Puffbox

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

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    Consultations supersite mkII

    Thanks to Jeremy for pointing out Harry Metcalfe‘s new ‘Tell Them What You Think‘, the latest mass screen-scraping exercise from the MySociety stable: this time, it’s government departments’ consultation exercises. I actually met Harry last week, but didn’t realise the project was actually ‘out there’. It bears all the classic MySociety hallmarks – which Harry should take as a great compliment.

    Describing the story so far on the site’s own blog, he writes:

    A few months ago, I responded to a couple of government consultations and, in the process, discovered there was no way to search all live consultations, or to be alerted when a new one was published. This struck me as more than a little mad.

    consultations.gov.ukExcept that, as web.archive.org demonstrates there was a central site listing live consultation exercises, at www.consultations.gov.uk from 2004 to early 2006. Did the site succeed in encouraging a new wave of civic engagement? Let’s put it this way: if it had, why would I be writing this? The site was then taken down, with the address redirecting into the Cabinet Office site.

    Today, it redirects to the BERR page on last year’s Consultation Policy Review. And – oh! the irony – if you look at their published response, you’ll find the following paragraphs:

    3.21 Several responses called for a new approach to publicising consultation exercises, including suggestions for a single website for all central Government consultations with a facility to register for alerts.

    3.23 The Better Regulation Executive will look into the feasibility of one website indexing all central Government consultation exercises and providing an automated alert system.

    Visibility of current consultations is part of the problem, but I’d argue it’s a small – and maybe even negligible – part. I’m not even sure we know what they are trying to achieve: is it simply transparency of process? is it just ‘what we’re meant to do’? are we looking for huge volumes of responses?

    And more pertinently, does the government really care what The Masses think? Harry almost acknowledges this himself to an extent, citing an example of a recent consultation which saw 85% outright opposition, and 91% disagreement with the phrasing of the question. What happened? The measure passed anyway.

    We need to decide what we’re trying to achieve with consultation, then decide the best way to go about it. We’re a long, long, l-o-n-g way from there.

    But there’s one important lesson from the exercise, as Jeremy notes. There are things you can do with your website to help the eage, public-spirited geeks take your information, and do something better with it. Ask them. And next time you spec up a website, make sure there’s a section on XML, RSS and/or API.

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    Commons flame war

    I draw your attention to Early Day Motion no 1037, lodged yesterday by Peter Kilfoyle MP and signed by more than 50 MP colleagues: at the current count, 51 Labour and 1 LibDem (Lembit, before you ask).

    That this House deplores the innuendo of the blog of Nick Robinson, the BBC’s lobby correspondent; calls upon him to substantiate the imputations he makes in his blog concerning the Speaker and hon. Members; and also calls upon the BBC to publish a full, itemised account of the expenses of Mr Robinson, in the name of transparency and accountability of public funds.

    This follows Kilfoyle’s submission of a comment on the offending post on Nick Robinson’s blog, barely an hour after it was posted. Nick reflects on the kerfuffle here. Personally, I don’t see why Kilfoyle’s getting so worked up: if someone said I was crap at my job, I’d probably be less inclined to be nice to them. Still, I guess it’s all an interesting step forward.

    Incidentally, Mr K: be careful what you wish for. BBC Radio Ulster presenter Conor Bradford was interviewing the DUP’s Gregory Campbell MP on precisely this subject. As the Belfast Telegraph reports:

    During (the) debate on air, Mr Campbell had been jibing him about BBC secrecy policy on presenter pay when Mr Bradford defended his position. “Look, I earn £29,000 a year for my Good Morning Ulster contract,” he said. “That is not hidden, that is open for everyone to see. That is my salary. Have you got any problems with that?”

    Mr Campbell, the article also notes, ‘rents his constituency office from his wife and employs her in a secretarial role.’

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    Sky's innovation rewarded

    Breaking news from, er, last week. Amid all the usual yah-boo of who won the RTS News Channel of the Year award, I missed the fact that Sky’s ‘Sky dot com news‘ bulletin at 7.30pm won the Innovation award. ‘The winning entry aims to integrate the web and tv audiences and was judged to be innovative because it lets the public rather than the news editor set the Agenda,’ reads the citation.

    As I noted when it launched, they’d done a ‘reasonable job of making it feel a bit more internetty, without becoming cheesy’. I don’t catch it often, as it clashes with family bedtime… but on the occasions I do catch it, it’s amusing to see a steady stream of familiar faces from the blogosphere, some more comfortable on-air than others.

    So what next for the show… or by bagging a trophy, has it achieved its objective? I’d personally want them to make more of their blog, which consists of little more than a list of post-show links each day, and a trickle of comments. Take the award as justification for pushing forward, guys. I’d look to do two or three blog posts through the afternoon, as the show comes together… maybe Twitter’s a better channel than a conventional blog. Invite the gang to react beforehand, if you like. And please, embed each day’s video recording in the post-show writeup.

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    PoliticsHome: like onepolitics, but with cash

    onepolitics has competition. The Dizzy Thinks blog revealed at the end of January that Stefan Shakespeare (who previously brought you 18 Doughty Street and YouGov) is set to launch PoliticsHome.com, promising to be the ‘definitive portal to the ongoing political debate, edited by some of the UK’s leading political journalists and pollsters’. Then Guido published a screenshot a couple of weeks back (although his footnote that PoliticsHome ‘is not going to be the final name’ looks a bit shaky given the company’s later use of the URL).

    First there was a job advert for ‘well paid part-time shifts‘ on the Work for an MP site, withdrawn early due to a high number of applicants. Now there’s an ad on the Guardian site, offering a salary of around £40k for a ‘Daily Editor to manage the newsroom and head up its website coverage’. But crucially, the ad notes, the site ‘does not produce its own content.’

    Promises of a February launch look a bit optimistic now. But there’s clearly a lot of money going into this – and it had better be good, very good. Because in a matter of a couple of days, and using fairly straightforward technology, I produced a website which (if you don’t mind me saying) does a more than reasonable job of providing a ‘portal to the ongoing political debate’. Granted, onepolitics makes no attempt to offer a qualitative commentary on individual posts… but it could, if anyone fancies helping me construct a business model?

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    Could the banks run ID cards?

    Writing for ConservativeHome at the weekend, the Telegraph’s Robert Colville recalls his colleague Rachel Sylvester’s revelation (uh, OK…) that ‘Sir David Varney, Gordon Brown’s adviser on “public service transformation”, supports vast databases to tailor public services to individual need – “a joined-up identity management system” that acts as “a single source of truth” about every individual.’

    Whilst I claim no technical expertise on the subject, I’ve long been of the opinion that some kind of centralised – or certainly, joined-up – identity register is inevitable, and indeed desirable. Too often this debate gets confused with identity cards; police stop-and-search powers; or even less helpfully, the War on Terror. It is unquestionably ‘ludicrous’ if, as Rachel Sylvester’s piece noted, ‘somebody has to contact 44 bits of the state when a relative dies.’ It would mean an end to the (alleged) shame of means-testing; those in need would get what they’re entitled to, automatically. But I understand people’s concerns about the security of that single repository of data; if someone cracks your DNA or retina scan, for example, you can’t just replace it like a stolen credit card.

    This all comes down to trust – and the truth is, people don’t trust government IT. But government isn’t the only area this kind of ‘crisis of confidence’ affects. Just look at the queues outside Northern Rock branches, the minute people suggested you couldn’t trust that bank’s financial position. The first run on a bank in 150 years, we’ve been told repeatedly.

    Banks face exactly the same issue of trust. Every month you hand over all the money you’ve earned to your bank, and you trust them not to lose it. They don’t stash it in a box in their big vault with your name on it. Your personal wealth, or the roof over your head is nothing but a cell in a spreadsheet. The banks’ only currency is trust, trust that they won’t screw up your spreadsheet. Like government data, it’s impossible to secure it 100%. But unlike the government context, the banks have a competitive reason – in fact, a life-or-death reason – to ensure it’s as secure as it humanly, possibly, conceivably can be. Otherwise, the queues will be outside their branches… and you can’t imagine Gordon and Alastair wanting to nationalise another one in a hurry.

    Robert Colville’s ConHome piece presents it, wrongly in my view, as a choice between ’empowering citizens’ and ‘amassing information on them’. But I do agree with his point about the ‘decentralising spirit’ of ‘Public Services 2.0’; and that may be the key. Identity data doesn’t necessarily have to be centralised in government; or then again, as technology like OpenID seems to hint, it doesn’t have to be ‘centralised’ at all. Since we all already have a relationship with a bank, aren’t they the natural people to provide this kind of service? After all, what is a bank today other than a provider of a data security service?

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    Telegraph style guide: 2m forward, 1' back

    Thanks to Shane at the Telegraph for highlighting the new Daily Telegraph style guide. Written (or more accurately, drafted?) by Simon Heffer, it’s online now for consultation, prior to hard-copy publication in a few months.

    As you might expect it’s a curious mix of the web-friendly and the conservative (with a small, and probably also a large C). So you get rulings like these:

    Increasingly, as the distinction between publishing the newspaper and producing the website fades, we will stop using such words as “yesterday” and “today” in copy except when necessary to avoid confusion or to promote exclusive stories.

    On the internet the priority for any headline is to inform search engines (and therefore readers) what the article is about. Its language should therefore be concrete, not abstract, and contain full names.

    We use imperial measures except where for accuracy’s sake – as in some scientific or foreign story, or one detailing the calibre of armaments – metric is appropriate.

    Bah. Just as you think the Telegraph is reinventing itself and its journalism for the imminent future, it drags you crashing back to pre-decimalisation days.

    The death of ‘today’ is well judged, though. I’m seeing too many (government) press releases with eager press officers falling back on the old rule of getting the word ‘today’ in the first sentence, to make it seem more urgent. I’m not sure it ever worked; now it’s positively counter-productive.

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    onepolitics, the new Puffbox site

    onepoliticsIt wasn’t originally intended for public consumption, but today I’m unveiling a new website produced by Puffbox. onepolitics is an at-a-glance view of the latest posts on the growing number of political blogs being written by ‘proper’ reporters. You can wait until tomorrow to see what they say in print, or in tonight’s bulletin; or you can get advance warning from what they’re writing on their blogs.

    In essence, it’s an RSS aggregator for people who don’t get RSS. I realised I’d written too many posts looking forward to the day when RSS would go mainstream – and it still shows very little sign of happening imminently. And all the while, I’m talking to public sector people for whom RSS is several evolutionary steps away. I’ve written quite lengthy explainers, covering the concept and the technicals, on the new site itself… so I won’t duplicate my efforts here. Suffice to say, it’s WordPress. But you all knew that already.

    onepolitics is the first fruit of my promise to give myself some Google-style ’20 per cent time’; a project with a loose connection to my work, but no direct commercial application. But I’m starting to wonder if it might be of interest to clients. Press offices or stakeholder managers, maybe, who don’t yet have any kind of blog monitoring strategy. We could be pulling in any kind of RSS feed; and could be indexing them, or just listing them (as with the ‘meanwhile in the blogosphere’ box on the homepage). Even better, it’s almost entirely automated, updating in the background as often as you like.

    It’s also making me wonder if there’s a need for a bridge between casual web surfing, with zero commitment to the site or subject; and the ‘need to know’ hunger for RSS subscriptions. I’m finding myself looking at onepolitics during quiet moments through the day, purely to see what’s popping up. I’m kind of interested in this sort of content generally, but not enough to want to be disturbed by every new item popping up in my RSS reader.

    I’m making no promises about onepolitics. It is what it is, for now anyway. Please have a play with it, and tell me what you think. There are a couple of glitches I know about, and can’t really justify fixing, so don’t get too pedantic please.

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    New report on politics and internet

    Provocative stuff from Mick Fealty over at the Telegraph’s Brassneck blog. He highlights a report by the Centre for Policy Studies which suggests that ‘the internet could offer MPs an unmatched opportunity to create a niche for themselves, and to re-empower local politics.’ And echoing the Economist’s point about government in competition, he notes:

    The most subtle, but perhaps most powerful, change, will be to the public’s mindset. As we grow used to the instant availability of information online, we will no longer tolerate delay and obfuscation in getting similar information from government. The individual, and not the state, will be the master in the digital age.

    A weighty 60-page document landing on your boss’s desk may give you some useful extra leverage, but regular readers of these pages can probably skip the first half: it’s a rather predictable mix of stuff you know already, mostly from across the Atlantic. The good stuff starts at the half-way point: I particularly like the notion of a continuing dialogue between MP and constituents, in good times and bad. As author Robert Colville points out:

    MPs traditionally hear from their constituents only when they are angry or in need – whether that be by post, or email, or at a surgery or public meeting. Most normal people will never contact their MP, due to constraints of time or motivation. This, naturally, promotes a rather jaundiced view of humanity among our elected officials. Yet by inhabiting the same online spaces as their constituents on a day-to-day basis, MPs will interact with them in much more normal conditions – when the MP is not the privileged voice of authority, but merely one member of a conversation among many. In doing so, perhaps they will get a much more realistic idea of what their constituents actually think.

    The thrust of the report is undermined, sadly, by the curious formatting issues on the press notice announcing its publication. The link to download the full PDF is at the very bottom, behind an almost undetectable ‘click here’ link.

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    BBC internet chief promises to learn web

    Nick Reynolds is the ‘editor’ of the BBC internet blog. I must admit, I was glad to see he’d written a post to explain what the ‘editor’ of the blog did, since it almost seems like a contradiction in terms. Nick says:

    ‘The man who persuades important people in BBC Future Media and Technology to write blog posts’ is more accurate but a bit of a mouthful. But as well as persuading people to write, Alan Connor and I do the actual work of putting what they write into the blogging software, checking it, sometimes adding extra links and photos, and then pushing the button to publish.

    The post (currently) features a fairly small number of comments – ‘typical BBC’… ‘waste of resources’… ‘public money’… etc etc. Sadly though, I note the comment I tried to submit – but apparently failed – hasn’t come through.

    What shocked me most wasn’t the fact that the blog has a full-time staffer, although that’s certainly curious. It was more the suggestion that people in the BBC’s Future Media & Technology department aren’t capable of typing or pasting words into a web-based authoring form. This includes people in extremely senior and highly paid positions – Ashley Highfield reportedly earns £359,000 a year (including benefits). I’d like to think he’s capable of basic computing skills. I’m afraid a promise that he’ll try to stop emailing in his posts just doesn’t cut it. Movable Type v3.2 isn’t state-of-the-art any more, but it’s hardly rocket science.

    My attempt at commenting fell foul – not for the first time, it must be said – of the BBC’s creaking blogging platform. I know they know it isn’t up to the job. Why the delay in replacing it?

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    Department of Health redesign

    The new Department of Health site is a definite improvement; the previous incarnation looked like it had been designed primarily by the technical side (which, indeed, it had). Now it’s all colourful boxes with rounded corners and shaded colourings, and it’s all the better for it. All this without breaking links, apparently.

    Well done to them for trailing the new design in a ‘coming soon’ page, made available for a couple of weeks before the changeover. And even better, I love the review of old designs. I wonder how many of us kept screengrabs of old sites? I know I’ve lost all trace of some previous ‘masterpieces’.