Whitehall Webby - digital media in government

Quick reminder that its the regular teacamp get-together tomorrow afternoon from 2pm to 4pm in Cafe Zest (which is on the top floor of House of Fraser in Victoria Street, London) for government web type people.

I missed the last one, and only floated around the last few due to pressure of work, but I am conscious that we are almost at the beginning of the summer holiday season, so it would be great to see as many of you there tomorrow as possible.

I know that some are coming along to have a natter about how we can turn Digital People from a name and an idea into something real and worthwhile. But whatever is on your mind, come along for a cup of tea or coffee and a chat with like minded souls.

There’s been so much interesting, stimulating stuff going on recently that sometimes its difficult to know what to make of it all.

In the last few months I’ve been to a number of events such as GeeKyoto, Interesting08, and 2gether. All great in their own way and all have generated lots of thoughts in my head about innovating around my day job stuff.

The key message from all this for me has been: stop prevaricating, stop strategising. Just do something, lots of small things, and know that some of them will pay off (though not necessarily the ones you expect).

The Power of Information taskforce has also been busy, launching a competition to generate ideas about making better use of public information (wish my department had thought of that..). Now OPSI has created an ‘unlocking’ service for people to request the availability of government data in usable formats.

All this stuff, all these ideas, are great. Its not all ’sexy’ social media (thank goodness), some of it is more fundamental than that.

I’ve been deliberating for a while about how we publish information online. On a daily basis we produce a fair number of documents in pdf format, not ideal but given the limited time (and various commitments that have been made) we have its often all we can do to get the information up on the website.

On Saturday I went along to Opentech08. Another inspiring event, but for very different reasons. Instead of being evangelist in approach it was very techie (I was well out of my depth there, chairing a session on openID - about which I know nothing). But there was a lot of talk about data feeds, mash ups etc. Luckily John Sheridan from OPSI gave me a quick five minute noddy guide to the whole area over lunch (I still don’t understand it, but I did smile a lot).

Anyway, from all that, and conversations I’ve been having with all sorts of people, its become clear to me that we could do better in how we make the information available - making it available as usable data rather than a document.

Changing what we already do is not easy, there are all sorts of constraints and barriers. But lets take the regular publication of statistical releases. We produce quite a few of these and, although we have started to make some data available in excel format to support the actual documents, its not ideal.

So I’m wondering, is there anyone who could help me do two things?:

• First, how can we turn excel documents into useful and usable data feeds (RDF was mentioned to me, whatever that means…). Are there tools that can do this easily? What would I need? Can anyone set this up for me?
• Second, how do I sell this to the powers that be? I understand conceptually that we should be doing it, but I don’t know how to articulate it well enough. It can’t just be about goodwill or the right thing to do - what is the ‘business’ benefit (remember it still costs us to do this stuff, so it needs to involve almost no extra work)?

Unlike the Power of Information taskforce, I don’t have big bags of money to dish out as a reward. But if you can help me, I promise you at least a pie and a pint, maybe more if I can get some money for development.

If you know how to explain it, or can help me do it, please let me know (email address is on the about me page if you don’t want to leave a comment here).

Had a great evening tonight discussing how government can embrace the opportunities of web2.0 with a bunch of interesting people - including ministers, senior officials, entrepreneurs and IT providers.

Hosted by the ever-genial crew from Ideal Government, the imposition of the Chatham House rules forbids me from going into detail about the discussion.

But the fact that we were even talking about it, and the fact that the group of people around the table all had a pretty sophisticated view on the subject, was to me a major step change. Twelve months ago I doubt we would have even been having the conversation at all.

Ideal Government will be posting a summary of the discussion shortly, and I don’t want to abuse their hospitality by stealing their thunder. So here are just a few thoughts that chimed with me:

• A real recognition that innovation doesn’t have to cost a lot but we just need to just try things. I’d add that we also need to ensure that the good stuff that is already going on is identified and surfaced so we can learn better from each other.
• A feeling that incumbent IT providers have little to gain from promoting free, open source (market leading) collaborative tools as it threatens their business models. Must admit I hadn’treally given much thought to this before but it certainly feels right.
• We need to recognise that government won’t always be best place to deliver innovation around public services or information. We need to be prepared to cede control and create the environment for others to act as intermediaries or have access to our data so they can create value from it. This is crucial, we have enough to do just improving our basic services online and not be distracted by the cool stuff (I’m regularly guilty of this, new betas are sooo seductive…).

Thank you Ideal Government for hosting the dinner. The more conversations people have, the more often, the better.

I don’t often post announcements about the teacamps here, but at the last event somebody asked me to do so.

Teacamp is an informal get together of people interested in government web and other online shenanigans. There’s no membership list, no agenda, no obligation to hang around (or even turn up). It’s simply an opportunity to meet other people working on (or interested in) government websites, intranets or other digital/web things. Its a great way to find an expert, discuss a problem or just meet others doing what you do.

If you’re interested, we meet in Cafe Zest, on the top floor of House of Fraser in Victoria Street between 2pm and 4pm. Pop in for half an hour, grab a coffee and chew the fat with us.

There are various websites and services we use to communicate information about the teacamps. One of them is here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/691145

There is no obligation to sign up to attend, just roll up whenever it suits you.

There’s been an amusing series of posts published over the past few days about the status of various pieces of government web guidance being developed by COI.

First Jack Pickard noticed that the Delivering Inclusive Websites guidance, for which he had valiantly led a response on behalf of the embryonic Public Sector Web Management Forum, had been published - after six months of radio silence from COI (though to be fair, they did take on board a fair number of Jack’s excellent points).

Then Emma noticed that some of the other guidance documents were ‘in consultation’ and mused how one could become involved in ‘consulting’ on the drafts.

Nick Booth pointed out the faint irony of describing something as being out for consultation, without indicating how any kind of conversation could take place (I’ll ignore the double irony that one of the documents in question is social media guidance aka participative online media).

So Nick put a call into COI’s press office asking how he could respond to the consultation.

Oh dear, today Emma checked the COI site again. Guess what? The documents in question are now simply marked as being ‘in preparation’.

It would be easy to laugh, cry, criticise or bitch about this situation. I’ll do none of them.

I will point out this: government webbies have been waiting a long time for these different sets of guidance to see the light of day. Some of us have been involved in helping to put them together even. But the pace of development has been tortuously slow (the previous guidance was published in 2003 if I remember correctly and work on their replacements has been going on for over a year). The fact that some of them are still ‘in preparation’ is very disappointing.

I’ve said this before to some closer to the work than I - and I repeat it here - why or why didn’t someone take the previous version of the guidance, upload it to a wiki, and invite anyone who wanted to contribute to producing a new version to do so (within reason, perhaps requiring them to register or even restrict it to those whose work would be subject to the guidelines).

I’ve been given a couple of answers:

1. They want to have something produced that they can upload once they are complete.
2. Various mutterings about developing cross-government social media platforms that could host this content.

Both of these answers seem a bit misguided to me. Take the second one first - Steve Dale nailed this the other day when building on a post from Euan Semple: there is no one technical ’solution’ that will work for all requirements. The reason why there are a myriad of wiki and blog platforms is that they all have different functionality and ways of working that suit different needs. Waiting for the magic ‘enterprise’ solution is not only costly, but misguided and wasting time.

In terms of producing the guidance, then publishing it in some kind of controlled collaborative environment - isn’t this rather missing the point? One of the greatest benefits of the social media/web2.0 bandwagon is the ability to collaborate and draw on the ‘collective wisdom of the many’. Trying to backfill ‘collaboration’ onto something signed off and published doesn’t really send the right signal.

Here’s my two’pennth: before anyone drafts any more guidance, take out your credit card and head over to Wikispaces (or a similar hosted wiki service). $1000 (pretty reasonable given the current exchange rate) will buy you a nice hosted wiki which you can rebrand and give a dedicated sub-domain so its nice and official (about half a day’s work?). Upload the drafts as they are now and invite anyone who wants to to help make those guidelines as good as they possibly could be. There are plenty of people out there, right across Whitehall and further afield the wider public sector, who are itching to contribute for everyone’s benefit.

If us webbies in government cannot demonstrate the amazing benefits of social media by our own actions, its a bit rich of us to go round telling anyone who will listen how great the latest online innovations are. Please, lets demonstrate our competences by our behaviour.

Clearly there was either a case of mistaken identity, or perhaps someone pulled out at short notice…

Anyway, I will be appearing at the Web2.0 Strategies conference this Thursday in Covent Garden on a panel entitled ‘Innovators under the spotlight’. We apparently will be debating how we have /are pioneering web 2.0 developments in our
organisations (- my work colleagues think this is hysterical, lets hope they don’t grass me up and burst my bubble…. ;-).

Anyway, if you’re coming, please do say hello. It looks like a good line up. Not a big fan of speaking in public so please be gentle with me.

Equally, if you have any ideas what I should talk about, please leave a comment here. I’m thinking vaguely something about cross-government social media evangelism and community organising, whatever that is

Hope to see you there (if you’re a public sector person thinking or attending, there’s a special rate on the price).

Teacamp, aka UKGovWeb afternoon tea, is on this afternoon. I haven’t promoted it here for a while, but just in case you weren’t aware of it I’m letting you know.

Teacamp is simply an informal opportunity for people who work in and around government online to sit down, have a cuppa, and chew the fat.

We meet at CafeZest, in House of Frazer on Victoria Street from 2pm to 4pm.

If you’re in the area and have half an hour to spare, come along. We’d love to meet you.

Last week I was presenting the results of some user testing and prototype design to a group of executives, including senior IT and marketing people.

The session went pretty well (it should have done, the work is robust and very high quality). At the end, the assembled group were pressed for comments. Two of them stuck in my craw:

“Can we be confident the site will work on my blackberry?”

- Hmm, multi-platform, multi-browser delivery of content. Well I’d never thought of that…..

“Is the site future proofed so it will do things like podcasts”.

- Aargh!

I left wondering, how much is it our responsibility to educate our colleagues about our role as webbies in understanding the various technologies, methods of delivery etc rather than just been seen as electronic publishers? And how much is it their responsibility to ensure they are up to date with changes in their working environment?

I’d love to invest a large chunk of my time in bringing people up to speed on the evolving world of digital communications, but I do have a day job too which makes this diffcult in a world of ever tightening budgets and pressures on headcount.

Is it wrong of me to expect others to invest their own time in improving their knowledge? After all, they have busy professional lives too. Methinks I need to divert some of my energies to some internal training….

As I’m going through one of my (reasonably regular) “neglecting the blog” phases at the moment I failed to recognise that somehow Whitehall Webby has made it to the ripe old age of one.

I started writing here on 29 April 2007, when I was helping the Cabinet Office to produce a report on government communicators’ use of social media. It was an experiment to demonstrate the opportunities of civil servants blogging (jury’s still out on that one I think…)

Since then I’ve published 91 pieces on the site, not bad considering I find it all so difficult, and had 336 comments (some of which, admittedly, are mine… ).

The most popular post over the last year has been the ‘about me‘ page, with over 1,100 views. However the posts I wrote on the civil serf affair got the most interest at the time (as most other government web related blogs experienced).

Over the last twelve months I’ve tried to to publicise examples of good government use of web, particularly innovative stuff. This includes the launch of the Ministry of Justice website, the Wales Office wordpress site, the Foreign Office’s social media big-bang, and more recently the excellent experimentation coming out of Number 10.

A common theme throughout my musings has been the role of webbies in government, and how we can organise ourselves into a group of experts who are recognised as such in Whitehall.

This thinking led to what has been my highlight of the last year - setting up the UKGovWeb Barcamp and bringing together civil servants, consultants, freelancers and others with the intention of encouraging the building of a community of committed people around government online.

So far thats bearing fruit. Many of us meet regularly at “teacamps” and colleagues in several departments are beginning to create self-organised groups in their organisations with the intention of working together to offer networking and training opportunities.

So, the future looks bright, and this blog has actually made it through a whote year - something I often thought wouldn’t happen.

End of term report completed, lets hope there’s another one next year.

When Jimmy Leach left Downing Street last Autumn, after the changing of the guard, many people thought that the raft of innovation he had overseen (including the introduction of online petitions and webchats) would come to an end. I have to admit that I was one of those people.

But in recent weeks, coinciding with the arrival of Jimmy’s replacement - Mark Flanagan - the web team at Number 10 has been on a bit of a roll.

First, a neat little wordpress microsite build to support the Progressive Governance summit at the beginning of April. The project included a live video stream of the event and online chat between officials and viewers. Considering the event took place on a Saturday, and the subject matter, it got a pretty good audience.

Second, an even cleverer wordpress microsite to support the prime minister’s recent visit to the United States. As well as the goodies above, this project incorporated Google maps to track the progress of the visit across the country.

Third, the launch of a Downing Street Twitter feed a few weeks back. Initial suspicion that this would simply tweet links to official announcements on the Downing Street website were allayed as the team found their voice, using the tool to support announcements, events (such as the two described above) and engage in dialogue and banter with the geek ‘twitterarti’.

All this activity has attracted attention elsewhere. Last Friday, the Guardian published an article on their homepage, sorry frontpage, about Downing Street’s use of Twitter. Now that is some coverage and encouragement.

Downing Street’s innovation has always been of help to other government webbies to justify investing time and effort in using new tools and applications for communication and engagement.

This isn’t playing with technology for the sake of technology. Its about piloting new methods of engagement, at little or no cost, in an attempt to improve transparency and dialogue.

Please guys, keep it up for all our sakes.