downingstreet – Page 4

5 Jul 2008

company, e-government

downingstreet, g8summit, rss, washingtonpost, wordpress

Another Downing St travel-blog

Gordon Brown’s off to Japan ~~for~~ at the weekend, to hang out with the other G8 heads of government. So it’s time to crank out another Puffbox production for 10 Downing Street: the now-familiar mash-up of a travel-blog, Twitter stream and Flickr photo set.

As with previous trips to the US and Brussels, it’s based primarily around WordPress, with data pulled in from the third-party services via RSS. Once again I’m using SimplePie to handle the RSS processing; although if I’d had more time this week, I’d probably have tried out Google’s new AJAX Feed API, to do it all on the client-side. I’ve done some preliminary trials with the service, and it seems very useful indeed.

This will probably be the last such travel-blog to be done in this form, for reasons which will very soon become apparent. But these set-piece microsites have served their purpose – providing an excellent excuse to expose the Number10 team to WordPress, and the possibilities of lightweight content management.

Update – the site got a nice mention in Monday’s Washington Post. ‘British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is stealing the G-8 show online. No. 10 Downing Street is blogging the summit in Toyako, throwing up an integrated social media site to follow “our man in Japan,” with Twitter and Flickr feeds to boot. Downingstreet, “the official twitter channel for the Prime Minister’s Office based at 10 Downing Street,” has more than 3,000 followers, and is part of the prime minister’s ongoing Web-savvy operation.’ Best press No10 has had in ages… 🙂
19 Jun 2008

company, e-government

downingstreet, gordonbrown, puffbox

No10 blogging from Brussels summit

Time to unleash another Puffbox production for 10 Downing Street. Gordon Brown’s off to Brussels to chat about this and that (mostly that, I guess), and as with the trip to the US in April, they’ve sent a member of the No10 web team to report on proceedings. I’ve been working with them to develop a blogging platform, based very much on the April site, but with a bit of Friendfeed-inspired feed aggregation.

The site, at eusummit.govblogs.co.uk (for reasons which will soon become apparent), is based primarily around a WordPress blog – but also attempts to bring together No10’s other activity on sites such as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. Plus, with David Miliband also attending, we’re ready to integrate any articles he publishes on his own blog.

The plan is to try and get as much video content as possible, to give a flavour of how the European Council actually works on the ground. But as ‘Your No10 Correspondent’ acknowledges, we just don’t know what he’ll be able to get.

Once again, it was an aggressive development schedule – measured in hours rather than days! – and I’ve had to use some cheeky work-arounds. (Accessing and filtering the Foreign Office’s blog content was especially tricky, for reasons I won’t bore you with.) But I hope it’s another example of how a few RSS feeds, a bit of PHP code, and a little lateral thinking can tie up these various best-of-breed tools and services into a single coherent website.
19 May 2008

e-government

downingstreet, gordonbrown, youtube

Questions to the Prime Minister!

Downing Street’s journey ever deeper into new media continues… as Sky’s Joey Jones observes, ‘cyberspace probably seems the safest place for Gordon Brown right now.’

And on the day he addresses Google’s Zeitgeist Europe conference, apparently to announce ‘a number of areas (plural? hmm…) where the UK Government and technology giant Google are planning to work together’, he also becomes the latest politician to invite questions from YouTubers. See their London Mayoral efforts, or the US-based YouChoose for other examples… or indeed, the Rolling Stones.

I’m not entirely sure about these ‘ping-pong’ video interviews… they’re certainly better than the mock-TV studio efforts which Labour have tried before, but I worry about a channel where the questions are often longer than the answers.

You’ve got until 21 June to record and submit your question, with responses to follow ‘at the end of June’… although they’re describing it as ‘regular’, so there should be further chances later.
6 May 2008

e-government, technology

coveritlive, downingstreet, liveblog

More Gov live blogging

There’s no doubt what the hot trend in blogging is: real time, thanks largely (or perhaps solely?) to the superb CoverItLive application/service. And following the apparent success of the Progressive Governance Summit last month, we’ll be seeing another e-government example today.

More than 80 MDs, CEOs, chairmen and Presidents from big-name global companies, plus a few heads of government (including our own) and various other dignitaries are attending ‘Business Call To Action’ – a London conference, backed by the UK government and UN Development Programme, to talk about what business can do to reduce poverty in the developing world, and get the Millennium Development Goals back on track. It’s quite an illustrious guest list, even if it’s only published in PDF.

The web component isn’t Downing Street-branded, but it’s being managed by the Downing Street team, with some Puffbox assistance (although most of the work has been handled by someone else). The plan is to run another liveblog of the proceedings, again using CoverItLive… plus a bit of video, and Flickr/Twitter mashing if schedules allow.

On my last post on the subject, Paul Canning queried the value of liveblogging, in the context of election coverage… and I take his point, in that context. But for something like this, it can provide an excellent channel for colour commentary, or even ‘context sensitive links’: when we did the ProGov event, people were contributing URLs providing additional background on the points being raised, for people who didn’t know the subjects. (Like, for example, me.)
4 May 2008

company, politics, technology

coveritlive, downingstreet, guidofawkes, iaindale, liveblog

Liveblogging the election results

Interesting to note some of the attempts to ‘live blog’ the election results last week – with Guido Fawkes, Slugger O’Toole and ConservativeHome all using CoverItLive‘s fantastic liveblogging ‘app’. Needless to say, there’s significant variation in the tone of each site’s usage.

Of course, it’s ironic to note both having a pop at Gordon Brown’s leadership when, dare I mention it, it was a Downing Street website – produced by yours truly – which first brought this technology to the attention of the UK political scene.

Now Iain Dale’s gone a bit CoverItLive-crazy, using it as an ad-hoc chatroom facility. It’s not really what it was intended for, and it’s probably quite hard work for Iain and colleague Shane Greer to moderate, but it does the job I suppose. They’re making good use of the popup polling mechanism, it must be said.

Correction: It took a heck of a lot of digging to find it, but I discover that ConservativeHome did use the CoverItLive tool back in January. My apologies; a straightforward Google search didn’t reveal it. I’m grateful to Guido for the advice to the contrary.
18 Apr 2008

e-government, news, politics

downingstreet, guardian, todayprogramme, twitter

No10 Twittering is front-page news

A bit of a surprise this morning to discover that the venerable Today Programme is on Twitter… with its first tentative tweets as far back as September last year, and a (more or less) daily service since December. The username ‘todaytrial’ doesn’t imply that it’s being taken too seriously… although it’s built into their BBC website pages. I suspect someone may now be regretting that choice of username. And it’s a rather incestuous ‘Following’ list, consisting solely of other BBC services.

Downing Street‘s Twitter efforts are front page news in the Guardian this morning – see the actual text here – which should help them pass the 1500 friends mark imminently. Meanwhile, it looks like the Tories are taking Twitter more seriously, with updates being written in Twhirl – and, intriguingly, nothing from Twitterfeed in a few days. Still only a modest 60-odd friends, though. That Labour account is still nothing more than Twitterfeeding, with no indication if it’s official or not, and an even more modest 21 followers.

PS: I see a few other recent political additions to the Twittersphere include Boris Johnson – who appears to be texting them in; and Comment Is Free, for whom Twitter might be the key to making the whole CiF experience more practical. @brianpaddick has been at it since January; if it’s official, @kenlivingstone is leaving it a bit late.
15 Apr 2008

e-government, politics

downingstreet, guidofawkes, labourparty, shanegreer

Playing party politics with hyperlinks
From the ‘you can’t win’ department… Guido today picks up on a piece by Shane Greer last week, claiming that ‘Brown uses Downing Street (web)site to promote Labour’. And what incendiary partisan material are we talking about, precisely? An external hyperlink.

The No10 site has a page of Gordon Brown’s speeches. Or strictly, as it states in the page’s first line, non-political speeches. If you heard that Gordon Brown had made a speech, it’s the logical first place to look. But what if the speech had been made in a party-political capacity? It would be wrong for No10 to carry that speech on their website. And nobody’s suggesting otherwise.

So what do you do – present people with a dead end, or try and be helpful? It’s not as if they don’t (or rather, didn’t) make clear that you’re crossing the line from government to politics. As Shane’s screengrab shows, the link stated: ‘political speeches at the Labour Party website’. And in keeping with the site’s approach to external links, it opened in a new window. Hey, there’s even a page explaining why they have to be selective about the material they carry, with links to both the Ministerial and Civil Service Codes.

Shane asks: ‘What exactly is the justification for using taxpayer (sic) money to drive traffic to the Labour Party website?’ Well, there are two.
1. Good customer service. If you walk into a shop to buy something, and they’re out of stock, you expect the salesperson to suggest somewhere else you might try. It costs them a sale, but they do it because of plain common decency.
2. More efficient use of taxpayers’ money. If you don’t tell people where else to look, they will contact you to ask. They will call the press office, or send emails. It’s much more time-consuming, and hence much more expensive, for a civil servant to have to respond personally to those calls and emails.
The link has now gone. Party politics 1, common sense 0.

But let’s not pretend this is a Labour thing. I worked in government comms as far back as 1995. People would call up, asking for speeches by Conservative ministers – notably during the party conferences, but not exclusively. We either produced a transcript scrubbed clean of party-political material; or we gave them the number for Conservative Central Office. It was the right thing to do. Were we using taxpayers’ money to help promote the Tory Party? By Shane’s argument, yes. Sorry.

Disclosure: Although I’m doing some work for/with the No10 web guys, I don’t have any inside knowledge of this matter. I haven’t spoken to them about it, and was not involved in this decision in any respect.

Disclaimer: Although I’m linking to their websites in the text above, I do not endorse the views expressed by Shane Greer or Guido Fawkes. My company, Puffbox Ltd, is not using its proceeds or resources to promote either Mr Greer or Mr Staines. Just so we’re clear.
14 Apr 2008

company, e-government

blogging, downingstreet, puffbox, usvisit, wordpress

On tour with the PM

I hinted that there might be more online initiatives coming out of 10 Downing Street; and true enough, next out the world-famous door is a bit of on-the-spot blogging from Gordon Brown’s trip to the United States later this week.

For the first time on a foreign visit, a member of the No10 web team is joining the PM’s entourage, armed with a laptop, a camera, a fresh WordPress installation back at base, and the passwords to the Flickr and Twitter accounts. And as Downing Street announced last week, we’re mashing it all together into a ‘live’ microsite.

The plan is to cover the set-piece events – speeches, press conferences, etc – via Twitter flashes, to be followed up with a longer, more considered blog post. Pictures will be posted on Flickr, most likely a combination of agency-sourced images and snaps from our man on the spot. And it’ll all be pulled together by the power of RSS, into the custom WordPress theme I’ve built.

When a journalist does this, it’s considered cutting-edge. But when the tables are turned, and the civil servants start doing it too? Let’s see.

My favourite element is the plotting of stories on a Google Map planted on the homepage. Granted, it’s fairly crude: articles written in Washington will be assigned a WordPress category ‘washington’, then when you click on the Google Map pushpin over Washington, you’ll see the appropriate archive listing. We aren’t talking GPS coordinates or anything. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone try doing it… and it works. 🙂

As with the Progressive Governance summit website, it’s experimental. We’re hoping to bring a new first-person perspective to things, but naturally it can’t be too personal: striking an appropriate balance could prove tricky. We’re banking on internet access being readily available; and it may or may not be practical for one person, with limited hands-on experience, to do all these things. But hey, there’s only one way to find out.

The fun starts late on Tuesday, or early on Wednesday, depending where you are. Please have a look, and tell us what you think.
7 Apr 2008

e-government

downingstreet, twitter

No10 beats Obama

It doesn’t actually mean anything, but well done to Downing Street for topping 1,000 followers on Twitter. The Twitterholic website collates a popularity contest, which suggests there’s still a l-o-n-g way to go to top Barack Obama in terms of followers – but they’ve already issued more updates in a fortnight than he’s put out in almost a year.

As for the last week’s other Twitter newbies: the Conservatives official-but-don’t-tell-anyone account has attracted just 48 followers, but that’s still many more than Labour‘s (official? unofficial?) account, which claims just 10. The ConservativeHome blog features a mere 28, with no postings in a few days… perhaps the novelty has worn off.
5 Apr 2008

e-government

blogging, civilservice, downingstreet, liveblog, progressivegovernance

How to live-blog a summit

I think we got away with it. The remit for the week had been pretty straightforward: design, install, build, populate, edit and operate a website for the Progressive Governance Summit of 20-ish world leaders. So yeah, I’ve been busy.

It became an exercise in ‘web 2.0’ – open source tools, free online services, RSS feeds, and a willingness to experiment. Arguably, that’s really the only way it could have worked. And the fact that it did work says as much about the culture change brought about by the new technology, as it does about my own (questionable) skills.

On the day itself, I concentrated my efforts on the ‘live video blog’: streaming video broadcast from inside the summit itself, with my live commentary alongside. To my mind, the former is probably more important than the latter. You could see the heads of government talking (relatively) informally, even arguing once or twice, and got a feel for their individual personalities and sincere beliefs.

But this is a blog, so let’s talk blog. There wasn’t really a plan for the ‘live blog’, and the approach changed as the morning went on. It started as a straightforward ‘this is Gordon Brown, prime minister of the UK’, with any good soundbites that caught my ear (and which I had time to transcribe correctly). But as the comments came in from ‘viewers’, it became increasingly interactive. And not just through me as host. Let me give you three examples of the social dimension.

We got a message from one viewer (blogger Ellee Seymour as it happens), complaining of sound problems. I wasn’t having issues, but I asked the audience. A stream of responses came back: no, not me, fine here, etc etc. Ellee turned it off and on again (or something), and lo, her problem was solved. The audience was providing its own tech support.

Then somebody – Oli Barrett? – spontaneously started sending URLs relevant to some of the points made in discussions. Context-sensitive links, popping up in the middle of conversation… effectively making a reality of Google’s April Fool gag earlier in the week. Way to go, Oli. 🙂

And none of this would have been practical without the CoverItLive tool. Now I confess, I’d never heard of it until Wednesday night, when Paul Bradshaw left a comment on this here blog. But it was perfect: a single console for live commentary, private messages, moderation of user contributions, and (phew!) a toilet break facility, although they didn’t call it that. (They should.) It was a dream to use… and it was free of charge. I almost feel guilty.So what, you may ask. The dozens of people who watched the video, and followed the blog, probably learned a few things, and saw a side of global democracy that they’d never seen before. We had a few laughs, the majority from the comments we didn’t feel able to allow through moderation. (FYI, very few comments failed moderation… and I suspect the contributors generally knew it was coming.)

But most importantly, we proved it can be done – even with zero preparation, zero prior experience of the technology, and two administrators who (frankly) didn’t know much about the subject matter. People were able to share their thoughts, with us and with each other. Maybe it wasn’t like being there, but it was like being next door.

The precedent is hereby set. Next time, we’ll do better. We need a host who really knows the subject matter (and can type really fast). We need to get the admin console operating on several machines, and delegate the various tasks. We need to bring more coffee. And we need a way to get the chat into the meeting itself – to the conference table somehow, or into the ‘press conference’ after.

All the while, our valiant photographer at the venue was pumping photos into the Downing Street Flickr account, which were then fed back into the summit website. The executive summaries of the various expert papers were opened for comments. And my colleague was sending out the odd Twitter flash.

By the summit’s conclusion, we were both tired and hungry. But every comms channel earned at least one holler of ‘bloody hell! this is fantastic!’… which, for anyone without Whitehall experience, is not common.

I’m grateful to the No10 team for letting me play with their summit. I hope we proved a few points, and learned a few lessons, which can help inform Downing Street’s future online work. Stay tuned. 😉