Whitehall Webby - digital media in government

Its recess, quiet(er) in the offices of Whitehall than usual, and a great time to catch up on all the niggly jobs that have been sitting around in the inbox for a while. Not a great bunch of subjects to write about I’m afraid.

I’m off on holiday myself next week and one of the things I’ve been trying to finish up before I go away is to make sense of the ream of paperwork I’ve got knocking around relating to website rationalisation (or web rat as its ‘affectionately’ known around these parts).

The project has virtually become (another) full time job for me over the last eight months or so and for most of that time its all been about ‘closing websites‘ as my regular reader, and other webbies around Whitehall, will recognise with a groan.

I’ve previously bemoaned the lack of a coherent picture of government web/digital strategy. Its not that we don’t between us know what the constituent parts of it are, its just that perceptions are skewed by the headline grabbers.

But as the work moves towards identification of what information and applications should migrate into Directgov or Businesslink (known as website convergence in Whitehall, or webc.. oh, you get it..) we have to work out what to do with what will be left.

Simon D has already pointed out the problem of losing permalinks, especially where content is cited in the official record of parliament. There is a real danger that this will be excaberated in the short term as sites are rationalised - though in the long term it should be easier to manage.

I’ve been involved in some discussions about how to resolve this. I’d love to tell you about it. Its not that I can’t (though maybe that wouldn’t be a good idea) its just that I don’t understand how to explain it. I’m convinced it will work, but not being a techie I got lost when being told the difference between a URL and a URI. Needless to say, the scale of the task is large. But the approach seems robust.

Other recent developments have been a raft of draft guidance looking at what role departmental corporate sites will have in the future, improving accessibility, channel strategies, updating the government website guidelines etc etc

This is all good, and starts to clarify what we are about for the future. Still can’t help thinking we’re missing a trick though. It feels like a classic civil service problem solving scenario: issue identified, official(s) commissioned to draft guidance, draft circulated, a few comments received, then its policy.

While I don’t have a problem with that in principle (and the people doing the legwork know what they are doing) it just feels like it goes against the grain of what we are about - webbies, online experts, social media savvy. Shouldn’t we be using the very tools we evangelise about on a daily basis to harness the collective knowledge of the community and build this vision together? By ‘we’ I don’t just mean webbies. There are plenty of other interested parties in and around government who have knowledge, expertise, experience and views about the best way to do all this stuff. We should be harnessing that, not imposing solutions - however good they appear.

I’m rambling know and losing focus so I’ll stop for the moment. Suffice to say I think its moving in the right direction but it needs something else, a commitment to change and invest in improving how we do all this. Not sure what the answer is but I have some ideas. They can wait for another day.

on the wall of the Public Office

Saw this statement on the way out from the workshop (illustrating a point from one of the case studies). Hammered home the point to me that website rationalisation is about them not us.

Spent an entertaining few hours today at GC expo. The show is mainly for IT bods rather than webbies but there were a few creative design and build agencies there who were good to make contact with, suppliers such as Adobe were demonstrating how to make the most of their products and there were some interesting presentations - such as Francis Irving from My Society and Paul Hodgkin of Patient Opinion talking about online citizen engagement.

After lunch I took part in a workshop exploring how public services could be reengineered around the customer. This was supported by some insightful observational video of five families experiencing public services in real scenarios. Fascinating stuff and stimulating discussion around improving the minefield that citizens often find themselves in when negotiating the myriad of frontline service providers. Called The Public Office, I recommend visiting the website to view the videos and the supporting information. No doubt you will hear more of this in the near future.

You may recall the announcement last January that the government was to close a good chunk of ‘.gov’ websites to improve both customer experience (by shifting content/online services into DirectGov or Businesslink) and efficiency (by reducing each department’s website support and development costs).

Conceptually this is pretty much a no brainer - most people accept that DirectGov/ Businesslink has visitor traffic that their servers could only dream about trying to support, and there are many sites out there (one estimate puts the total number at over 2000 but who really knows…) which could benefit from tighter control, consistency of presentation etc to ensure the user experience is better and the content up to date. (more…)

Went to an interesting session today, where GCN and the Henley Centre were presenting their second report on media and communication trends. You may remember the first iteration of this research did the rounds around government about 18 months ago.

My recollection of the first report was that it was full of fascinating stuff but there was so much to take in it was almost impossible to know where to start. This time it was different - slicker, more digestible and seemingly more authoritative because it had the baseline from 18 months ago to compare against.

One clear message this time is the rise of social media and the implications of this for government. The audience, who were mainly heads of marketing or similar, were alert to this and there was some lively discussion afterwards about the implications of all this for them.

Some of the points made included: (more…)

There’s always a lot going on, as you’d expect, but there are three things going on at the moment that are taking up most of my time:

A new website for a new department - my current employer effectively ceases to exist on 8 May and will be replaced by a new government department. My team and I are working furiously to build and test a new corporate website to launch on 9 May.

Website rationalisation - you may have seen this announcement a few months ago. Needless to say, it means a lot of work for the likes of me.

Social media review - helping the Cabinet Office to understand government’s role and legitimacy in this space. Interesting work and a chance to actually spend time and talk with experts whose work I find interesting but never normally have time to follow up. I’ll write more about this shortly.