Puffbox

Robert Andrews has picked up on comments in the Commons yesterday, which asked the perennial question of where to draw the line between ‘speaking as a minister’ and ‘speaking as a politician’. As I’ve commented, I fear the only reason for the Tories pursuing Purnell and/or Miliband is because that’s what oppositions are there to do, plain and simple. And I think that’s sad.

Cameron and co, be warned. It’s easy to take potshots like this when you aren’t actually in office. What future for Webcameron, one wonders, if/when Dave wins the next election?

(Incidentally… I think I mentioned it before, I’m really enjoying the post-PMQs videos which Cameron is offering on the Webcameron site. Here’s today’s on-the-hoof example. But it does feel disturbingly like a Sky Sports post-match interview. How long before we see party donors’ logos on a backdrop?)

I’ve always been inclined to agree with the view expressed by Downing Street recently (no date given?), ahead of a seminar yesterday: ‘Overzealous data sharing rules may be an obstacle to improving public services… Laws and procedures that prevent different public services from sharing their customers’ personal details should be reviewed to bring customer care in the public sector up to the best private sector standards.’

The only catch which seems to stand up is that any joined-up system has to be very, very, very good on security and reliability. When it’s all held in one place, you only have to crack one system to compromise everything… and that certainly isn’t an appealing prospect. But it’s a trade-off like anything else. Risk vs reward.

I’ve been trying to find the provenance of a quote which – I think – is attributed to Jerry Garcia. It goes something like: ‘I used to worry about the CIA until I met them.’ (If anyone can give me chapter and verse on that, I’ll be very grateful!) Whoever said it, and whatever they said, they were spot-on. If you think the evil Civil Service is ready, willing and able to build a super-snooping megacomputer to track your every move, you’ll be disappointed.

If you’ve ever wanted to calculate the value of something in real terms, removing the effect of the inflation rate over time, it can be a real pain. So I finally got round to building a little web app which does precisely that – for prices as far back as 1750. Why? Because I fancied the challenge.

You can use it in two ways. One is the ‘Time Machine’, taking the price of an item for a given year, and calculating the equivalent price for a different year, based solely on the effect of inflation. So for example, I remember CDs costing 12 quid each in the mid-80s. If they had kept pace with inflation, they should now be costing nearly double that.

To calculate the ‘real terms’ movement in an item’s price, removing the effects of inflation, there’s also the ‘Up or down?’ tool. Type in a ‘before’ year and price, and an ‘after’ year and price, and the tool tells you the percentage rise or fall over that period.

It’s all relatively simple, I suppose, but I’ve used it as an opportunity to experiment with some exciting new technologies: namely Scriptaculous, Prototype and a bit of Ajax. It uses some basic PHP to do the various data lookups behind the scenes, rather than any database. I’m especially pleased with the slider controls to let you select a year (with conventional text boxes if you don’t fancy that). The design is a bit old-school, but it wasn’t meant to be a design challenge. 🙂

Update: It’s entirely coincidental that this should be on the same day that ONS launches its own interactive personal inflation calculator, with the aim of ‘(allowing) individuals to see how differences in spending patterns affect inflation rates.’ It’s all done in SVG, but I’m having real trouble using it in Firefox. Surely plain old HTML (souped up with ajax goodness), with a dash of Flash if necessary, would have been better?

There are a few documents explaining all about it available from here but be warned, you’re going to face usability issues, with or without documentation. (Simon’s first law of usability: if it needs instructions, it’s too complicated. A two-page PDF is a pretty spectacular breach of this law.)

I wasn’t very nice about the new MI5 email alerting service thing… but it was even worse than I thought. According to a BBC report:

Campaigners’ ‘found that data gathered was being stored in the US leading to questions about who would have access to the list of names and e-mail addresses… The activists discovered that the whole system had been contracted and some of it was being run by a company called Mailtrack that specialises in handling large e-mail mailing lists. More worryingly when people signed up to use the alert system, the standard encryption software had been disabled. This would have scrambled personal data, such as name and e-mail address, to stop others eavesdropping.

Even the US company operating the service admitted: ‘we would always encourage people to move it to their own country.’ Whoops. There’s even a suggestion that ‘one of the digital security certificates used in the scrambling process between the MI5 site and a user’s browser while they sign up was only issued two days after the mailing list was unveiled.’

The next tranche of English school league tables has been published today, covering secondary and post-16 performance. As with the primary school league tables beforehand, they are blessed with Google Map goodness. And yes, for the record, the user-centric redesign and the web-2.0-ification was a project I led. I said more about this in a post last year.

The Guido Fawkes rumour is confirmed: the BBC reports that ‘hundreds of government websites are to be shut down “to make access to information easier” for people. Instead government information online will be streamlined through two main sites – Directgov and Business Link.’

The Cabinet Office press release describes just how tough a line they’re now taking: ‘only 26 of the websites examined so far are certain to be retained by Government, while 551 will go. Information of continuing relevance from closed sites will transfer to www.direct.gov.uk and www.businesslink.gov.uk.’ Grr. But if you take the time to read the full report (available in PDF format from here), you’ll see on page 15 that the headline-grabbing figure isn’t as concrete as it might seem:

In the first phase of departmental reviews, 951 websites were considered across 16 central government departments. Decisions have already been taken to close 551 (58 per cent) of these websites; 90 sites have already closed. Decisions have also been taken to continue with 26 websites – although some of their current content will move to Directgov and Business Link – and decisions on the remaining 374 sites will be taken in the next six months. Further discussions will take place over the next few months in order to produce detailed implementation plans, confirm the role of departmental corporate sites, extend the review to executive agencies and nondepartmental public bodies, and encourage further collaboration between departments. This will be completed by June 2007.

So, taking these numbers at face value, more than a third of the 16 departments’ websites remain to be reviewed; and of course, this is only phase one. There’s a long way to go yet.

No argument from me with the principle of consolidation, incidentally. I’m just shocked at the number of new sites which have popped up in the 14 months since ‘Transformational Government’ was first published. This announcement of a cull can’t possibly have come as a surprise to anyone. Can it?

Guido Fawkes passes on the rumour that ‘an official report on “transformational strategy” will confirm that of the 951 state-run websites, 551 in total will be closed.’

I’m not sure where either figure can come from. Certainly it’s the first time I’ve seen a count of 951 ‘state-run’ websites; the most usually quoted figure is usually several times higher than that, although I always felt it was an over-estimate since (I understand) it was based on gov.uk domain names. And I can’t entirely understand how we end up with 400 sites after this cull. I’m pretty sure the Transformation Government strategy (PDF) had a much lower figure in mind.

Mind you, it’ll be interesting to see what ‘closed’ means in practice. Sure, the overall number of stand-alone sites will probably be slashed. But I don’t imagine the content will disappear overnight. It’ll just end up somewhere else.

Looks like I wasn’t dreaming, first thing this morning. Five Live really did lead on a government website offering an email alerting service. (Shame they weren’t interested when I launched the first government website to do so, back in – er – 1998.) So how totally ridiculous is it that, even at 2pm – as the lunchtime traffic peak ends, after such staggeringly good mainstream media coverage, all the MI5 website can manage is:

E-mail alerts of changes to the national Threat Level and updates on the Security Service website will be available in the near future. This will enable subscribers to keep informed of major developments in national security affairs. You will be able to subscribe via a form on the Security Service website. We will publish an update shortly giving the address of the subscription form.

Utterly, utterly depressing. The least they could have done is publicise it tomorrow, once the damn thing had launched. What would have been nice would have been a desktop widget to slot into either/both the Mac dashboard and the Vista sidebar, as well as things like Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets). But I suspect the geek community may have that covered. And I presume I don’t need to mention RSS.

In the run-up to Christmas, I completely missed the release of the Hansard Society’s ‘phase one’ report on its Digital Dialogues initiative into ‘the use of online technologies to promote dialogue between central government and the public’. It’s all here in glorious PDF format.

The good news is that, perhaps predictably, the online world comes out of it pretty well. Public engagement is a good thing, and the majority of those drawn to online channels were not previously ‘engaged’; but it should be seen as a complement rather than a replacement for conventional offline methods. There’s also a fair bit on the importance of appropriate planning and ongoing management / moderation.

Perhaps the most interesting section of the report concerns David Miliband’s ministerial blog.

There are aspects of David Miliband’s blogging that have justified the criticism. The most important is that for reasons of inexperience and lack of time Miliband has not adequately established his blog’s presence online. There are very few links to other relevant blogs – either in the permanent ‘blog roll’ or in the posts. The Minister rarely interacts with the comments made in response to his posts, and does not visit other blogs to comment. Therefore, the Minister’s blog fails to exploit its potential as a node in the communicative network that blogging has created. It stands out because of its establishment associations and looks awkward next to its peers.

Redressing the inefficiencies presents the most pressing challenge to David Miliband and his fledgling blog. Success may bring a greater acceptance by bloggers and generate more general traffic amongst those who are not regular participants in the political process. However, this will require a team effort by the Minister and his departmental communications team, and it will be interesting to see how this will be viewed by evangelical bloggers and political opponents.

I think criticising Miliband’s lack of engagement in the blogosphere is harsh: he does have a pretty heavy-duty day job. And I’m a bit surprised to see the degree of attention given to the £6,000 spent on setting up the blog, particularly when I know precisely how much was spent on some of the other projects covered.

Other case studies tend to follow the standard form for such experimental work, where all is forgiven as it contributed to the learning experience. A three-week long forum on Welfare Reform attracted only 84 registered users, with only 18 of them actually getting round to posting anything. (And no, you didn’t have to register to view.) Total number of messages: 44. None of which, by the look of it, were by the relevant DWP policy team. Pretty diabolical all round, frankly. But hey, ‘when reflecting on the exercise, the department detailed a number of aspects it would approach differently with the benefit of hindsight,’ so that’s OK then.

If you’re involved in this kind of thing, it’s well worth having a look through Part Three, the draft guidance. It’s maybe a bit too generic, but you’ll certainly find some useful stuff in there. At the very least, it’s good to have a generic ‘terms and conditions’ to copy-and-paste.

The Department of Work and Pensions has followed up its blog on pensions reform with another on welfare reform and child poverty. It kicked off in mid-October, and as with the pensions blog, it’s running on a local WordPress installation.

The blog is clearly ‘owned’ by minister Jim Murphy, and it’s good to see lots of first-person language and informal phrasing. Even a bit of self-deprecating humour. The numbers of comments are relatively low, after an early burst on the first couple of posts, but that’s only to be expected.

Higher numbers of comments over on the longer-established Pension Reform blog, which feels much more natural – and all the better for it – since I last looked. DWP is doing some good work in this area, and has done well to start with two areas which are (a) high on the public agenda; and (b) likely to interest specific audiences. WordPress looks to be serving them well, and it’s the right choice (as I might have mentioned before), but a bit of extra page design could be a wise investment, now the blogs are a bit more substantial.