completely unacceptable not to be able to communicate with customers securely, electronically, when technology clearly allows that to happen.

It is unacceptable not to be able to do our work from any device we choose. That’s possible, and has been for some time, and it’s outrageous we can’t do that.

It is unacceptable to pay, and these figures are PAC figures, up to £3,500 per person per year for a desktop service.

It is unacceptable for your corporate desktop to take 10 minutes to boot up, and the same amount of time to close down. But that’s the truth of what goes on every day in government IT, and I suspect public sector [sic] too.

It’s unacceptable for staff to be unable to access Twitter or YouTube when they use those services for what they do; and it’s unacceptable for call centre staff not able to access the very service they are supporting in the call centre. These all sound funny, but when you think of the consequences of that, it’s truly dreadful.

And I think it’s unacceptable in this day and age to ensure people are working by restricting their access to the Internet. If truly we can’t measure people by outputs, where on earth are we?

It is unacceptable that 80% of government IT is controlled by five corporations. It is unacceptable that some organisations outsource their IT strategy in government.

And it’s unacceptable that, to change one line of code, in one application, can cost up to £50,000.

It is unacceptable to wait 12 weeks to get a server commissioned for use. And that’s pretty commonplace. When you think in terms of using a service like Amazon, the most problematic thing on the critical path is the time it takes you to get your credit card out of your wallet and enter the details on-screen.

And above all, and at the heart of a lot of this, it is unacceptable not to engage directly with the most agile, forward thinking suppliers that are in the SME market today, and not in the suppliers that we’ve been using.

Things have changed, and we haven’t.

Did he really say all that? Yes, he did. Alan Mather got a rough transcript up last week – which I’ve used a basis for the above. I wanted to get a searchable, indexable record of the exact words used. And I’m glad I did: it turns out, Chris used the words ‘outrageous’ and ‘completely unacceptable’ much more than Alan had recorded.

And now, for the removal of any doubt, courtesy of the Cabinet Office’s own digital engagement blog, here’s definitive audio proof.