Puffbox

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

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    Maybe if I was a Londoner

    I’m actually a big fan of ‘fill in this questionnaire and we’ll tell you who to vote for’ websites. Granted, it’s all a bit unscientific: it’s close to impossible to boil the key policy issues down to a series of multiple choice answers (never mind agree/disagree), then assess how each candidate’s policy correlates to the available options. But at the very, very least it makes you think. It makes you question what you thought were your natural leanings. And it may even change your mind. In these days of political disengagement, and plunging voter turnout, that could be pivotal.

    Unlock Democracy has just unveiled such a site for the London Mayoral elections. Although I spend a lot of my time in London, I no longer live there, so I don’t have a vote. (But that’s for another time.) This allows me to approach the exercise with a degree of detachment. It genuinely is just a bit of fun.

    Twenty-five agree/disagree questions later, the site gives me a response. Two candidates came joint-top of the list: one I probably expected, the other I probably didn’t. And curiously, I’m pretty sure the two don’t consider themselves to be in competition for my (non-existent) vote. Something for me to think about… and arguably, something for the candidates to consider too.

    No, I’m not going to say which two candidates: I try to keep my own party politics (such as they are) out of things here. But feel free to offer your own guesses. ๐Ÿ™‚

    And by the way… if anyone (eg Tom Steinberg) has a URL for the similar Dutch ‘Stem-viser’ website that Tom Steinberg always quotes as an example, do pass it on. An accurate spelling would be a start.

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    Govt report backs 'free' data

    I wasn’t especially nice about the interim progress report on Power of Information Review, in that I didn’t see much specific progress being reported. So it came as a bit of a shock to discover, courtesy of the Open Rights Group, that there’s actually something really significant in it.

    The interim report announced that:

    HM Treasury and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) commissioned Cambridge University to undertake a study into the different models for charging for and defining public sector information. This is has (sic) been publicly released [External website].

    I know, I know… that’s quite some call to action. You’re all simply dying to click on that link. But if you did, you’d eventually find your way to this report by three Cambridge University academics, published in late February, which concluded:

    It was found that, in most cases, a marginal cost regime would be welfare improving – that is, the benefits to society of moving to a marginal cost regime outweighed the costs.

    For registration based trading funds (DVLA, Companies House and the Land Registry) it likely (sic) that this change in charging policy could be made without the need for government to provide additional funds as any shortfall could be made up from the registration side of their activities.

    For the other trading funds some direct assistance, beyond that already provided, would be required. In the case of the UKHO and the Met Office the sums involved would be limited (around ยฃ1m) but in the case of Ordnance Survey would be substantially larger (though the benefits in this case would be commensurably bigger).

    One added benefit of adopting the marginal cost pricing scheme suggested by the analysis is that it would immediately address the competition concerns raised by the OFT as, a fortiori, outside organizations would now have access to ‘unrefined’ (‘upstream’) data on the same terms as the trading fund itself.

    I’m no expert on all this stuff, but I know enough to recognise there are potentially staggering implications in this. And it’s surely useful ammunition for efforts like Free Our Bills.

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    Innovation, innovation, innovation

    Over at the Telegraph, Mick Fealty rightly reflects on the ‘fascinating confluence of ideas cascading into the body politic at the moment’, with both right and left suddenly making an issue of innovation, open source, and all that good stuff. The latest contribution was David Cameron’s speech at NESTA this morning:

    Indeed, the odd thing about the Government’s innovation policy is how un-innovative it is. More spending, more state control, more reliance on the levers of bureaucratic intervention. The chapter on public sector innovation in Government’s “science innovation” document, has this as its centrepiece: the proposal to create a “Whitehall Hub for Innovation”. Something about that doesn’t ring true. Whitehall and innovation don’t go together, for the simple reason that innovation is the product of many heads not a few, and free thinking not state control.

    We accept that innovation requires a culture of risk-taking, of trial and error, of flexibility in thinking and often of collaborative effort. So I have also asked Adam Afriyie to identify ways a Conservative government could tackle the corrosive sense of risk-aversion which holds back innovation within our society.

    To be fair, it’s been an uplifting week in terms of online innovation, across the political divide(s). The sudden rush into Twitter – by No10, and (apparently) by both major parties – isn’t a big deal in terms of audience numbers, but it’s certainly symbolic: a recognition that there’s clearly something interesting going on, and a readiness to just get stuck in.

    I’m hoping that the weekend’s Progressive Governance summit microsite, which I’m constructing on No10’s behalf, can take that momentum forward. We’re throwing as many 2.0 tricks into the mix as we can: some will undoubtedly work better than others. (And yes, as Guido helpfully notes, we’re cutting it fine. We know.)

    But the value of the social connections fostered by blogs and Twitter is already revealing itself. Last night I talked about my search for a live blogging / chat solution. Paul Bradshaw suggested CoverItLive, a service I hadn’t seen before. I played around with it, and it looked great. But I wanted to see what others thought – so I threw out a plea for assistance on Twitter. Within a couple of minutes, I had two friends in the ‘chatroom’ with me, giving the product a proper test. It passed – and it’s looking like we’re going to use it on Saturday morning to ‘live blog’ the summit’s proceedings. This stuff works.

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    No10's new microsite by Puffbox

    Fresh from its success with Twitter, 10 Downing Street is preparing for a weekend of social media experimentation, in association with Puffbox.

    This Saturday, Gordon Brown is hosting a gathering of around 20 left-leaning world leaders under the banner of Progressive Governance, to discuss globalisation, climate change, development and international institutional reform. (It got a brief mention in yesterday’s monthly press conference, but you’d be forgiven for missing it.) With the renewed appetite for online experimentation at Number 10, I was asked to put together a microsite for the event – running on WordPress, and incorporating a few ‘web 2.0’ tools and tricks.

    The site went live late this afternoon – sort of. There’s very little to see so far: the supporting materials, and our ideas of what to do with them, are still coming together. In fact, I fully expect to be coding up new templates and functions live on the day. I know rapid development has become a bit of a Puffbox trademark, but we’ve never cut it quite this fine before. ๐Ÿ™‚

    The centrepiece will be a live video stream of the proceedings, with a text commentary / discussion thread alongside. You could call it ‘live tweeting’, but we’re probably not going to use Twitter (tbc though). We’ll be posting the conference’s discussion papers for online viewing, with the opportunity for you to post your comments alongside. We’re hoping to get photos beamed into the site from the conference venue, via Downing Street’s new Flickr account; their well-established YouTube channel may also come into play. As may anything else which crosses my mind in the meantime.

    It’s an ideal opportunity for innovation: a one-off, relatively low-profile event, not exactly on the scale of a G8, but still significant enough to be taken seriously. The ludicrously tight timeframe is forcing us to make rapid, almost instinctive decisions: in my book, that’s a good thing.

    If you’re interested to see what we make of it, believe me – so am I. It all happens on Saturday morning, with the live proceedings due to wind up in the early afternoon. With Arsenal-Liverpool Round Two kicking off at 12.45pm, I’m relying on my fellow Gooner, David Miliband to ensure things stay on schedule.

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    Tories hit Twitter; where's Labour?

    It really is Twitter week in Westminster. Barely ten days after the first MP began tweeting, and only a week after Number 10, the @Conservatives have launched an official channel – although so far, it’s precisely the one-way Twitterfeed-powered channel we all expected @DowningStreet to be (but wasn’t).

    Likely to be more interesting is @conhome, the Twitter feed of the influential ConservativeHome website. It’s being written as a joint effort by the look of it, with identified authors: not a normal way to run a Twitter channel, but more likely to generate two-way tweeting, I guess.

    Meanwhile there’s no stopping LibDem Lynne Featherstone, who started all this: she’s even been tweeting from the benches of the House of Commons chamber. And of course, her LibDem mates first tweeted back in May 2007, with an experimental election night service. The account is still active, with occasional alerts.

    All of which brings us back to the age-old question of the Labour Party‘s general underperformance in new media. @Labour does exist, but it’s the Irish Labour Party. I’ve guessed at a bunch of possible Twitter IDs which Labour HQ might use; and all are still coming up as unregistered. Hey, even a basic Twitterfeed-powered channel would be a sensible starting point, and a defensive claim of the best ID.

    BREAKING NEWS: Looks like there’s movement on the Twitter front. @uklabour is now pumping out Twitterfeed-powered updates from various sources. Thanks to Paul in the comments (below).

    Instead, Labour seems to have been putting its efforts into a special homepage for its local election efforts. It has a campaign blog whose RSS feed doesn’t know what character set it’s sending, and thinks an appropriate story description is the first four words. There’s a box to make an online donation, which asks for your name and a donation amount, then seems to do nothing sensible with them. It’s terrible.

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    Minister wants more social media

    Tom Watson publishes (what looks like) a speech announcing the formation of a Power Of Information Taskforce, to be chaired by former LibDem MP Richard Allan (now senior manager of UK&I government affairs at Cisco), taking forward the Power Of Information report by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg.

    An interim Progress Report on Power was published yesterday… but frankly, there’s nothing especially substantial to report. Plenty of talk about pilots and guidelines, though. I’m keen to see what Jeremy Gould makes of the report’s claim that ‘the government supported a Barcamp initiated by the Ministry of Justice.’ And I’m not sure I’d get too excited about an OPSI discussion forum with ‘over 70 messages’ in it.

    This contrasts so sharply with the moves made by Downing Street last week, throwing themselves at the mercy of the Twitterverse – and winning quite a few friends by doing so. No need for lengthy stakeholder consultation, or strategy papers. It was clearly a good idea; so they just did it. (And believe me, No10 aren’t finished yet, not by a long shot. More on that later this week.)

    The two most interesting lines in Tom’s speech are, I’d say, the ‘draft guidance on how public servants can use social media’ being put to the Taskforce ‘later this week’ (confirming a rumour I’d heard from elsewhere); and his call for:

    more use of techniques commonplace now in the wider world, internal blogs, wikis, discussion forums, shared workspaces, all still quite rare within the machine.

    Yes folks, the Minister actively wants you to use blogs and wikis. Your business case just wrote itself.

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    Is that all there is, BBC?

    There’s a new look to the BBC News website. They’ve been working on it ‘for the past few months’. So there’s clearly more to it than just making everything a little bigger – font sizes, white spaces, etc. Isn’t there?

    BBC new look

    The trouble is… the screenshot currently showing on the BBC Internet Blog homepage shows the old site, not the new one. If Steve Herrmann (or his people) can’t tell the difference, what chance do the rest of us have? (It’s correct elsewhere on the site – eg the extended page – which makes me think it’s a Movable Type problem, but that’s no excuse.)

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    New Foreign Office website

    A year after spending ยฃ1.47m on the Morello content management system, the new Foreign Office website went live this morning. Having spent five great years there, the FCO is naturally dear to my heart; but with David Miliband at the helm, its online activity takes on added significance. So how’s the new site looking?

    It’s unquestionably better looking than its (frankly quite ugly) predecessor. The consistent, colour-coded header area works well, and navigation into the site’s depths is handled well. Personally I’m not sure about the homepage, whose four evenly-sized columns don’t direct the eye particularly efficiently; and I’m not sure about the balance between white space and solid copywriting at deeper levels. But if the question is ‘does it succeed functionally?’, the answer is yes.

    However, with Miliband in charge, and with its track record of innovation, we expect more from the FCO. I’m looking for examples of groundbreaking content, function or presentation – and so far, I haven’t found many. The use of a layered Google Map is nice, to show worldwide FCO activity; and I suppose we should welcome the introduction of a first RSS feed on the main site (although it doesn’t currently work). The blogging site gets a facelift, but it’s suffering some especially nasty teething troubles, as I write. There are occasional references to their YouTube and Flickr presences, but I’d have hoped to see them integrated more deeply.

    I’m a little disappointed that some obvious enhancements haven’t made an early appearance. The lack of RSS feeds is a particular shame: a single news feed really isn’t sufficient. The Travel Advice section is surely a prime candidate for RSS: shouldn’t FCO be going out of its way to feed advisory notices out to travel websites? I’m surprised there isn’t at least a general ‘don’t go there‘ feed; I’d also have hoped to see individual country feeds, which should probably also incorporate more general news content.

    So overall, I’m underwhelmed. We need departments to push the boundaries, and few departments will have an easier ride from their Secretary of State than FCO. But maybe this is the prudent approach: migrate the basic stuff at the beginning, then start to push the platform harder in due course. We’ll have to wait and see.

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    Twitter etiquette for corporates

    It’s been amazing to watch news of Downing Street’s new Twitter account spreading round the planet. Reaction on blogs and Twitter itself has been a combination of ‘awesome!’, ‘boring!’ and ‘validates Twitter as a proper comms channel’.

    But it poses an interesting question. Should a corporate channel like /downingstreet be following other people, or is it purely a one-way service? So far, I can’t decide.

    Let’s be realistic: Gordon Brown doesn’t want to know what your cat had for breakfast, and deep down, you all know that. But it’s the done thing on Twitter: everyone follows everyone else. It might make people feel loved, if they see their picture embedded into the No10 page’s sidebar. It doesn’t take much effort to add people, and hey – nobody’s forcing you to read it.

    Looking at it coldly then, I can’t help feeling it’s a pointless token gesture. But – and it’s a big ‘but’ – look at what’s happening across the Atlantic. Barack Obama has 19,000 followers and almost the same number of ‘following’ – each of whom gets to see their picture on his profile. Hillary Clinton takes the ‘follow no-one’ approach, and has a mere 2,400 followers. And which campaign gets plaudits for its voter engagement?

    Maybe that’s the point. Twitter represents a pretty deep level of ‘buy in’ to a person or a thing, much deeper than a blog subscription or email signup. You’re asking to know the minutiae on a real-time basis. By definition, it’s a more personal, touchy-feely environment. Maybe it’s the touchy-feely criteria which should matter most.

    What do the rest of you think?

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    No10 now on Twitter

    There isn’t much to see there yet, but 10 Downing Street has just opened an official Twitter account. Like a lot of corporate presences, it’s based – in these initial stages at least – on their existing RSS output, and the free Twitterfeed web service. But I had a very interesting chat this afternoon with No10’s new head of digital… and he’s eagerly exploring what they might do next.

    Just as interesting: I think I ‘broke the story’ when I mentioned it to my own (relatively) select band of Twitter contacts. I was subscriber no3. Two hours later, we’re up to 23. Word travels fast.