e-government – Page 19

30 Mar 2010

company, e-government, technology

careandsupport, simonwheatley, wordpress

Live text commentary in WordPress

I don’t usually blog about projects until after they’ve happened; but I’m going to make an exception for something that’s going to happen later today.

For just about a year, we’ve been looking after the website for The Big Care Debate, the government’s large-scale consultation on the funding of long-term social care. We’ve had a great relationship with the team at the Department of Health, and we’ve done some fun, innovative and highly effective things: commentable documents, Facebook activity, online questionnaires, even user-submitted photo galleries.

The consultation process is reaching its conclusion, with the publication of the government White Paper on the subject. (For those who don’t know the jargon: a ‘green paper’ presents options or starts a debate, often leading to a ‘white paper’, which is a declaration of government policy.) Oh, and as you might have noticed, there’s an election on the cards, and we’ve already had a few skirmishes on this very subject.

When we first met to discuss plans for the White Paper publication, one idea was to ‘live tweet’ the launch event on Twitter; but I’ve never been a fan of sudden, frantic bursts of tweeting by one of the hundred-odd accounts I follow. (And indeed, I’ve ‘unfollowed’ certain people for doing precisely that.) So we reworked the plan, taking as our inspiration the undoubted success of the BBC’s ‘live text commentaries’ – seen at its best on the sports site on a Saturday afternoon, but used with increasing frequency on the news site, for set-piece events like PMQs.

So over lunchtime, we’ll be supplementing our live video stream with a live text commentary – using ajax and some custom WordPress wizardry. It’s a very simple concept at heart. A live commentary is just a chronologically-presented series of short text chunks… just like a list of comments on a post. So that’s what we’re going to use.

The site editor will be entering his comments via a hidden, ajax-powered comment form: and, as with any WordPress comment, he’ll benefit from features like automatic text formatting, including conversion of URLs into clickable links. Meanwhile, users will see each new comment appended to the bottom of the list, with a cute colour highlight, but without the need for a full page refresh.

Naturally, this means a much increased workload for the web server, particularly if – as we expect – we attract a sizable audience for what looks like being front-page news. WordPress and its plugin collection can do a lot to help; but we’ve taken a few additional server-level steps to ensure all runs smoothly. All the credit for this goes to my regular collaborator Simon Wheatley, who knows a thing or two about these things, thanks in part to his work for Stephen Fry.

There are plenty of options for running live text commentaries like this, such as the excellent CoverItLive. But there are a number of benefits to running it within WordPress: not least the fact that afterwards, you’ll instantly have a bullet-point summary of the key points at your disposal. And as we’ve been building the functionality, we’ve been getting quite excited at other ways we could use it.

If you’re at a keyboard at lunchtime, please drop by, and let me know how you find it.
25 Mar 2010

e-government, technology

downingstreet, telegraph, wordpress

Telegraph calls No10 site 'a technical mess'
Last night, the Telegraph published a piece by their head of audience development, Julian Sambles accusing the Downing Street website of being ‘a technical mess’. This damning conclusion was based on the following criticisms:
- It wasn’t in the top search results for a few randomly-selected Budget-related search terms.
- It doesn’t have a ‘link canonical’ tag in its code header.
- It has a pretty curious set of ‘meta keywords’ – including ‘piercings’, ‘tattoos’ and ‘polish armed forces’. (Update: apparently not random at all – see comment below.)
- The page templates aren’t especially well structured for SEO purposes.
- It has inconsistent names on various external sites like Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.
None of which, in my mind, constitute a ‘technical mess’. So it’s interesting to see, this morning, that the headline has been watered down, to mock the keyword selection.

Some of the criticisms are valid. The site could do a few simple things to improve its SEO standing, probably taking barely a few minutes. And yes, I have trouble remembering which specific configuration of ‘downing’ and ‘st(reet)’ it uses to make up its various usernames. But some of the accusations are way over the top, and some don’t stand up at all.

The ‘meta keywords’ criticism, for example. In the old days, search engines respected the keywords you entered in your page header as a guide to the page’s substance. But then people, possibly working in the field of ‘audience development’, began abusing them. So what does Google, with 90% of the UK search market, think about meta keywords?

Let’s ask Google’s Matt Cutts, shall we?

His answer: they don’t use it. ‘Basically not at all… Even in the least little bit.’ Not worth spending much time on then, I’d say.

And then there’s the failure to rank highly for certain budget-related search terms. But would you want or expect Number10 to be a high-ranking result, when it has very little material on the subject – and isn’t the ‘lead site’ on the subject, from either a policy (HM Treasury) or a citizen-facing (Directgov) perspective?

If you search Google right now for ‘budget’, you’ll get both HMT and DG in the top few results. That’s the appropriate outcome.

I’m not saying there aren’t improvements I’d want to make to the Number10 site. As regular readers may know, I contributed some advice in the early days of their migration to WordPress – but I didn’t have any hands-on involvement in the build itself. If I had, for the record, certain things would have been done differently.

PS: Thankfully, someone at the Telegraph saw sense, and dropped the ‘technical mess’ line. Otherwise I’d be forced to point out that their article page scores 88 HTML validation errors in the W3C checker, compared to the Number10 homepage’s zero.
23 Mar 2010

e-government

conservatives, downingstreet, iphone, labourparty

Number10's iPhone app

I finally gave in, and upgraded the company’s iPod Touch for the purposes of testing the brand new iPhone app from 10 Downing Street. And then, as I spent an hour randomly resetting and restoring, I promptly remembered why I hadn’t upgraded for so long. Anyway…

On a technical level, the Number10 app is actually quite modest – just a pretty front end on its website’s RSS feeds, and the feeds from its YouTube, Flickr and Twitter accounts. But it’s really very pretty – and that kind of thing matters in the world of the iPhone. It feels like a perfect blend of native iPhone interface and the parent website’s house style.

It follows, coincidentally I’m sure, in the wake of recently-launched apps by both Labour and the Conservatives – and I’d say it’s the best of the three. The Tories’ somewhat dazzling effort may have more glitz, but the Number10 app feels better in terms of information delivery: and I like its one-click sharing button to send details to your Twitter and Facebook chums. (It’s quite surprising that neither the Labour nor Tory apps have sharing buttons.)

Not entirely sure who it’s aimed at, or what specific purpose it serves, other than providing an iPhone-optimised interface on those various web presences: but the same criticism can be levelled at many such ‘corporate’ iPhone apps.
22 Mar 2010

e-government, politics

conservatives, datasharing, gordonbrown, labourparty

Brown's big picture of the digital future

Gordon Brown’s speech, describing a vision of Britain’s digital future, is stirring stuff, with its pledges to make Britain a world leader in terms of digital jobs, public service delivery and ‘the new politics’.

The announcements and commitments came thick and fast – from the £30m to create an Institute of Web Science, to be headed by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, to confirmation of the release of ‘a substantial package of information held by Ordnance Survey … without restrictions on reuse’, to a ‘Domesday Book for the 21st century’ listing all non-personal datasets held by government and arms-length bodies, to an iPhone app for Number10, to an API on Directgov content ‘by the end of May’.

And then there’s MyGov – ‘a radical new model making interaction with government as easy as internet banking or online shopping.’ On the face of it, this seems – finally – like recognition that citizens’ expectations have jumped ahead of government’s delivery in the last decade. There wasn’t much detail in the speech – but it sounds to me like the first hint at Vendor Relationship Management, where the citizen shares his/her data up to suppliers. That’s certainly where the Times seemed to be pointing on Saturday, when it described the creation of a ‘paperless state’:

The aim is that within a year, everybody in the country should have a personalised website through which they would be able to find out about local services and do business with the Government. A unique identifier will allow citizens to apply for a place for their child at school, book a doctor’s appointment, claim benefits, get a new passport, pay council tax or register a car from their computer at home. … Over the next three years, the secure site will be expanded to allow people to interact with their children’s teachers or ask medical advice from their doctor through a government version of Facebook.

As I’ve written here before, I’m convinced this has to happen at some point. We build up personal profiles on Facebook, and allow Amazon and Tesco to analyse our purchasing habits – in return for much improved service. I just don’t think it’s sustainable on any level for government to continue to demand that we fill in lengthy forms, whether on paper or online, to get what we’re due.

But of course, that’s a huge government IT project, isn’t it? And by definition, that’s doomed? Well, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line which suggests things might be changing:

This does not require large-scale government IT Infrastructure; the ‘open source’ technology that will make it happen is freely available. All that is required is the will and willingness of the centre to give up control.

Blimey: recognition that open source is ready to deliver the most visionary of government policy.

And with my WordPress hat on – do I ever take it off? – I can’t help smiling at his pledge that ‘no new [government] website will be allowed unless it allows feedback and engagement with citizens themselves.’

Of course, the speech has to be seen in context. Without ever mentioning the Tories, the speech was quite unashamedly party political in places: portraying the differing views of broadband expansion, or trying to match or trump Tory pledges on data transparency. It was also the speech of a Prime Minister staring at a huge public debt problem: and with neither tax rises nor spending cuts being palatable, that really only leaves technology-driven efficiency savings.

And it’s the context that’s stopping me getting too excited about it all. We’re probably a fortnight away from government pulling down the shutters for a month. In six weeks, Brown may or may not be Prime Minister, and may or may not be in a position to deliver on these promises.

Comparisons with the Tories’ technology manifesto are inevitable. In this speech, Brown blended small-scale but symbolic measures, like a Directgov API within weeks, with big-picture principles such as VRM. It’s both shorter- and longer-term than the Conservative document – attempting, perhaps, to outflank Cameron, Maude, Hunt et al on both sides at once.

But whilst they may differ on certain matters of implementation, both are heading – rushing actually – in the same basic direction. On the face of it, no matter who wins, we can’t lose.
14 Mar 2010

e-government, technology

gcn, speaking, training

From my presentation to new civil servants

On Tuesday this week, I gave a presentation at the Government Communication Network’s foundation course for new entrants – talking about the current online and social media landscape, and highlighting a few specific implications for those working in government. I haven’t received the feedback questionnaire summary yet; but the initial signals look encouraging. (Thanks Sue.)

For a while now, I’ve been doing slides which don’t make a lot of sense unless I’m standing up in front of them; so I’m not going to share my slideshow per se. However, I thought I’d share the key information sources I used: you’ll find the facts and figures I quoted, plus – undoubtedly – some other gems I missed.

The best sources of numbers were the Ofcom Communications Market Report and the National Statistics release on Internet Access, both published last August. The Ofcom report is particularly good for numbers and charts on all aspects of media consumption. I also used a few figures from the BBC’s iPlayer press pack, to illustrate the growth of high-bandwidth activity, and the use of non-traditional devices (specifically in that case, PS3s and Wiis).

Click to see it a bit larger

The most useful visual was probably this one, from Hitwise – using data originally produced for the BBC’s Virtual Revolution series, it visualises the UK’s top 30 web presences, and the traffic flows between them.

It’s particularly useful to show just how significant Google, Facebook and Hotmail (or strictly nowadays, Windows Live Mail) are in the UK online experience – and hopefully made people think a bit more about tools which government (and indeed, party politics) often seems to ignore.

I used to do similar sessions for GCN (or as it was then, GICS) courses on a fairly regular basis; and it was great to be doing them again, forcing me to stay up-to-date on the latest statistics. The biggest single change between this one and the last one I did, back in 2006? The language I found myself using.

I was perfectly comfortable using ‘industry terms’ which I’d felt the need to avoid (or certainly, explain) last time: and the audience knew what I was talking about. But perhaps most striking of all, I was conscious of the fact that most of what I was saying was in the present tense, where last time it was future.

My thanks to Jon Worth for recommending me for the course; and to course leader Sue Calthorpe for going far beyond the call of duty, when I stupidly left my laptop power cable behind. I really enjoyed it all; I hope the attendees did too; and I’m dead keen to do more.
13 Mar 2010

e-government, politics

bis, notwordpress

BIS website grows up

There’s a new website for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – aka BIS – this weekend; and as I reported here back in November (sniff!), they’re waving farewell to WordPress as their core publishing platform. The new site is built on Sitecore, and is appearing bang on the published schedule.

Visually it’s really nice: a very open feel to the design, good solid navigation and a very fashionable ‘carousel’ slideshow at the top of the homepage. It still doesn’t feel like a large site, although it’s clearly much deeper than its WordPress predecessor – and that’s definitely a compliment. As you might expect, given they’ve got some of the most web- and social-media-savvy people in Whitehall, it’s a fine piece of work.

It’s going to be a bumpy ride for them though. With purdah probably only 4 weeks away, with Lord Mandelson as your minister, in the wake of the Tory technology manifesto, given controversy over the Digital Britain bill, given the possibility (likelihood?) of Machinery of Government changes in a couple of months, etc etc… well, you can imagine what headlines it might prompt. But the BIS team aren’t stupid; I’m sure they’ll have a comms plan ready.

On the WordPress front – yes of course, it’s a pity to lose a ‘trophy user’. It’s been great to quote the main corporate web presence of one of Whitehall’s highest-profile departments as a WordPress-based site. But remember why it was on WordPress in the first place: a small-scale, stop-gap website, thrown together within (literally) a couple of days. Precisely the kind of lightweight, tactical context where we’ve always said WordPress excels.

And whilst WordPress might not be right for a single department-wide site, with thousands of pages and dozens of authors, I refer you to our recent work with BIS on Science and Society, and its testing of the concept of a ‘network of blogs’ making up a larger site. This model is already starting to happen in a few places: I know of one Whitehall departmental site which is steadily hiving off various bits to stand-alone WordPress sites. And of course, BIS have quite a few WordPress-based sites which remain live, even after the parent site ‘grows up’.

Now… chances are, on 7 May, we’re going to have a few new or rejigged entities keen to get web presences up and running: certainly quickly, probably cheaply. As BIS has hopefully proven beyond all doubt, WordPress is up to the task: at least in the short term, and probably longer – ask the Wales Office, now into year 3 of operation. And for the record, it ticks a good number of the boxes on BIS team leader Neil Williams’s Fantasy CMS wishlist. We’re ready when you are.
11 Mar 2010

e-government, politics

conservatives, skunkworks

Tories promise IT skunkworks
If there’s one commitment in the Conservatives’ Technology Manifesto, billed as ‘the most ambitious technology agenda ever proposed by a British political party’, which makes my heart leap with joy, it’s this:

We will also create a small IT development team in government – a ‘government skunkworks’ – that can develop low cost IT applications in-house and advise on the procurement of large projects.

For those unfamiliar with the term, ‘skunkworks’ was devised by aircraft maker Lockheed Martin – and is still jealously guarded by them as a trademark. It describes a small, almost secret unit within a large organisation, protected from all the internal bureaucracy, and given carte blanche to be creative. Among Lockheed Martin’s 14 rules for its operation are:
- Unit manager to be answerable directly to a very senior member of the organisation.
- An ‘almost vicious’ restriction of the numbers of people involved.
- Minimal reporting requirements.
- Strict access controls.
- Mutual trust, with close cooperation and daily liaison, allowing correspondence to be kept to a minimum.
All very ‘web 2.0’… until you learn these rules came together in the 1940s.

I detect the influence of Tom Steinberg. Eighteen months ago, at MySociety’s 5th birthday celebration, Tom gave a speech in which he said:

So long as the cult of outsourcing everything computer related continues to dominate in Whitehall, and so long as experts like Matthew [Somerville] and Francis [Irving] are treated as suspicious just because they understand computers, little is going to change.

Government in the UK once led the world in its own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire’s worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.

But equally, as I argued at the time, bringing those kinds of people back into Whitehall and then dumping them inside IT departments wasn’t going to help either. This skunkworks concept – where you’re effectively a startup within the organisation – should offer the best of both worlds.

I’ve been one of numerous people – inside and outside government – who have suggested such an approach in the past. And no matter how positive a hearing the idea received, it didn’t happen. Its time may well be coming.

My suggestion is that this unit needs to be created very, very quickly after the election. I remember the uncertainty and sheer chaos which followed the handover from Tories to Labour in 1997. Radical, dramatic, shocking, good things happened. For a while, you went into work each day not knowing what was coming next. It was magnificent, wonderful chaos – for a while.

There’s also a specific paragraph on government websites:

The Conservative Party believes that government websites should not be treated like secure government offices or laboratories, where public access is to be controlled as tightly as possible.

We see government websites as being more like a mixture of private building and public spaces, such as squares and parks: places where people can come together to discuss issues and solve problems.

Where large amounts of people with similar concerns come together, for example filling in VAT forms or registering children for schools, we will take the opportunity to let people interact and support each other.

Again… Mr Steinberg, I presume? I’m not sure quite what that’s getting at; discussion forums? opening up Sidewiki-esque comments on ‘standard’ pages? (That idea was first aired at the 2008 Barcamp.)

There’s a commitment to ‘a level playing ?eld for open source IT’: welcome words, but we already have an on-paper commitment to a level playing field… or arguably, ever-so-slightly slanted in favour of open source. I haven’t changed my mind since January this year, when I concluded that we need a ‘specific high-profile victory for Open Source, to give it real momentum in government’. And those mythical 100 Days could be the time to deliver that.

Elsewhere there’s confirmation of notions already floated: transparency of senior salaries and contract spending, a ‘right to data’, online publication of expenses claims at Parliament and council levels, and so on.

In some aspects, there’s little to separate the rhetoric between Labour and the Tories. But whereas Labour has had the opportunity to make ambitious changes happen – and hasn’t always taken them, you get the sense of energy and ambition in the Tories’ promises.

There are specific actions and measurable commitments in this document: and it must be said, there’s evidence of the Tories practising what they’re preaching – use of WordPress and Drupal, publication of government IT policy (admittedly, someone else’s) in commentable form, publication of front-bench expenses via Google Spreadsheet.

Things could be about to get very, very interesting.
8 Mar 2010

company, e-government

commentariat, defra, wordpress

Defra's new WordPress comment platform

Over the last few months we’ve been doing a few little projects with Defra: first came the UK Location (micro)site, and I mentioned there was ‘at least one more’ in the pipeline.

The second project emerged a few days back: a ‘commentable page’ platform, in the style (as Steph rightly observed) of the now-legendary Commentariat theme. In fact, I handed over my part of the work some time ago; but the Defra team have taken things a step or two further, embedding it even deeper into their ‘house style’.

This kind of ‘new light through old windows’ work – where I build a WordPress site to match or slot into an existing design – has probably accounted for about half my (new) projects over the last six months or so. It’s much quicker for me, and hence much cheaper for clients. It’s usually as simple as referencing the parent site’s CSS files; stripping their page templates down to empty shells; then dropping in the required WordPress functions, and building new CSS around them as necessary. It cuts my bill by about 50%, maybe more. And because you’re removing most, if not all, of the subjective elements, things tend to run much more smoothly too.

Maybe this is a pointer for how we can take WordPress deeper into large corporates. It isn’t about replacing your entire Existing Arrangement with a young upstart like WordPress in one fell swoop. Inevitably, certain sections of your website will lend themselves better than others to WordPress’s natural preference for chronological presentation, commenting, RSS feeds, tagging, and so on. And if you’re smart in terms of how you code it all, how you structure your navigation, and how you pass data around (most likely using RSS feeds), the join can be made barely visible.

If you’re looking for a nice example of this: look at the integration of www.parliament.uk and news.parliament.uk: the latter runs on WordPress, and delivers its content – including images, by the way – back into the parent site via RSS. (Disclosure: I had a very minor role in it.)

For those interested in the technical details: it’s a WordPress MU installation (although of course, that won’t matter for long); meaning the Defra team are able to generate new sites under the ‘engage’ subdomain with just a couple of clicks. I think they’ve altered the default theme I handed over, for tighter integration into the site structure; but even then, it’s just a case of editing the HTML around the WordPress code, all of which will be instantly familiar as it’s using their existing stylesheet.

We’ve got one more project with Defra in the works: hoping to get it out there within the next couple of weeks.
26 Feb 2010

company, e-government

notwordpress, ukti

Our modest microsite for UKTI

Monday saw a gathering of 250 leading figures from the world of business at London’s Saatchi Gallery; and organisers UK Trade & Investment asked Puffbox to put together a microsite for the event. With minimal advance publicity, few official post-conference outputs, and no particular involvement for the general public, we felt the best approach was to work up a relatively modest ‘one page site’ idea, ‘mashing up’ material from numerous external sources.

For the past few months I’ve been falling in love with javascript library jQuery; and I wanted to make use of what I’d learned – partly to enrich the user experience above that of a fairly static page, but also to simplify its management. So there’s a nice little sideways-scrolling video playlist – which uses jQuery not only for the animation effect, but also to wrap the content in the necessary HTML markup. Each set of three videos needs to be contained in an LI tag; but doing that manually would have been a nightmare, especially when it came to adding new videos midway down the list – so jQuery does it on my behalf.

When you click to play a video, it loads in the page’s main panel – and generates a few extras too. We’re offering YouTube’s little-known short URL format for easier sharing; social buttons for Twitter, Facebook and Delicious; plus a (somewhat experimental) click-to-copy button, which triggers a rather cute colour trick when you press it. None of it rocket science, but it all helps make things a little more user-friendly, and hopefully a bit more memorable.

(If you’re keen to know how any of it was done, a peek at the source code should reveal all.)

It was a little strange to find myself right back at the coalface, hand-coding HTML pages in real-time: it’s been a good few years, probably dating back to my time at the Foreign Office or Sky News since I’ve had to do that. (Yes folks, that’s right – no WordPress this time.) And inevitably, with various people producing various things in various places – all also in real time, a significant proportion of the effort went on coordination rather than pure web development.

This wasn’t a website on the scale of, say, FCO’s efforts for the London Summit last year. But given what we had, in terms of both time and material available, I’m definitely pleased with it. Looks pretty, thanks to designer Matt; with some cute interactions, thanks to jQuery; and relatively easy to maintain on the day. I’m particularly grateful to UKTI, who were an ideal client in many respects – telling us the end result they wanted, and allowing us to work out how best to do it.
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.