Puffbox

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

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    'Gov 2.0' in US presidential campaigning

    I’m grateful to Jeff Jarvis for a detailed post on ‘government 2.0’ (although it isn’t a term he used, nor should he have). He points to two recent proposals from the Democrat candidates for the US presidency.

    I hadn’t heard Hillary Clinton’s suggestion, back in January, that government should actually be required to blog:

    I want to have as much information about the way our government operates on the Internet so the people who pay for it, the taxpayers of America, can see that. I want to be sure that, you know, we actually have like agency blogs. I want people in all the government agencies to be communicating with people, you know, because for me, we’re now in an era–which didn’t exist before–where you can have instant access to information, and I want to see my government be more transparent.

    Meanwhile, Barack Obama told an audience at Google:

    I’ll put government data online in universally accessible formats. I’ll let citizens track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts. I’ll let you participate in government forums, ask questions in real time, offer suggestions that will be reviewed before decisions are made, and let you comment on legislation before it is signed. And to ensure that every government agency is meeting 21st century standards, I’ll appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer.

    The concept of universally accessible data formats will/would be music to some people’s ears, of course.

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    No10 man's blog raised at PMQs

    With civil servants’ blogging habits such a hot topic, I can’t avoid mentioning the reference casually dropped into PMQs by David Cameron this afternoon.

    There is a new strategist, a man called David Muir. Yes, I have done a bit of research—he is the chief strategist and on the internet he has listed his favourite book. It is called—[Interruption.] Is his favourite book not the following? It is called “The unstoppable power of leaderless organisations”. If the Prime Minister cannot make a decision, and if he cannot run his office, why does anyone wonder why he cannot run the country?

    How could Cameron possibly have uncovered this? Well, David Muir included the book on a list of ‘books I really like’, in the sidebar of his Typepad blog… hastily password-protected upon the announcement of his appointment, but still visible via Google’s cache.

    The FT’s Westminster blog calls it a ‘nice bit of point scoring’ – and wonders how the book’s message of decentralisation squares with the perception of a Stalinist Prime Minister. How indeed. Meanwhile of course, Clay Shirky – in town to promote his new book, ‘Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations‘ – is being invited round to tea by Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson. There’s a thread here.

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    The hunt for Civil Serf continues

    It looks like I wasn’t the only e-gov person to get an email this afternoon from the Daily Mail, asking if I knew who Civil Serf was. No, I don’t. And given the treatment which the Mail handed out to DFID’s Owen Barder, I wouldn’t be inclined to tell them, even if I did. But on the bright side – if they’re asking, they clearly don’t know yet. Probably just as well.

    I’ve worked out what troubled me about the Mail’s reporting of Civil Serf’s suspension. They have reproduced a remarkably detailed account of Serf’s meeting with ‘investigators’; details which, I’d say, reflect badly on the individual concerned. I’d have thought such details were confidential, at least until the completion of any investigation. Breaching confidentiality? I’m not smiling at the irony in that.

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    Nine Lords a-blogging

    Very interesting to see the horrendously-branded Lords Of The Blog, a new group blog co-written by nine peers, each promising a couple of items per week. Prime mover Lord (Clive) Soley writes in his introductory post:

    MP’s and Peers need to find new ways of engaging with the public. A blog is not the complete answer to the feeling of alienation from the political system that many feel today but it is part of the answer. In the 1950’ trade unions and the church played a bigger role in informing people about their political rights and duties. That has gone and the conventional media has been unable to replace it.

    The selection of participants is rather curious – mainly LibDems and cross-benchers, if I’m not mistaken – but there are a few recognisable names and faces. And as ever, it’s early days, etc etc.

    The site is hosted on the WordPress.com service – as, coincidentally, is another HMG blog site I’m hoping to launch before the end of the week. If you’re only looking for standard blog functionality, and aren’t too precious about design, it’s hard to argue with the WordPress.com offering: just $10/year to map your own domain instead of ?.wordpress.com, $15/year for the right to use your own CSS styling, if you aren’t impressed by the dozens of available themes.

    It won’t give you absolutely everything you want; but it’ll do most of it, and it’ll take care of all the hassle-y bits too.

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    Civil Serf suspended

    I’m reluctant to write this solely on the basis of a piece in the Mail (on Sunday?), but it seems Civil Serf has been identified and suspended by DWP.

    Investigators hunting for the blogger summoned her to a meeting last week, when it is understood that she denied responsibility. She was told she was being suspended regardless and, when she was ordered to attend a subsequent meeting with the inquiry team, she finally confessed.

    She was caught after the Government dedicated a team of computer experts to track her down across the internet. A source in the DWP said it was an extraordinary outlay of resources as the team was told to clear their desks of everything except their hunt for Civil Serf.

    OK, if we try to strip away the inevitable tabloid hyperbole, which isn’t necessarily straightforward… this is almost the worst possible conclusion. Denying responsibility was a bit daft, and probably only made things worse. It also leaves DWP looking just a bit reactionary.

    What message are they trying to send, I wonder? And what signals does it send about DWP senior management’s appreciation of the way communications are evolving?

    Reminder: DWP takes ownership of the government’s flagship web project in a couple of weeks.

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    Civil Serf: Simon's video for BBC

    I got an email from the team behind BBC News 24’s Your News show during the week, asking if I’d record a contribution as part of a piece they’re planning about – guess what – Civil Serf. So here it is, as a Puffbox first-play exclusive.

    Nothing you probably don’t know already, but hey – a bit of TV exposure, for the first time in ages. Eagle-eyed viewers may recognise the location for the filming, a deliberate choice obviously. (I say filming: more a case of propping my mobile phone up against the wall of the Foreign Office building.)

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    Civil service blogging guidelines

    I guess you might see it as kneejerk; I prefer to see it as responsive. The Civil Serf affair has brought the matter of civil servants blogging to a head, and now is absolutely the right time to work out the ground rules.

    At lunchtime, Tom Watson publishes a ‘for starters’ list of bullet points on his personal blog. By 6pm, he’s had responses back from all the usual suspects, and a few others. And you can see things taking shape. A case study in itself.

    Point number one has to be the observance of the Civil Service Code. I don’t see anything in it which shouldn’t apply in the online world as in the offline. And if there are anomalies, the Civil Service Code needs to be reconsidered.

    As for specific rules on (personal) blogging, It’s hard to argue with Tom Loosemore‘s suggestion that we adopt the BBC’s policy as a starting point. It’s well worded; it’s been collaboratively developed by people who actually do it; it’s been through several iterations, with a new release out today in fact; communication is their natural territory; and they’ve been dealing it as an issue for longer than most. Besides, ‘it’s what the BBC does’ usually wins any argument in this business.

    But it’s official blogging which interests me most: use of the tools to engage your stakeholder audience in a rolling dialogue. Too often initiatives disappear the day after their announcement, sometimes never to be spoken of again. The job needs to be done, I’d argue; and blogs are the best tool for doing so. I’d like any official guidelines to actively encourage them, especially on long-running, sensitive and high-visibility projects. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking ID cards, Census, major public service reform.

    Do they need separate guidelines? Initially I thought so; now I’m not so sure. The BBC guidelines basically say if you use your BBC identity, you must do so responsibly. Official blogging is the very same scenario, turned up a notch. But we’ve got plenty of experience in doing blogs like these – FCO, Our NHS, the various Hansard Society pilots. It should be fairly easy to test any guidance against prior experience.

    My only thought is that any guidance will inevitably call for distance between personal capacity and professional capacity, opinion and fact. Where does that leave a Minister, who splits his posts between the Ministerial portfolio and the party-political? Tom?

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    Civil Serf: the Spartacus effect

    I was curious. In an idle moment on the train home on Monday night, I wondered how easy it could have been for Civil Serf to delete all trace of her now legendary blog. So I went to the blog.co.uk site she used, and set about registering my own blog with them. When it asked me what username I wanted, just for a laugh, I tried ‘civilserf’. Would it let me have it? Astonishingly, the answer was ‘yes’.

    And so, with the clock ticking towards 10pm, I took ownership of Britain’s most famous blog. I quickly bashed out an initial post, as I knew the story was going to feature in Radio 4’s The World Tonight, and on BBC2’s Newsnight, within the hour. By the power of Google, my post was indexed within a few minutes, and sat proudly atop the search results for ‘civil serf’.

    And the traffic began to come. In the first hour, I received 60+ referrals to my own website; I don’t know about the various other gov.uk-centric bloggers I highlighted. Bear in mind, this is hardly peak time for web surfing. (Well, maybe not this kind of web surfing.)

    Opportunities like this don’t come round very often. I can’t help feeling we should make something of it. Anyone?

    Oh, and by the way… yes, there is a big ‘delete’ button on the blog.co.uk control panel. But I’m certainly not planning on pressing it, to see what it does. I’ve had another dozen hits since I started writing this piece.

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    The inevitable tragedy of Civil Serf

    It’s most amusing to see so many journalists writing up the Civil Serf story for the ‘proper’ media… particularly since most seem to be lifting the key quotes from each other’s write-ups, rather than the blog itself (which was pulled, cached versions and all, by Sunday morning). Secondary sourcing at its worst.

    Steadily though, the Legend Of Civil Serf is building, in the secondary analysis and the ill-informed blog comments which build on it. That the blog was revealing state secrets, including the contents of Alastair Darling’s forthcoming budget. That it named individual Ministers and told endless tales of their incompetence. That she was wasting time blogging, when she should have been working. That it was a big deal. In truth, it was none of these. It was a modest affair, a handful of posts written over a three-month period by an intelligent young woman, describing what she saw in her workplace.

    There’s been an air of inevitability about each step, as the story plays itself out. Of course her anonymity was going to fail eventually. What else could she do when the truth came out, but delete the blog? What else could people make of it all? My worry is for the next inevitable, knee-jerk step: a Cabinet Office communique choosing to interpret the Civil Service Code in such a way that bans all such blogging.

    The Civil Service has a problem. It needs to recruit people with outside experience; and it does a pretty good job of that. The problem is keeping them, once they’re inside. I left under a cloud of frustration a couple of years back. Too few people interested in making things happen, too many people eager for a quiet life – and, I concluded, a quiet retirement. Or perhaps that’s harsh. Maybe just too set in their ways.

    More than anything, it needs people who really care about what they’re there to do. And when you care about something, you want to talk about it. You want to evangelise. You want to involve your friends. I’m really worried that this sends a message – join us by all means, but whatever you do, don’t start to care.

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    The rise and disappearance of Civil Serf

    It was going to happen eventually. I think Puffbox.com was the first to highlight Civil Serf’s excellent blog, back in late January. She started to hit the big-hitting political blogs a few weeks later – see Dizzy Thinks, the Telegraph’s Three Line Whip, The Times’s Comment Central. But it’s only when she hits the proper media, namely this morning’s Sunday Times and Telegraph, that it becomes a big deal. Big enough, it seems, to wipe the blog from the face of the web. (Wish I’d archived it for onepolitics now.)

    First off, there’s a lesson here about the relative importance of blogs in general, and the papers’ own blogging efforts in particular. If the Times and Tele were that fussed about it all, they sat on its existence for a remarkably long time. That’s assuming one desk in the newsroom is talking to another – one suspects not, on this evidence.

    It’s really depressing that the blog has been deleted so quickly. I don’t recall anything especially sensitive being disclosed – she never said enough to really confirm which department she worked in, even. (For the record, some of us reached a different conclusion to the Times.)

    The only controversy, and that’s already stretching the definition, was the fact that a civil servant dared to ‘tell it like it is’, and very eloquently too. It was provocative, but having been in a very similar position myself, I can say it was absolutely valid. Frankly, I think we’d be better off if there was a bit more of that.

    I have a nasty feeling this has set back the cause of ‘government 2.0’ by a good few months – just as it seemed the word ‘blog’ had shaken off its most negative connotations. It’ll be interesting to see if Tom Watson makes reference to it in his big speech tomorrow.