Puffbox

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

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    Bong! Parliament goes WordPress

    The Parliament web team have launched a new News site for the new parliamentary session – and hurrah, it’s done in WordPress.

    I can’t really claim any credit for actually doing any of it, despite what you may have read elsewhere. The internal development team did a considerable amount of customisation, most of which won’t be immediately visible to the reader, before I ever came along. I didn’t do a lot more than pick holes in it for a day or so.

    It’s definitely a ‘news site’ rather than a blog, and the layout sits comfortably alongside the likes of the BBC. It’s a brave move to commit to putting big photos on every story, but if it’s sustainable, it’ll pay dividends. There’s a little way to go as regards the editorial; but these are early days, and the direction is unquestionably the right one.

    Their plan is to make heavy use of WordPress’s fantastic RSS functionality. There’s already a very detailed subject (category) taxonomy showing on the site; and of course, once everything’s tagged, it’s relatively easy to use category-specific RSS feeds to surface the headlines on other sites. Other departments might, for example, want to integrate into their own pages a list of Parliament’s latest news on their particular topics..?

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    DCSF's new Drupal site

    Hooray for another high-profile UK government website based on an open sourceย content management system: the new National Strategies website from DCSF, built on Drupal. It’s big, bright, bold, and once you’ve registered – a remarkably painless process for a government site, without any apparent checks on your membership of the target audience – it offers significant social functionality: commenting on articles, bookmarking pages to your own personal homepages, group discussion, page rating, sending links to Delicious and the like. Nothing exceptional for a Drupal site, perhaps, but pretty impressive for HMG.

    There’s particular significance to this particular launch, though. The National Strategies, and much of this ‘2.0’ functionality, were due to be part of Schoolsweb, the ambitious plan to rationalise all schools-related sites into a single mega-portal, to be built on the same Stellent-based infrastructure as Directgov (known as ‘The Club’). It was initially scheduled to launch in late 2005, with eight-figure budgets quoted; the last public reference I’m aware of was in February 2008, when Jim Knight responded in a PQ: Work is currently being taken forward to bring these sites into a single new website for schools – ‘SchoolsWeb’. (Note the present tense.) And as I noted some time ago, the guys who did the visual design work for Schoolsweb are still quoting it in their online portfolio, with the caveat: ‘We are currently supporting the project through a challenging build phase pending the full launch of the website shortly.’

    To paper over the cracks, a temporary signposting website was launched at www.schoolsweb.gov.uk, labelled ‘Schoolsweb Locate’ – but even that has been taken away now, replaced by a slightly clumsy redirect to the long-established ‘Standards Site’.

    On this evidence, one would have to assume that Schoolsweb, as initially conceived at least, is dead. In its place, we have a feature-rich online community built on open-source tools, and making use of pre-existing functionality – either in its core platform, or via plugins. My understanding is that the Drupal site came together in a matter of months, and seems to offer most (if not all) the functionality envisaged for Schoolsweb.

    Somewhere in there lies a great case study just waiting to be written.

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    Independent launches blogging platform

    The Independent‘s new blogging platform, Independent Minds, launched yesterday in a partnership with the now Russian-owned Livejournal. But unlike the Telegraph’s MyTelegraph site, it puts the journalists’ blogs on the same platform as the readers’. It’s a dramatic improvement (as you’d expect) on the very clunky, and frankly half-hearted blogging efforts they were doing on Typepad; and they also promise a strategic decision to ‘centre more on the writer than on the topic’ as they did before. The blogging content gets some high-profile space on the Indy’s homepage.

    On the face of it, it’s a fairly basic re-skinning of Livejournal’s community features; the deeper you click, the less it feels like an Independent site, and the more it feels like plain old Livejournal. Nothing wrong with that; it makes sense to use a well-established and relatively beginner-friendly platform. It’s a natural move for Livejournal as the new owners are reportedly keen to expand their relatively modest UK user base: their statistics page shows they have 315,000 UK-based users.

    Hmm… the Independent? Livejournal? There wouldn’t be a Downing Street connection there, would there? Former No10 web boss Jimmy Leach is now the Indy’s ‘editorial director for digital’; and Ben Wegg-Prosser, ex-head of the Strategic Communications Unit is Director of Corporate Development at Livejournal’s Russian owners, SUP. The two also worked together for ages at the Guardian (I think).

    It’s another signal of blogging’s steady progress into the newsroom: speaking of which, it’s well worth reading BBC man Jem Stone’s write-up of Robert Peston’s talk to the BBC’s College of Journalism yesterday. ‘Central to everything that I do at the BBC,’ he says.

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    Liveblogging the budget

    It was described earlier as the biggest moment in modern political history that wasn’t an election: probably a bit much, I’d have said. But it’s no surprise to see so many websites ‘liveblogging’ today’s Pre-Budget Report: the TUC, the Spectator, Liberal Conspiracy, Iain Dale, among many others. Sky News is doing something especially interesting, with its ‘Unplugged’ online broadcast offering live commentary and analysis: effectively a live video-blog, I suppose.

    Which rather begs the question, what should the Treasury themselves be doing? The Chancellor standing up in the Commons chamber, and (sorry) droning on for an hour or so, throwing numbers around like confetti, then BANG! a huge wad of paper lands on your newsdesk as he sits down – it’s simply not an effective way to communicate. There’s too much to take in, too many big numbers, too much jargon, in too short a space of time.

    I’m wondering if the Treasury shouldn’t be running an enhanced live video stream, with bullet points appearing as the Chancellor makes his announcement; and graphs / charts / etc in a second window. I’ve worked in the TV channel gallery on Budget day; it’s chaotic, as a hapless producer tries to make sense of it all, picking out the headlines in real time. Meanwhile, of course, the Treasury staff are sitting on copies of the full text of the speech, with all the advance notice they need to make a really good job of it. It’s not as if they aren’t doing the production work already, with a consumer-friendly leaflet being a regular output each time.

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    Barcamp is back

    At the time, January’s BarcampUKGovWeb felt like a breakthrough moment. Civil servants, specialist consultants, activists and volunteers coming together – on a Saturday, crucially – to share ideas and experiences, with the common objective of improving government web activity. And you know what? Looking back on it, you can trace so many good things from the past year, be they tangible deliverables or just personal connections, back to Barcamp. It worked.

    So let’s do it again. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Announced last week by Tom Watson, we’ve set a date of Saturday 31 January 2009 for the second UK government Barcamp, and it’s great to see so many people rushing to sign up already. It’ll be the same basic Barcamp mix of talks, demos, discussions and (no doubt) drinks… with an expectation that everyone comes prepared to contribute, and ideally, to lead a session of their own. The more informal, the better: just stand up, and tell us about something you’ve done lately. And the truth is, in the past year, we’ve all done a tremendous amount worth talking about. This is our chance to share what we’ve learned.

    If you’re reading this blog, you’re the sort of person who should be coming along. Simple as that.

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    New head of govt comms

    PR Week is reporting that Matt Tee, currently chief executive of NHS Direct, has been appointed the new Permanent Secretary of Government Communications; a formal decision is apparently due later today.

    It’s an intriguing appointment: Tee’s background is very different to that of his predecessor, Howell James. He came into government (proper) from a business development role at health information company Dr Foster, which already had close links with the NHS. He’s a former head of news at DTI, and was acting director of comms at the Department of Health in 2006 and 2007, whilst Sian Jarvis was on maternity leave. He joined NHS Direct in July 2007; and in the last couple of weeks said he was ‘disappointed’ at having to shelve plans for foundation status.

    He’s well connected, judging by his Facebook friends anyway – among them his predecessor in the job, Mike Grannatt, and Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne. And it’ll certainly be good to have someone with hands-on experience of online: Dr Foster ran NHS Choices (until recently), and DH was steadily moving to its new platform during his tenure. Plus, if memory serves, he’s a fellow Arsenal fan? I certainly remember a Matt Tee contributing to the Arsenal mailing list and Arseweb website in the early/mid 1990s.

    But I’ll also note that Health has come in for particular criticism in evidence to the House of Lords Comms committee over the summer: there’s quite emotive language in Computer Weekly editor Tony Collins’s write-up of his appearance; whilst Times health editor Nigel Hawkes saying relations were ‘not particularly good’:

    They are even discouraging you from developing a relationship of trust with an individual press officer. … Very often big announcements will be so extensively trailed that by the time the report actually appears I cannot persuade my news desk it is of the slightest importance. That leads to bad reporting. … I find [the DH press office] are just useful for getting the line; I would not use them for anything else.

    There have been big improvements in communications with the public through websites and participation events and so on. Big efforts have been made there but there is still an understandable reluctance to acknowledge that sometimes policies are not working. If there were more willingness to acknowledge a policy did not work so they will do something else, then they could build a bit of credibility with journalists and be taken a bit more seriously by them.

    Update: appointment now confirmed by the Cabinet Office. Interestingly they’ve used the same pic I used… and if you look at the source code of this page, you’ll see exactly where I found it. ๐Ÿ˜‰

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    FCO blogging on blogging

    It’s great to see the Foreign Office’s Stephen Hale raising his head above the parapet, and blogging about his job as ‘Head of Engagement’. (Quite a job title, by the way.) Makes sense for numerous reasons of course, not least as a means of setting a good example for colleagues. I mean, would you trust a ‘blogging expert’ who didn’t blog?

    Stephen has already touched on the FCO’s choice of the rather obscure Roller blogging platform – ‘because of the ease with which we could integrate it with our web platform’. His latest post reveals something I hadn’t previously appreciated: ‘we opened up the blogs over the summer so that any member of staff with a valid business reason could start an official blog’.

    That’s a remarkable move in itself, and perhaps unexpectedly, puts FCO on a par with hi-tech companies like Microsoft – but I’m still in two minds about the wisdom of people blogging in a personal capacity on an official platform (generally speaking). My instinct remains that corporate blogging is best done on a project basis, with more personal stuff (again, generally) kept separate.

    In that respect, we should all be grateful to FCO for testing the water here; we’ll only find out what works – if anythying – by trying it, and they’ve certainly got the Boss most likely to give them the freedom to experiment.

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    Speaking at ScotWeb2

    I spoke last Friday at ScotWeb2, organised by (now former) civil servant Alex Stobart to talk about Scotland and web 2.0, open source, engagement, all that good stuff – with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on public sector activity. There isn’t yet (so I’m told) much of a critical mass for this stuff north of the border, and this was an effort to kick-start things.

    It’s a story I’ve told many times before: how open source software and free services can be a match (or more) for mega-expensive content management solutions; how the rock-bottom cost of development should make us reconsider the meaning of ‘failure’; and the fact that whatever you want to do online, you could probably now do it. As ever, it turned into a WordPress evangelism session, and I think I’ve encouraged a few people to look at it for their more modest online projects. It’s becoming a very easy ‘sell’.

    James Munro from Patient Opinion was up before me. His starting point was that people would share their views of NHS services, whether you provided a mechanism or not – but I didn’t expect him to quote Flickr or YouTube as the platforms people might use. Having initially been funded by the Department of Health, 50 NHS organisations are now paying for ‘value added’ services on the Patient Opinion site… and with the NHS in Scotland being a separate entity, James talked about looking to expand northwards.

    If I’m honest, I was a little distracted during the afternoon’s proceeding; having got my Googlephone on launch day, I hadn’t had the chance to play with it. (Er, I mean, configure it properly.) But there were – inevitably – some interesting discussions in the pub afterwards – concentrating most notably on also-ran Scottish football. By which, of course, I mean all of it apart from Rangers and Celtic.

    The event took place at Edinburgh University‘s education faculty (?), a few doors up from the Scottish Parliament, but I was struck by the event’s very different atmosphere compared to, let’s say, a similar seminar in Westminster. Much more relaxed, with no problem interrupting speakers’ presentations, and with people on all sides of the political game happy to chat. I’d never been to the Parliament building – and it’s reassuringly, remarkably ordinary. If that’s what comes of devolution, let’s have more of it.

    Hi to some of the guys I met on the day: LibDem PPC Stephen Glenn, ex-Green MSP Mark Ballard, blogger Duncan Stephen and Stewart from w00tonomy… and thanks to Alex for making it happen.

  • Ask your MP to free our bills

    I’ve just sent the following to my local MP, Richard Benyon. I’ve given him a bit of grief lately, regarding party-political content on his apolitical Communications Allowance-funded website. I hope he’s forgiven me.

    I am writing to ask you to sign EDM 2141, tabled in July by Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson, in support of the Free Our Bills campaign by charity MySociety.

    MySociety’s pioneering work is recognised worldwide. You will probably have seen their site, TheyWorkForYou, which makes Hansard infinitely more usable on the internet. They are seeking Parliament’s assistance to do something similar with bills, to allow the public to see the laws being drafted and published on their behalf.

    Whilst recognising the motion has been tabled by a LibDem member, and that EDM signatures tend to be motivated by party affiliations, I would note that senior figures in your own party have spoken in favour of freeing public data. For example, David Cameron stated in February 2008 that he would ‘require local authorities to publish information online and in a standardised format. That way, it can be collected and used by the public and third party groups.’ This is precisely what MySociety is proposing for Westminster.

    MySociety’s track record shows that they can and will deliver. They are proposing changes which will take little time, cost little money, and have no material impact on current working practices.

    I urge you to show your support for this important principle; and to take a few moments to sign the EDM in question.

    I encourage you to do likewise. But write your own letter.

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    Gordon Brown on your Wii

    One of the more inspiring developments at the BBC recently has been the extension of iPlayer away from the desktop PC. Back in April, they launched iPlayer on the Wii – but it wasn’t the breakthrough moment it might have been. Leaving aside the fact it didn’t stream especially smoothly on my machine, the interface was optimised for a screen resolution which the Wii couldn’t deliver, making for a horrid user experience. Last week they made amends, with a Wii-optimised screen setup – and it’s truly brilliant. Try it on your desktop PC, but to appreciate its full glory, you need to be sitting on the living room sofa, in proper telly-watching mode.

    I’ve been a bit surprised that people haven’t done more optimising of content for ‘games consoles’ – particularly the current generation, with their online capabilities. And with the Wii (again) selling like hot cakes (set to get even hotter too), it has tremendous potential for video-on-demand in the living room.

    Inspired by the Beeb’s efforts, I wondered how much effort it would take to put a Wii-friendly front end on some YouTube content. So I took a few hours last night to build a prototype – and here it is: wii10.puffbox.co.uk

    It’s basically the same concept as the BBC’s design, rebuilt from scratch using a combination of PHP, RSS and Javascript (specifically, JQuery). The code pulls in the last 10 items from Downing Street’s YouTube account, and puts them into a JQuery-driven carousel. When you click on a clip, a popup fades into view, and the embedded YouTube player autoplays. The big buttons left and right make the playlist scroll beautifully from side to side.

    I want to stress: I’ve done this completely off my own bat. Although we have a continuing working relationship, I wasn’t asked to do this by Number10. It’s purely a proof-of-concept, using publicly available (publicly funded) material. It’s a bit rough round the edges: some of the link highlighting isn’t too smooth on the Wii, the word wrapping isn’t polished, and it doesn’t seem to work properly on (desktop) Firefox for some reason – although curiously, all other browsers seem OK, even IE! But having proven the concept, to be honest, I may not bother going back to fix these issues. There’s also a risk of YouTube changing their code, as has happened before: the Wii’s Flash player is a bit behind the times, and YouTube’s improvements have caused problems in the past.

    But for now – it works, really quite nicely, and I’m dead pleased with it. You need never again say the words ‘there’s nothing on telly.’ ๐Ÿ™‚ And with more and more government content going on YouTube, if anybody thinks this might be useful in a proper business context, please get in touch.