Puffbox

The new post-Stellent website for the Department for Transport has now gone live… and somebody has clearly been reading the Web 2.0 style guide. Big table-free layouts, gradient backgrounds, reflections, drop shadows… actually very pretty. And I don’t think I’ve said that too often about government websites.

The most striking aspect of the site is its reliance on search as the principal navigation method. The huge photo-buttons at the top of the homepage lead you into pages of search results, showing the latest 500 items on your chosen mode of transport, rather than any particular content structure. It looks like everything is categorised by mode of transport, ‘subject area’, UK geography and audience (plus date, obviously) – allowing for some very rich filtering of results. (I’m not sure about ‘audience’ as a filter though… the categories inevitably overlap, and people don’t always categorise themselves as you’d expect.)

It’s possible to leave people feeling overwhelmed with this kind of approach: but Transport have done a good job in making it all feel fairly manageable. If I come here knowing exactly what I want, I’m fairly sure I’ll be able to get to it. But on the flipside, if I don’t know precisely what I’m here for, I’ve got problems.

Like, for example… say I want to find out exactly what has or hasn’t been proposed in terms of road pricing, as stories of a million-plus people signing an e-petition hit the front pages. There is official information on road pricing in there: but you’re just not going to find it unless you search for the right keyword. The petition itself refers to ‘the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy’: but ‘vehicle tracking’ yields zero results on the DfT site, so you’d better guess right. You have 1.5 million internet users taking an active interest in this developing policy: why isn’t it splashed all over your front page?

And inevitably, the ‘jargon’ term isn’t the term used by mere mortals. As a search term, ‘road tax’ is five times more popular than ‘road pricing’ (Overture data, Jan 07) – and guess what, ‘road tax’ only pulls up ten documents at DfT, none of which is relevant to the road pricing debate.

Plus, I’m genuinely quite shocked to see zero use of RSS. Surely it’s mandatory on any major new site build now… with IE7 and Windows Vista a reality? There’s a What’s New page which is crying out for RSS; the press releases and/or speeches are ideal candidates; and frankly, for a site driven primarily by search, I’d expect to see a ‘saved search via RSS’ option similar to the recent addition to BBC News.

I’m just so behind the times… it turns out that e-government is dead. According to Helen Milner, the managing director of UK Online Centres (yes, apparently they are still going), writing in the new Development Plan for her network:

The time has come to reposition the network, building on its strong foundations of community learning and social inclusion and developing its role to support transformational government (‘t-government’, formerly known as e-government), a major programme to modernise and transform the way government interacts with the public and delivers its services.

So from here on in, it’s t-go….. actually, no, forget it.

Jakob Nielsen has written a piece on whether ‘Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability‘, which doesn’t really tell you anything you wouldn’t know already – like, er, usability is a good thing, and if you pick some figures out of the air, and total them up, you can put a number on it. But since it’s Dr Nielsen, and since your boss has probably heard of him, it’s worth a glance.

From Saturday’s Guardian (with thanks to David Wilcox for spotting it):

The government is planning to link up with the power of consumer and civic movements on the net by offering funding, permitting civil servants to post information on sites, and releasing information currently locked up in Whitehall. Ministers believe web movements are rapidly transforming the power relationship between government and society. A two-month review inside the Cabinet Office, including ministers, communicaitons (sic) officials, and outside experts such as Tom Steinberg from mysociety, is to be established next week, for the government to consider how to respond. They are discussing whether it is sensible for government to pull back from setting up its own sites if they are going to compete with existing innovative ones. They are instead thinking of providing funding for grassroots sites dedicated to information sharing.

Lovely thought, and with people like Tom involved, there should be the odd sane contribution at least. But bear in mind the radical shift in approach that this would represent. Not only encouraging two-way interaction, but going a step further by putting someone else in charge of it. Good luck, Tom!

Personally I have only mild reservations about the notion. It isn’t much different from private companies engaging in public forums… a case of balancing honesty and transparency, with a need to stay reasonably ‘on message’.

But ministers aren’t the problem here; the civil service is the problem. Ministers know they need to understand what’s happening in the real world, because the clock is always ticking until the next general election, with the inherent risk they might get kicked out. The civil service has no such concerns, with the only ticking clock being the one that counts down to his/her retirement. And senior civil servants simply don’t want to do anything which might put that at risk.

Tony Blair’s plans post-Downing Street… chat-show host? I hadn’t picked up on the number of podcasts he has been recording with various celebs lately, from Chris Evans to Seb Coe, and now Stephen Fry. Of course, Stephen Fry is always going to be great to listen to. But he isn’t shy about asking some tricky questions – ‘do you mind knowing that so many people don’t like you’? (I’m not sure that one was cleared in advance?)

They touch on some interesting territory – the way new communication channels and challenges mean having to ‘conduct politics in a different way’, but disappointingly, it doesn’t really go anywhere. Instead, we end up on the old familiar territory of ‘oh, I’m rubbish with computers’. But at least we get a pledge: ‘It is something that when I leave I am going to have to devote a lot of time to.’ About time too, Prime Minister.

I have no idea what these podcasts are meant to achieve, other than some vague sense of improving engagement with the ordinary voters, by involving ‘that bloke off the telly’. I doubt it’s working particularly well. But it’s an entertaining listen (or read) nonetheless.

I see Steve Dale’s stirring again 😉 – with further noises of discontent regarding that mandatory government subject taxonomy, the IPSV.

I picked up a report on a recent meeting of local authority webmasters and managers held in Birmingham (England), where most present appeared to conclude that IPSV, now the official Government Metadata Standard, served no useful purpose and should be ignored and not implemented.

In the comments which follow, Dan Champion notes:

We (local gov web managers) have been expected to invest time and energy in implementing and maintaining the LGCL and now IPSV on our sites, for nothing more than a promise of riches to come. We should be questioning why we’re making that investment.

And that absolutely hits the nail on the head. These initiatives (and don’t forget the GCL, too) began because people (generally librarians, let’s be honest) assumed that they would pay dividends in the long run. Well, version 1.0 of the GCL was issued in January 2002 – a full five years ago. Can anyone point to a single substantial end-user benefit yet? How much longer should that ‘long run’ be?

If you’ve got any thoughts on government websites, you might want to contribute to the National Audit Office’s ‘Government on the Web 3‘ public survey. Just ten questions, so nothing too taxing.

Saturday morning probably isn’t the time you’d choose to announce a major bird flu outbreak, with a full two days before offices are fully staffed again. Mind you, it could have been much worse: like, say, six weeks ago. A national turkey crisis in the week before Christmas… can you imagine?

I have to say, Defra have done a decent job in splashing their homepage with bird flu links. ‘H5N1 avian influenza (Asian strain) in poultry, Suffolk’ doesn’t perhaps include the magic words ‘bird flu’, but the H5N1 reference is clear enough, and it’s right at the top of the page’s body area, so you aren’t going to miss it. It’s especially good to see a single page describing the ‘latest situation‘, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets prominent front-page promo space on Monday.

Search-wise, Defra’s bird flu homepage currently appears at slot #6 on Google results for ‘bird flu’, behind a few BBC pages and something from Health. Not a bad showing, really.

But perhaps the most encouraging aspect of all this is the extent to which they’ve clearly been planning ahead. Not only do we have lots of background information, but there’s an interactive map application which (by the look of it) has been sitting ready-to-go. A shame, then, that it’s a mapping tool from the era before Google Maps. Navigation is awkward, and it’s a full page-refresh every time you pan or zoom. A hint of Ajax technology would be relatively easy to implement, and would be much more user-friendly.

And it’s a bit of a pity that we’ve got nothing from David Miliband (yet) on the ministerial blog. The recent trend seems to have been to use the blog merely as a ‘have you seen?’ bulletin board, with few posts going beyond a few sentences. So I’m a bit surprised there isn’t at least a one-line pointer to that ‘latest situation’ page; but maybe it’s a conscious decision to keep ministers (and indeed Defra generally) out of the spotlight.

Now Iain Dale’s stirring about the cost of government blogs. He points to a PQ in which DWP admits that it’s costing half a staff member’s time to run the Welfare Reform and Child Poverty blog. Once again, the retort is that ‘well, I do it in my own time for next to nothing’.

Iain – who, let’s remember, isn’t even an MP yet (although not for lack of trying), never mind having ministerial experience – falls into a classic trap here. It simply isn’t fair to compare the two. Iain’s blog is a personal project, with no formal or official standing; no chain of management to answer to; no need for the left hand to check what the right hand is/was doing; no concerns about the expression of strong political opinions in the comments. As soon as it’s an official initiative, on a .gov.uk server, with the Government ‘seal of approval’, it’s a whole new ball game.

So – for example – Iain can shrug off any difficulties with his blog’s hosting, where government would be (rightly) lambasted if they trusted an official website to a freebie with no recourse in the event of such problems.

Even if the comparison were valid, is Iain is a glass house with a pile of stones? Questioned by the Guardian in October about online TV channel 18 Doughty Street, he said this:

Viewing figures, he says, seem to be up in the thousands but are hard to determine at this stage and, anyway, “We’re not going to let the viewership dictate what we do.” A former bookshop owner and publisher, he says, “It’s like when you publish a really good book that only sells a few copies – it was still well worth doing. That’s the way we look at it, and we’ll see where that takes us.”

So is it OK to condemn the value of an initiative on account of low readership/audience numbers, or not? (I’m guessing Doughty Street viewing figures are ‘low’, judging by the Alexa trendline and an apparent lack of any official statement to the contrary… but I’m happy to be told otherwise.)

Be warned, Mr Dale. Despite the best efforts of myself and the small number of people like me, Government – or more particularly the civil service – just does not work that way. If/when the Tories win the next election, and if you decide to bring in the zero-cost ‘guerilla communication’ philosophy, good luck to you… and I’d be delighted to help. But comments like these are certain to come back to bite you in the behind.

I don’t disagree with the thinking described by Simon Moores in a piece on silicon.com:

While being joined-up may offer a real advantage to government departments, the privacy risks to the rest of us are even greater. Until the public sector can demonstrate a better track record of success with personal data than it has in the past, I’ll support my spooky friend in believing that some things are best left alone.

But I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. If we can’t provide sufficient degrees of security, we might as well give the game up, here and now. I’ll stop shopping online, and I’ll withdraw all my savings and store them in a box under the bed. As I said the other day, it’s risk vs reward.