e-government – Page 20

10 Feb 2010

company, e-government

bis, scienceandsociety, stephgray, wordpress, wordpressmu

Networked blogs: our latest science experiment

Over the last couple of months I’ve been working with Steph Gray and his BIS colleagues to build a modest little family of websites which could have far-reaching consequences.

As Steph notes on his own blog, I’ve long been musing openly about seeing corporate websites as clusters of smaller websites: making a virtue of the silo mentality, if you like. Give each sub-unit a full-featured website, with hands-on control of content, their own ‘latest news’ stream, the ability to activate and manage reader comments. Let the technology platform enforce a certain degree of consistency, and centralised control. Lay a unifying ‘front end’ over the top, to promote the day’s most important developments, and assist with search and navigation.

It also tied in neatly to a question I’ve been asked quite a few times lately: what’s the maximum number of pages a WordPress build can handle? In a single ‘page tree’, I’ve helped run sites with hundreds of pages – and whilst it’s perfectly serviceable, it’s hardly ideal. But maybe it’s the single page tree that’s the problem there. How about if, instead of a 100-page structure, you had 10 structures each of 10 pages?

The opportunity to test the theory arose when Steph approached me about BIS’s Science and Society site – which, as it happens, had been Steph’s first WordPress build (whilst still in DIUS). What better audience for such an experiment than the science community?

We replaced ‘ordinary’ WordPress with WordPress MU (‘multi user’), and I built a more flexible MU-friendly theme, maintaining the same basic look and feel. There’s a top-level ‘family’ navigation, representing the various individual subsites; and with a line or two of CSS, we can give subsite its own colour scheme. There’s a special ‘homepage’ template for subsite use, driven primarily by widgets. And at the top level, we’re actually aggregating the subsites’ RSS feeds to produce a ‘latest across the whole site’ listing and RSS feed.

It’s a tricky time to be doing the project, on numerous fronts. BIS are working on launching a redesigned (non-WP) site, hence the new blue branding along the top. WordPress v3.0 is on the horizon, integrating MU’s multi-user aspect into the core product, with as yet unknown consequences. Oh, and in case you’d missed it, there’s an election on the cards, not to mention a purdah period leading up to it – and who-knows-what afterwards. So things have been a bit quick-and-dirtier than I’d usually allow; but I saw no point getting bogged down in detail when everything could be up for grabs imminently.

Steph has used a deliberately provocative title on his post – ‘One day, all of this will be blogs.’ Is that an overstatement? Perhaps, but aren’t we seeing blogging steadily take over other forms of communication?

If teams really do want to connect with their stakeholders (hate that word), and operate transparently, and permit two-way conversations – this model would give them the platform they need. A single WordPress MU build makes the maintenance of the network (almost) as straightforward as a single blog – and allows a degree of control to be kept at the centre. The stakeholders can have all the RSS feeds and email alerts they could desire. It doesn’t resolve the human and organisational / cultural aspects: but it clears the way for those to be tackled, if we really want to.

I think it can work: it’s the logical ‘next step’ for WordPress’s journey into the corporate world, surely. Do I think it will work? I honestly don’t know. I’ll be watching with interest.
9 Feb 2010

e-government

advertising, adwords, google, health

DH reveals £2.7m Adwords spend

A parliamentary question has revealed that, in the year to the end of January 2010, the Department of Health spent £2.72 million on Google Adwords pay-per-click keyword advertising. A big number, but a fair one?

With Google’s Adwords advertising, you only pay on results. An advert is displayed at the top, or down the side of a set of Google search results for a given keyword or phrase; or, optionally, on third-party web pages where Google’s matching technology decides your keyword is relevant. Plus, Google’s technology allows for geo-targeting, so in the case of DH, they can specify ‘UK only’. (Of course, DH is only responsible for England, but that’s for another day.) So in theory at least – we know that people were looking for something health-related; they saw an advert from DH/the NHS; they decided it was of interest; they clicked on it, and were taken to a DH website. Job done.

A couple of factors to bear in mind. There has been a trend towards campaign calls-to-action based on search terms: ‘search online for X’ – and in the free-for-all of Google search ranking, the only way to truly guarantee visibility at the top of the page is to pay Google for the privilege. If it works as a call-to-action, and you have to pay for it, then so be it. And it’s a competitive business – where government finds itself going head-to-head against pharmaceutical companies. Top ranking can cost a lot of money.

DH is rightly cautious about disclosing too much data, citing competitive confidentiality. Similarly, Google doesn’t tell you as much as you might like about ‘what keyword X will cost you’. But their Traffic Estimator provides some clues.

If we look at ‘chlamydia’ for example: Google’s tool suggests that a bid of 30-43p per click will buy you a position in the top 3 adverts for the term, leading to 62-86 clicks per day. That’s something like £27.50 per day, or £10,000 a year. Now of course, Google’s screen layout means there’s a significant premium to being the no1 ‘sponsored link’ – and you might well consider it worth bidding high to guarantee top spot, particularly in the case of chlamydia, where the NHS site is the no2 ‘natural’ result.

For the term ‘stop smoking’, Google’s tool suggests a bid of £1.66 to £2.50 per click, to secure a top 3 slot resulting in 49-68 clicks per day. So for a similar volume of traffic, that’d be well over £100 per day – and an annual cost in the region of £42,500. Why so much more expensive? – because the NHS is in direct competition with bids from anti-smoking drugs, devices and consultants. One wonders what premium they’re paying to guarantee no1 position there – but the Google tool suggests a maximum bid-per-click of over £6, taking us well into six figure annual budgets.

Time and again, when you search for something health-related on Google, there’s an NHS sponsored link at the top of the page. They, or rather we, are paying good money for this. You’ve got to assume someone’s looking at the numbers, and deciding it’s worthwhile. Just because it’s a big number, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t cost-effective. It may surprise some people for me to say this – but some things on the web are worth paying for.
5 Feb 2010

e-government, politics

Payment on results

WeAreSocial’s Robin Grant tagged me (and various others) on Twitter, asking for opinions on Conservative proposals from Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne:

A Conservative government will require all public bodies that want to launch marketing campaigns to state precisely what behaviour change the advertising is designed to bring about, and an element of the advertising agency fee will be made contingent on achieving the desired outcome.

Like Robin post author Simon Collister, I can see good and bad in this. I’m inclined to agree with anything which makes government think much harder about its communications spending: the whole reason I started down the open source technology route with Puffbox was because I felt we were spending too much money, and receiving too little in return. I’m all for bad projects being held to account, and good projects to be held aloft as exemplars.

But it’s going to be incredibly difficult to make such a rule make sense. Too many factors involved, too much hard cash at stake.

If marketing operated in a vacuum, with no external factors – and, by the way, no client involvement / interference – then maybe you could compare the situation before with the situation after, and say that any difference was solely down to the quality of the campaign. But of course it doesn’t. And even if it did, you’d be assuming absolute trust in the measurement of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ – which would, in many cases, be government statistics. You can imagine the worries around conflicts of interest, potential and perceived. And where potentially large sums of money are at stake, lawyers gather.

And what would happen if the target were exceeded, perhaps considerably? No reward? All stick, no carrot?

Robin wonders if any such rules would be applied to websites and other social media. I’d draw a distinction between scenarios where you are doing the communicating on behalf of the client, and where you’re enabling the client to communicate themselves. Virtually everything Puffbox does is the latter: more’s the pity, sometimes. So the only metrics my output can be judged on are the deliverables: did we do what we said we’d do, in the agreed time and for a reasonable budget. And on those, I’ve got no worries whatsoever.

Bottom line: I doubt this would change much for me, and others in similar situations. We’re only as good as our last job, as they say; and it would only bring the threat one step closer. Same threat though. And that’s fine.
4 Feb 2010

e-government

commentariat, mod, wordpress

Defence green paper on WordPress

Delighted to note the Ministry of Defence’s decision to publish its new green paper in commentable form, using a restyled version of Steph‘s Commentariat theme for WordPress.

The MoD have been doing some excellent, if a little underpublicised, work with blogging tools – Defence News and a blog from Afghanistan, both running on a Typepad account; and Blogger-based initiatives from Basra and Helmand; not to mention efforts around YouTube, Facebook and so on. But I think this is their first WordPress-based work.

Looks to be sitting in ultra-cheap hosting space provided by Hampshire-based Justhost.com – £2.95 a month for unlimited disk space and bandwidth; although I think the server itself is in California.

Depending on your definitions, I think that’s now a majority of central government departments – or certainly very close to it, anyway – who have run public-facing WordPress-based websites.
3 Feb 2010

e-government, technology

france, opensource, thunderbird

French military's open-source collaboration
Now this is how open source is meant to work.

In January 2007, the French defence ministry’s Direction Générale de l’Armement began work (in association with BT) on a project called Milimail, to enhance Firefox’s open-source cousin, the Thunderbird email client for military purposes. It’s now known as Trustedbird – and lists among its additional features:
- Deletion receipts (MDN);
- Delivery receipts (DSN);
- Encryption/Signing with triple wrapping;
- RFC 2634 Security Labels and Signed Receipts;
- Address autocompletion with several LDAP directories;
- CRL download from LDAP directories;
- Manage Out of Office settings on a Sieve server
…only some of which I even begin to understand. But apparently, the key enhancement is the fact that you can ‘know for sure when messages have been read, which is critical in a command-and-control organization’ – according to Mozilla executive David Ascher, quoted by Reuters. And that’s good enough for it to hook into NATO systems.

What’s more, code from the French project found its way into Thunderbird’s v3 public release last December – making the product better for everybody.

The recently revised UK government policy on open source seemed to focus solely on the procurement angle. But as Trustedbird demonstrates, there’s potential for the benefits of open source to go much, much wider.

And if a particular open source product doesn’t quite meet your exacting specification, that shouldn’t mean you simply dismiss it. Ask not what open source can do for you, you might say; ask what you can do for open source.
3 Feb 2010

e-government, technology

downingstreet, internetexplorer, petitions

No10 e-petition on abandoning IE6

I’ve happily signed the e-petition on the Downing Street website calling on the Prime Minister to ‘encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6.’

I’ve written on this subject before; and I know the huge headache it would be to alter in-house applications built for IE6 alone (although that’s another story altogether).

I note the petitioner’s failure to mention the government-backed Get Safe Online initiative, which explicitly recommends upgrading. So when he says ‘(The French and German) governments have let their populations know that an upgrade will keep them safer online. We should follow them.’ – I know he’s wrong. And I’m not sure I buy his suggestion that ‘When the UK government does this, most of Europe will follow. That will create some pressure on the US to do so too.’

But that’s all beside the point. If we can use this petition as some kind of leverage, I’m prepared to overlook its deficiencies. And with nearly 5,000 signatures in a couple of days, and front-page coverage from the BBC, we have a platform on which to build.

The latest browser market share numbers show that finally, IE6 has been deposed as the world’s #1 browser. And in the last few days, Google has announced that its Apps will be phasing out IE6 support, becoming the latest big name to say enough is enough.

It’s time to put IE6 out of our misery. Sign the petition.
3 Feb 2010

e-government, politics

datagovuk, freedata

Don't go comparing

There’s a bit of a spat at the moment over Conservative (mis)use of crime stats to suggest a doubling or trebling of violent crime. The BBC’s Mark Easton has an excellent summary of the situation, which ultimately boils down to a change in how the numbers were put together:

Before 2002 the decision as to whether an incident was a violent crime had been taken by police. After 2002, officers were obliged to record all incidents as violent crimes if the alleged victim said that is what it was. The aim was to stop police fiddling the figures and to get a better picture of violence. The obvious consequence was to send the raw numbers shooting up.

Statisticians therefore warn that ‘figures before and after that date are not directly comparable’ – however, that doesn’t seem to have stopped either the Tories or, to some extent at least, the Labour government making precisely such comparisons.

Not that that’s any kind of justification, as Tory spokesman Chris Grayling attempted on the Today programme this morning:

I know there’s been a change; I also know that the Home Office has continued to use the same comparators. … As an opposition party, we don’t make the statistics. We can only use what the Home Office publishes.

My point isn’t the party politics of the situation: it’s the reminder of the pitfalls of playing with data. The launch of data.gov.uk is rightly being hailed as a triumph: but it hands highly explosive material to eager amateurs. Some won’t notice the caveats; some won’t understand them; some may actively choose to ignore them. And some will say, ‘what does it matter, we’re all at it.’

If statistics are kept to a small clique of experts, then it’s fine to tinker with the calculations – safe in the knowledge that all the users are expert enough to understand and factor in the changes. But stats aren’t kept to the cliques any more, if ever they really were – and data.gov.uk takes this to a whole new level.

The decision to offer the data was absolutely right in my view: in time, it should be an antidote to this. But it will come under fire at some point: and we need to have a defence ready.
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.
25 Jan 2010

company, e-government

careandsupport, flickr, health, photos, wordpress

Photo-sharing function for Health consultation

One of my longest-running projects has been the consultation around Care and Support, and the creation of a National Care Service. It’s been a huge engagement process on many fronts, moving through numerous phases – and the website has reflected that, with frequent changes, additions and updates.

The latest enhancement went live last week – and effectively grafts Flickr-like photo functionality on top of WordPress. We’re asking people to submit photos which illustrate the issue from their perspective, with the prospect of including the best ones in the White Paper due later this year.

Now I’ll confess, I wasn’t too convinced by the idea initially. Would we get any response at all? Would the photos be any good? Would people take the issues seriously? But I’m happy to admit my instincts were wrong this time: yes, people are sending in their photos, and yes, some of them are fantastic.

The upload function is based around the TDO Mini Forms plugin: not always the easiest to work with, but it opens up all sorts of possibilities. In a perfect world we’d maybe have tried to do a really slick upload form: TDOMF relies on an iframe, with some downside in terms of usability. But it’s good enough, and it was up and running in next to no time. All submissions are moderated prior to publication: and thankfully, TDOMF makes this as easy as normal WP comments.

If you know Flickr, you’ll immediately see echoes of its design in the custom templates I’ve done – and yes, that’s entirely deliberate. Since it’s fulfilling the same basic purpose, it made sense to use the same basic presentation. We considered using Flickr itself, but didn’t feel too comfortable with its rules on ‘commercial’ groups: maybe we could have pleaded non-profit status, but it wasn’t worth spending time on. (Comment functionality is of course present on the site; but it was decided not to open comments on these pages.)

I doubt there’s a place for this in many consultations; but I’m glad we’ve been able to prove it can be done – and that there are people out there, willing to get involved. A soft engagement success story in the making, I hope.
21 Jan 2010

e-government, technology

creativecommons, datagovuk, opsi, statistics, timbernerslee

Creative Commons coming to data.gov.uk

There’s something almost unnerving about the launch of a government website getting so much positive coverage. But today’s been data.gov.uk‘s big day, and everyone seems to agree it’s a jolly good thing. For now.

James Crabtree’s piece for Prospect magazine hails it as ‘a tale of star power, serendipity, vision, persistence and an almost unprecedented convergence of all levels of government’. The New Statesman says it’s ‘a far more radical project than it first appears… a clear break with the closed, data-hugging state of the past.’ We’re all getting quite excitable, aren’t we?

Me? I’m just looking back over posts on this blog last year: this one about the need to make moves on data release (including an excerpt from my resignation letter from ONS), and this one on Tim Berners-Lee’s appointment. I’ll confess, I got something wrong in that latter post; I wrote that it was ‘probably’ a cult-of-celebrity, hands-off appointment. Looks like that wasn’t entirely accurate. Sorry.

This has been a long time coming. Too long. Shamefully long. But there is still good reason to be excited. Amid all the talk about bicycle accidents, you may have missed the news that OPSI is working on simplified T&Cs for reuse of the site’s data:

These terms and conditions have been aligned so that they are interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence. The terms and conditions are also machine readable meaning that the licence is presented and coded in such a way that applications and programs can access and understand the terms and conditions too.

This is the first major step towards the adoption of a non-transactional, Creative Commons style approach to licensing the re-use of government information. The new model will replace the existing Click-Use Licence. We are working towards the launch of the new licence model by the end of May 2010.

Don’t overlook the significance of this move. This is government adopting someone else’s standard, for something they have historically claimed as their own. The Click-Use Licence is actually pretty liberal… but it’s scary.

This simple shift will take us from this:

Unless otherwise specified the information on this site is covered by either Crown Copyright, Crown Database Right or has been licensed to the Crown. It is your responsibility to clear any other rights. You are encouraged to use and re-use the information that is available on and through this site freely and flexibly, with only a few conditions…

to this (or something very like it). We, the citizens of the web, know what Creative Commons means: we don’t need to look it up, we won’t need a dictionary, and we won’t need a lawyer. Good things will happen as a direct result.