cabinetoffice – Page 4

30 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, opensource

Open source policy: back where we started

It’s good to see the coordinated publication of departments’ responses to the Programme For Government exercise – including the Cabinet Office’s reponse on government transparency, which also covered the use of open source software:

We are committed to the use of open standards and recognise that open source software offers government the opportunity of lower procurement prices, increased interoperability and easier integration. The use of open standards can also provide freedom from vendor lock in. In September 2010, we will publish Guidance for Procurers. This guidance will ensure that new IT procurements conducted by Government, evaluate both open source and proprietary software solutions, and select the option offering best value for money.

Nothing much to get excited about, to be honest. I suppose it’s nice to see an acknowledgement of ‘the opportunity’ of achieving benefits. But it’s a little disappointing that it should close with a flat statement about evaluating both proprietary and open-source on ‘best value for money’ grounds alone – which leaves us right back where we started. I note there’s no reference the Maude statement, back in June, about departmental websites using open source ‘whenever possible’.
22 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, directgov, dwp

Directgov returns to the Cabinet Office

I couldn’t help smiling at the news of Directgov going back to its original home in the Cabinet Office. Funny how things go full-circle: launched from within the Cabinet Office in April 2004, to COI (an ‘ideal location’) in March 2006, to DWP in April 2008, back to Cabinet Office in July 2010.

The Cabinet Office press release says it will ‘sit in the Government Communications team headed by Matt Tee’, with oversight from Francis Maude and Danny Alexander; but will also have celebrity input:

Today’s move puts new energy behind the drive to get more people and public services online. Martha Lane Fox, UK Digital Champion, will drive a transformation and redirection of Directgov as part of her role advising government on how efficiencies can best be realised through the online delivery of public services.

That’s quite a curiously worded sentence when you look at it. In terms of traffic at least, Directgov is doing well – so you could argue that a ‘transformation and redirection’ of Directgov would be breaking what has so far been a winning formula. But then comes the key word – ‘efficiencies’. I think we know what that means.

And so, Directgov continues to be shuffled around government every two years. But maybe now, with Matt Tee’s Cabinet Office government communications unit holding responsibility for all the key strands of activity, it’ll get the kind of clear, authoritative leadership it’s perhaps been lacking.

Let’s all meet up again here in 2012, and see how it went.
7 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, efficiencyboard, francismaude, tomwatson

Websites under £20k dodge Maude's gateway

There’s an intriguing mismatch between the answers to two PQs tabled by former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson today. In one, he asks ‘what criteria have been set to govern the creation of new Government websites’, to which Francis Maude replies:

I am determined to reduce the number of Government websites and so the creation of any new sites will be exceptional and only permitted where its objective cannot be met in any other way. The reduction in the number of websites is part of the overall control on communications spending, which the Efficiency Board is overseeing.

You’ll note the complete lack of any specific criteria being mentioned. That’s OK, it’s hardly the first time. But on the very same page of Hansard, we go on to learn there are some specific criteria as to whether or not a web project even requires the Board’s oversight.

Tom also asked about the cost of the Your Freedom website, built by Delib. Francis Maude responds that the site cost a very reasonable £3,200 (inc VAT) to build, and has a (very precisely) estimated annual cost of £19,853.98 including VAT. But the last line of the response is the most interesting:

The creation of the Your Freedom website did not come before the Efficiency Board as the estimated cost was below the £20,000 threshold for approval.

Ah, there is a specific criterion after all! There’s certainly been no mention of it in, for example, the Cabinet Office press release announcing the new procedure, which only stated that:

No new websites will be permitted except for those that pass through a stringent exceptions process for special cases, and are cleared by the Efficiency board

So at first glance, it looks like you’ll get away with it if you keep the price below £20k. Your Freedom, which comes in just £146.02 below that threshold, appears to be setting a handy precedent.
1 Jul 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, delib, nickclegg

Another week, another major consultation

First it was the Programme for Government, then the public sector Spending Challenge… and now it’s Your Freedom:

We’re working to create a more open and less intrusive society through our Programme for Government. We want to restore Britain’s traditions of freedom and fairness, and free our society of unnecessary laws and regulations – both for individuals and businesses. This site gives you the chance to submit, comment on, or vote for ideas about how we can do this. Your ideas will inform government policy and some of your proposals could end up making it into bills we bring before Parliament to change the law.

As with the Spending Challenge, it’s a concept which the LibDems tried (to a certain extent) prior to the election: they published their proposed Freedom Bill online, and invited comments on it. So for once, with concrete justification, you can argue that the government – at least part of it, anyway – knows what it wants to come out of this consultation before it starts. (Indeed, the Cabinet Office press release is quite explicit, that it will result in ‘a Freedom Bill in the autumn’.)

Update: Mark Pack makes some excellent points re the original LibDem exercise. The ‘blank sheet of paper’ approach of Your Freedom is inevitably (?) leading to some crackpot proposals. The LD approach was much more focused: here are the key repeals we’re intending to make; please tell us if you think we’ve got the detail wrong and if there’s anything similar missing.

This time, the site is running on Delib’s Plone-based Dialogue App platform. We know this because somewhat unusually, Delib have included a namecheck in the footer of each page. Whilst Plone is open source, Delib’s code doesn’t seem to be; however, there’s some suggestion among various gov people on Twitter that there should be ‘positive’ news on that front shortly.

It certainly looks a lot like the design I cobbled together for the Programme for Government site – although this time, it looks like they’ve rebuilt it from scratch. I’m now slightly worried that, in the space of a couple of hours, I may have accidentally defined a common design framework for all such sites??

Worth noting that they have a tickbox on the registration page, asking for permission to ‘contact you by email from time to time’. No specifics on what ‘time to time’ means, but at least they’ve started the exercise with that opt-in so explicit – meaning there’s no discussion later on about whether or not it’s OK to ‘spam’ people. That’s a mistake we’ve made before.

And since I haven’t mentioned it already: I also see Nick Clegg now has a separate YouTube channel of his own – although as yet, no website to speak of. But please, if you’re going to embed YouTube videos on pages, don’t set them to autoplay. We don’t need another MySpace.
4 Jun 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, francismaude, opensource, tomwatson

Gov websites to use open source 'whenever possible'

In the response to a pretty innocuous parliamentary question from Tom Watson, new Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude makes a statement which could, on the face of it, be of monumental significance for UK e-government.

The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges – and that this should be achieved efficiently and, whenever possible using open source software. Any future development of websites run by the Cabinet Office will be assessed and reviewed against these criteria.

We’ve heard the ‘hubs for debate’ line before, in the Conservative tech manifesto, but the other part is quite startling. Open source software ‘wherever possible’. An unqualified statement of policy. No caveats at all; not even financial. That takes us far, far beyond the ‘level playing field’.
1 Jun 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, transparency

First they came for the Permanent Secretaries…

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.

The real fun will come in September: it was stated in the Programme for Government, and has now been confirmed in a letter from the PM, that:

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.
25 May 2010

company, e-government

cabinetoffice, coalition, coi, wordpress

Commentable Coalition plan

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.
7 Apr 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, generalelection

Civil servant socialising grinds to a halt
When it eventually came, after two and a half years of speculation, the announcement of the general election almost felt like a disappointment. But the welcome news finally came this morning: it’s ‘game on’.

Or rather, if you’re a civil servant – off. The day has seen a steady stream of tweets from civil servants (including the guv’nor), plus the odd blog post, warning of a period of ‘radio silence’.

In fact, when it finally came this morning, the official Cabinet Office guidance was pretty light on detail regarding online activity: I’d heard suggestions that some quite detailed rules were being circulated.

I spot a couple of points worth highlighting:
- ‘Films, videos and photographs from departmental libraries or sources should not be made available for use by political Parties. Tools for sharing videos and photographs, such as Flikr (sic) and YouTube should not be updated with new content [but…] material previously published can stand.’
  I can see some potential for conflict there: if, let’s say, a photo of a Ministerial visit has gone on Flickr with a CC licence, is that ‘fair game’ for a political leaflet?
- ‘News sections of websites must comply with the advice on press releases… News tickers and other mechanisms should be discontinued for the election period.’
  Eh? My assumption is that they mean ‘push’ apps, as opposed to an on-page animation technique; but even so, the wording is a little curious. And I can’t actually think of any specific examples of ‘push’ apps anyway. (Does Twitterfeed count?)
But whilst there’s a requirement to limit ‘civil servants’ participation in a professional capacity in social networks’, I don’t necessarily read that as the draconian ban it might have been. So whilst the government online community’s unanimous decision to go quiet is perfectly understandable, and unquestionably the safest thing to do, I’m not sure the guidance actually demands it.

The calm before the storm, perhaps. Enjoy a couple of weeks’ rest, gang; things could get very busy on 7 May.
25 Feb 2010

e-government, technology

cabinetoffice, opensource, opera

Cabinet Office's open source fail

A PQ from Conservative shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office what her policy is in respect of the installation and use of (a) Internet Explorer, (b) Firefox and (c) Opera website browsers by Government departments.

To which Angela Smith replies:

Government policy regarding installation and use of web browsers is that all decisions must be in line with value for money requirements. In addition, the Open Source, Open Standards, Re-use strategy requires Departments to consider open source browsers such as Firefox and Opera on a level basis with proprietary browsers such as Internet Explorer.

A slightly disappointing answer on a few levels. It shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an either/or thing. A Strategy which says ‘we don’t have any specific preference’ isn’t really a strategy. Oh, and without wanting to be too picky, Opera isn’t actually open source.*

I’ve had trouble finding a copy of it online; so here’s the key section of the Opera licence:

All intellectual property rights such as, but not limited to, patents, trademarks, copyrights or trade-secret rights related to the Software are exclusively the property of, and remain vested in, Opera Software ASA and/or its suppliers.

You shall not modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the Software or any part thereof or otherwise attempt to derive source code, create or use derivative works therefrom. You agree not to modify the Software in any manner or form or to use modified versions of the Software including, without limitation, for the purpose of obtaining unauthorized access to the Services or disabling features of the Software or Services.

See that bit about ‘You shall not attempt to derive source code’? Well, that’s basically the complete opposite of Open Source. We’re going to have real trouble making this debate happen if we can’t even get the basics right.

* Although, in an unexpected moment of charity, I’m wondering whether it’s actually a punctuation failure. Perhaps they meant ‘open source browsers such as Firefox, and [non-open source browsers like] Opera’? No, I doubt it too.

Update (er, a year later): To their credit, I suppose, they did issue a correction in Hansard a few days later: ‘Errors have been identified in the response given to the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) on 24 February 2010. The words “such as Firefox and Opera” and “such as Internet Explorer” were incorrectly included in the answer.’ – maybe this blog does have influence after all.
27 Jan 2010

e-government

cabinetoffice, opensource, wordpress, writetoreply

Government beefs up open source policy – a bit

A bit out of the blue, this morning saw a revision of the UK government’s open source policy. And whilst it still doesn’t quite endorse the notion that open source solutions are fundamentally better solutions, it does ratchet up the expectations.

Last year’s revision to the 2005 policy statement introduced a subtle – but, I thought, very important – ‘tiebreaker’ clause: ‘Where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products, open source will be selected on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility.’ I felt it read ‘like a document which wanted to say more, but didn’t feel able to.’

Well, in the intervening twelve months, the Cabinet Office appears to have grown a little in confidence. The 2009 policy included the following ‘Supplier Challenge’:

Building on the actions above, Government Departments will challenge their suppliers to demonstrate that they have capability in open source and that open source products have been actively considered in whole or as part of the business solution which they are proposing. Where no overall open source solution is available suppliers will be expected to have considered the use of open source products within the overall solution to optimise the cost of ownership. Particular scrutiny will be directed where mature open source products exist and have already been used elsewhere in government. Suppliers putting forward non-open source products will be asked to provide evidence that they have carefully considered open source alternatives and to explain why they have been rejected.

… to which has now been added:

If they are unable to provide evidence of fair consideration of open source solutions, their bid will be deemed non-compliant with government policy and the proposal is likely to be automatically be delisted from the procurement.

The only other significant change to the Action Plan itself is the introduction of a requirement for:

Clear guidance that where public sector organisations have procured ‘perpetual licences’ from proprietary vendors, a shadow licence cost will need to be applied to the cost of the licences. Where an agreement has been reached on behalf of the Crown, this price will be applied as the shadow cost. Where no agreement has been reached on behalf of the Crown, the shadow cost will be the non-discounted list price of that product from the vendor.

… but apart from that, and a few consequential tweaks here and there, it’s all more-or-less word-for-word identical to last year.

So it’s still a good document, fundamentally pointing in the right direction. But it now comes with an explicit threat to suppliers that if they can’t demonstrate that open source can’t be at least part of their solution, their bid is ‘likely’ (although not perhaps guaranteed) to be binned. Presumably because that explicit threat proved itself to be required over the past 12 months.

We’re a year down the line, and it would be nice if there weren’t quite so many statements in the future tense. It’s also a shame we don’t have some more inspiring examples to quote. But this revision hardens the policy in a potentially significant respect – and we should certainly give it a chance.

However, I have a nagging feeling that at some point, we’re going to need a specific high-profile victory for Open Source, to give it real momentum in government. An order to replace a common proprietary product with an open-source equivalent. A department switching from Windows to Ubuntu? Replacing MS Office with OpenOffice? Neither of those seem likely.

I suspect the only realistic win is the web browser – abandoning IE in favour of Firefox or Chrome/Chromium. And it’s not as if we don’t have good reason to do so.

Oh, one more thing. It’s entirely to the Cabinet Office’s credit that they have proactively offered the policy up for comment, working with the WriteToReply guys. It’s WordPress-based, sitting on WriteToReply’s hosted platform.