Puffbox

I spent most of this morning talking to a couple of press officers in a Whitehall department which I won’t name. I was a bit shocked to discover they’re stuck using IE5.something; never mind the risk involved in upgrading everyone, what about the risk of using such an outdated (and unsupported) browser?

But that was nothing compared to the shock of learning that their network blocks their access to ‘blogs’. I’m not quite sure of the precise technical extent of the blockage, but they definitely couldn’t get into Bloglines or Google Reader. Truly outrageous.

How can a government press office be expected to function properly, in a world where political stories habitually break first on the blogs, then hit the websites, then maybe make it to the papers and broadcast?

I’ll tell you how. They break the rules; it’s all they can do. They browse the web on their mobile phones, or their Blackberry. They bring in USB memory sticks. They buy unsupported kit, which the IT department never even gets a sniff of.

Now tell me, which scenario is more insecure?

I finally got round to signing up for January’s planned BarcampUKGovweb (catchy!) – two days of tech talk at a venue yet to be named. If you’ve got any interest in any of this public sector web stuff, or if you’re just interested in putting some faces to the names, you need to be there. There’s at least half a dozen people I’ve been hoping to meet for months, not to mention two of my former bosses. See links on Jeremy Gould’s blog for more info.

Puffbox‘s latest project was unleashed today; working alongside Jeremy Gould at the Ministry of Justice, we’ve built a WordPress-based website in support of the Whitehall-wide programme of UK constitutional reform, going under the banner Governance of Britain.

As regular readers will know, I’ve started specialising in blog-powered websites which aren’t actually blogs. And this one is probably the least bloggy of the lot, so far. (For now, anyway; the functionality’s there when they want it.) At its heart is a ‘what’s new’ function, keeping track of the various announcements and consultations happening across Government. And as you’d expect, there are a few supplementary, ‘static’ pages explaining what’s going on.

There are a couple of ‘innovations’ (using the term rather loosely, I admit) worthy of note. One is the use of categorisation in the blog posts news updates. We’ve used WordPress’s notion of parent/child categories to build a list of subjects, and a list of departments. So if you want to see any announcements related to Parliament, let’s say, or announcements by HM Treasury, then there’s a page for that. And because it’s WordPress, you can access this ‘page’ as an RSS feed. (Which explains something I wrote a couple of weeks back…)

I’ve been trying to do something like this for a while; the implications for cross-government working are huge. You, in your Whitehall department, can write stuff into the Governance site; and we can pump it back to you in RSS format, for your own site to republish (if you want). In other words, it’s the ability to get the best of both worlds: a page on your own corporate site, and inclusion within the unified web presence. A real-world example of joined-up working… if your corporate site is able to process basic RSS. We do the hard part at our end; we can’t make it any easier for you. But I fear very few will be able to receive it. (Please prove me wrong, folks.)

The other ‘innovation’ is the page of ‘What others are saying‘, powered by del.icio.us. Technically, it’s just a republished RSS feed (um, see above). But I think it’s an important step for a government website to go out of its way to point to relevant stuff elsewhere – newspapers, magazines, blogs, anywhere online.

We’re using del.icio.us for a couple of reasons. One, because it’s a really nice way to save web links; and it delivers an easy-to-process RSS feed which we can integrate directly into our pages. (Yes, even our homepage.) But equally of course, this means we’re in the del.icio.us community – so if people want to tell us about pages we might want to read, they can do this via del.icio.us. Just tag it ‘for:governanceofbritain’, and we’ll see it in our ‘links for you’ inbox.

We’ve also hijacked some other blog functionality: for example, the list of ‘recent documents’ on the homepage is actually managed by the WordPress ‘blogroll’. Nothing particularly special or clever in that, but it provides an easy-to-use interface for non-technical people to keep that list up-to-date.

It all came together very quickly, almost too quickly; and it’s far from the prettiest site I’ve ever done. But again, it’s proof that you really can get from nought to a full-featured, multi-authored, two-way communicating, CMS-driven site in a couple of weeks. It’s a site which makes real efforts to engage with the rest of the web. And it tries a few things which might come off, and might not. We’ll all learn something as a result.

Another new FCO blog launched today, this time following the British Hajj Delegation, a relatively new development in consular protection which will look after the 25,000 British Muslims doing their pilgrimage to Makkah. A blog is a terrific way to give this team a presence; good to see them doing the YouTube thing on day one, too.

Today sees the launch of version 2 of the website I designed and built for Lord Darzi’s national review of the NHS. V1 was built in double-quick time during the summer, and for reasons of cost and speed, used the Typepad blogging platform. Over the last month or so, Typepad’s limitations have become more and more apparent… so it was time to migrate to WordPress. Which, of course, is what I’d always wanted.

All the juicy new stuff hangs off the homepage. ‘Latest news’ is (as you’d expect) a listing of the top news updates, using a special ‘homepage’ category to give the authors total control. ‘Lord Darzi’s blog’ is the latest blog to be written by a government minister, but unlike some, we’re positively encouraging comments. Finally, there’s the ‘latest video’: the review team is producing quite a lot of video content, so we’re sticking it on YouTube, and using YouTube’s little-known RSS feed functionality (with a bit of string manipulation) to pump it back into the site.

The primary navigation is a mix of blog categories and static ‘pages’: hey, if you dig deep enough, there’s even an old-school image map! How long is it since I did one of those? We haven’t made any distinction between the two; I’m not sure it really matters to the punters.

As it’s WordPress, we’ve got full comment functionality if we want it. The plan is that blog posts should generally have comments enabled, but news posts won’t. However, if we fancy it, we can. To draw attention to the items where comments are ‘on’, there’s a little speech bubble icon which appears against the relevant headlines. A minor thing, but it catches the eye really well.

Overall, it’s taken less than a week to recode the templates, develop the new functionality, and import the content. Importing from Typepad was relatively painless: the initial process took seconds, but then you’ve got the hassle of setting summaries for each item, identifying and repointing all the manual inline links, etc etc. I’m glad there wasn’t too much content to worry about. DNS changes and server reconfiguration took about a day and a half, which was a real disappointment, but at least it’s done now.

I’m really pleased with it; the initial site was OK, particularly given the laughably short timeframe, but I knew we could do better. I’m afraid the exercise has put me off using Typepad, though: although it does have some pseudo-CMS functionality, my feeling was that it’s too tied to the concept of blogging.

Next steps? We’re thinking of a photo gallery, and maybe even some delegated authoring responsibility. But that’s all for another day. My next WordPress-in-government project is looming, and is likely to be even bigger. 😉

OK, so HMRC is getting what looks like an entirely justifiable kicking for (a) losing the CDs in transit, and (b) having a system which allowed a junior member of staff to burn the most sensitive data to CDs in the first place. But that isn’t the end of it.

Have a quick glance through these PQs on VAT registration, answered last month, which received virtually zero media coverage. HMRC has a target time of 14 days to process an application to register for VAT. Since the start of 2007, in their best month (January), they failed to meet that target in 79% of applications. Let me repeat that: the best they’ve managed is 79% failure. The worst – 93% failure in April. Things are on the up since then, but the September figure was still over 80% failure.

(For the record: the First Great Western train franchise, the worst performing in the country,  fails to meet its service delivery target – train punctuality – in just 17.4% of cases, according to the latest data from the Rail Regulator.)

FST Jane Kennedy is contrite: ‘HMRC recognise that in recent months there have been some unacceptable delays for genuine businesses. Several factors have contributed to this, including an increase in the threat of fraud, an increase in the number of applications, and both resource and IT pressures.’

This is a problem which has been raised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales; in June, they identified VAT registration delays as ‘the biggest single VAT issue facing our members and their clients.’ I’m afraid I was one of them, and yes, it was a major inconvenience at the very moment I was trying to get a small business off the ground. It’s just as well I could live off my savings for a few months.

Version 2 of the NHS website has now gone live, with a few significant changes. First off, the homepage: gone is the smiling lady with her head in the clouds. Now it looks a lot less ‘2.0’, and a lot more businesslike, which is probably a good thing.

There’s much greater prominence for things like ‘calculators, quizzes and interactive tools‘, and a whole new ‘Behind the headlines’ section which will provide ‘an unbiased and evidence-based analysis of health stories that make the news’ – including links to both the media coverage and the source material (where available). The aim is to respond on the day; an RSS feed is available immediately, with an email alerting service to follow. For what it’s worth, I think this is a brilliant addition to the site. And so far, they’re doing a good job of keeping it readable.

PS: Not the only NHS site to get a facelift this week, as I’ll be revealing shortly… 🙂

I’m reluctant to mention this, as I’m not a fan of Second Life (and never was, for the record). But I think we’re in for something of an e-government first this week (unless, of course, you know different):

On 21st and 22nd November, staff and stakeholders involved in the Our NHS, our future review will join internationally acclaimed health experts at a pioneering summit to showcase examples of leading-edge care from the UK and around the world… For members of Second Life, the keynote speeches can also be viewed live on the 21 November, and you will be able to register your own opinions and meet and chat with the speakers online.

Thankfully there’s also going to be a normal webcast of proceedings. The thought of medical gurus tinkering about in Second Life just seems wrong somehow.