Over that time, we’ve worked to make product recall information more useful and helped to make it easier to reduce cold calls and junk mail. I’ve been able to work with Consumer Focus’ energy team to publish complaints data on energy suppliers, the Wales team to publish performance data for the Royal Mail, and Passenger Focus to help open up rail performance information.

There is still a lot more to be done, however shortly I’m going to be taking a break from Consumer Focus and embarking on a new challenge.

I’m delighted to announce that from the end of this month I’ll be joining GovUK – the team in London working to produce a single website for government.

GovUK has already put together an initial prototype for the website (AlphaGov) – but they are now working to produce a much more in depth second (beta) phase.  Over the next few months, we’ll be putting together a public beta of the main citizen-facing aspects of Gov.uk.  We’ll also be developing a private beta of a shared  ’corporate’ publishing platform (for government departments) and a draft Global Experience Language for all government sites. The Cabinet Office has built up an impressive and extremely talented team to put the site together and I’m honoured to be able to join them.

If you want to know more about the project, take a look at the project’s blog and the initial prototype.

December 2011

In early December we launched a directory of post offices owned by and operated for communities across the UK.  Consumer Focus commissioned the Plunkett Foundation and Social Enterprise Coalition to compile the data which CF Labs then presented through this site.

The site allows users to search for community post offices in their area, find out where they are located and see what services they provide.  The site also provides some statistics on core activities and the data is exposed in JSON format.

A few days later we launched a service to publish ratings of how energy companies handle complaints.  We’d worked closely with our colleagues in the Energy team at Consumer Focus to design and develop a meaningful way of showing this data.  We produced a number of prototypes which were refined through several stages to a shortlist of 3 possible options.  These were then independently tested by TNS-BMRB in September which helped us to pick the final option.

The system ranks each of the ‘Big Six’ energy suppliers using stars – 0 for the worst performing companies, 5 for the best.  The site publishes a snapshot of the data (the last quarter) and also a more detailed historical view.  All the data is also published using JSON and CSV formats.

October 2010

In October we completed the second phase of the new Consumer Focus website.  Earlier in the year we made the move from an external proprietary content management system to a WordPress system managed in house by CF Labs.  The second phase of work involved a complete restructure of the content and a refreshed website template.

As with the new CF Labs in September, we used WordPress 3.0 and built new templates for each of the Consumer Focus Nations (GB, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland).  New areas were created for advice, policy work and publications.

We launched the site just in time to hear rumours that Consumer Focus was to be abolished in the Government’s “bonfire of the quangos”.  It turned out that the rumours were true.  The intention is to transfer some of our functions to Citizens Advice and Citizens Advice Scotland.  Even now, 4 months later, we still don’t know exactly when or how this transfer will happen.

November 2010

November was a quiet month – mostly spent finalising work on three projects that were due to launch before the year came to a close.

At the end of the month we launched the second phase of the Consumer Focus Energy Price Comparison (EPC) Service.  The EPC acts as a mini-price comparison system and gives you a rough idea of the price to expect when shopping around for an energy supplier.  Consumer Focus inherited this system from our predecessor Energywatch.  Earlier in 2010 we’d shifted the system to a new data supplier and rebuilt it so we could manage it in house to save money.

The second phase of development involved producing a brand new front end to make the system easier to use.  We gave it the CF Labs treatment and integrated it with the Consumer Focus website design.  We cleaned up the code, added a bunch of features and created bookmarkable URLs for every search.

Coming up…

• Community post offices
• Rating energy suppliers

As this recap covers such a long period of time, I’ve split it across several posts. First up is July, August & September.

July 2010

Throughout July I spent time working on the recently launched StayPrivate.org website.  As users sent in feedback we evaluated and tweaked the interface to reduce problems.

August 2010

As with July, plenty of time was spent evaluating and implementing changes to StayPrivate.org following user feedback.  Late in the month we blogged about some of the issues users were having and the reasons behind them.  We also launched a revamped FAQ to answer as many of the common questions as possible.

A large number of other projects also took up time during August –all of which launched before the end of 2010.

September 2010

In early September we launched a new website for CF Labs to showcase our work and host our blog.  The existing website included a heavy focus on ideas for potential future projects but we decided to change the focus to projects that had already been completed.

As the CF Labs site was built using WordPress, we developed a new template to take advantage of all the new features added into WordPress 3.0.  We used Custom Post Types to provide a page for each of our projects which includes an introduction to the work and associated images. We also used tags to show the latest three blog posts related to each project.

Also in September I stumbled across a fantastic open-source tool (Tweet Nest) for creating a searchable archive of a user’s tweets.  In the past, I’d used various methods to create such an archive but none of them worked as well as this.  You can see a working example using my tweets at http://tweetnest.daibach.co.uk.

I’m considering using this tool to create an archive of tweets from the various Consumer Focus twitter accounts.

Coming up…

• Launch of new Consumer Focus website
• Consumer Focus is abolished
• Comprehensive Spending Review
• Comparing energy prices

If you dig a little deeper into the figures you can see that central government has spent £14m on Strategy & Planning, £15.8m on Design & Build, £23.8m on Hosting & Infrastructure and £9.7m on Testing (these are categories that COI requires under their TG128 standard). Despite their efforts (gathering this kind of data is by no means easy) I have concerns about the quality. For example:

• The Ministry of Defence spent £418,000 on Design & Build: however, that includes figures for their internal intranet whereas the others do not appear to include intranet costs
• A comment against the Forestry Commission figures numbers states “This is as close as I can make it. Won’t be too far out.”
• The Office of Fair Trading hosting costs cover both their website and internal intranet
• Numerous departments (Ministry of Justice, Audit Commission, Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, GCHQ, Crown Prosecution Service and the Statistics Authority) show no costs for website hosting

Quite clearly there is a discrepancy in the ways each department has calculated their figures. There could be quite legitimate reasons for this, for example, hosting could be part of a much bigger IT contract, making it difficult to split out website costs. However it does raise questions as to the accuracy of the dataset as a whole.

Interestingly, the Crown Prosecution Service does not appear to have provided any costs (all fields are marked as zero); they have however answered an FOI request recently, revealing they paid nearly £122k last year.

That said the spending figure is horrifying. The government is spending way too much on websites. I can’t quite figure out how spending £35 million on BusinessLink is justified, or £10.4 million on Directgov for that matter, particularly when these sites were supposed to reduce the cost of public sector websites.

I would also be interested to see a breakdown of where all of this money is spent. I wonder how much of it goes to the big public sector outsourcing companies rather than SME web development agencies.

I agree that the costs need to be brought down, and some of that needs to be through closing websites and rationalising hosting infrastructures. However I think that there needs to be a proper look at why the costs for producing websites are so high – value for money is just not being achieved in a lot of these cases.

Simon Dickson from Puffbox has written more about these figures on his blog, as has Harry Metcalfe from the Dextrous Web.

Sometimes I come away from the office and struggle to see what we have actually achieved. When you are stuck into day to day work, it is quite easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

This isn’t helped by the fact that part of our team’s aim does not have a tangible outcome. We spend a sizable portion of our energy on promoting our open principles within the organisation and converting people to our way of thinking. It isn’t an easy task, as I’m sure other people in this field will confirm but I’m starting to feel like we are making some headway.

The first report (of which I hope there will be many) has just gone online, in a format allowing the public to comment on each part of the document. The Consumer Focus website is now powered using the open source WordPress Content Management System (joining the likes of bis.gov.uk and number10.gov.uk). Other developments are also in the pipeline for the next few months and all have stemmed from us ‘spreading the gospel’.

This sort of work is going on across Government on many different levels, but recently there seems to have been a bit of a breakthrough. There is lots of things happening at the moment which you might find interesting. I’m going to briefly run through them.

Data.gov.uk

This is the UK version of the USA’s Data.gov and has been operating in a restricted beta for a few months. Government departments have been posting raw datasets for developers to use for free in their open projects. From sometime in January, the site will go live with over 1100 datasets from central government.

Ordnance Survey, NHS Data, Office of National Statistics Data

Work is underway to open up more datasets and make them freely available. These include health data from NHS Choices, mapping data from Ordnance Survey (OS) and statistics from the Office of National Statistics. Consultations are planned for early in the new year with aims to open them up by April 2010. There also seems to be some movement on publishing data of how the money allocated in the 2008 Pre-Budget report has been spent (possibly by spring, with further data released in the summer).

More information about the data releases can be found in the Government’s recent strategy ‘Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government‘ and on the Government’s Digital Engagement blog.

Crime Maps

The various Police forces around the UK have released crime statistics using their new mapping service. I’ve had a bit of a play around and it looks pretty good. You can see lots of information about your local area and download the data in CSV format.

More information about the Crime Maps can be found on the Directgov website.

Post Code Data

A few months ago I wrote about the issue of post codes after ErnestMarples.com was forced to shut down by the Royal Mail. Since then, a campaign has been ongoing to set the post code free. Well, it looks like someone might have listened. As part of the opening up of OS data above, a consultation will be taking place shortly on the opening up of post code datasets, which could see the data released by April 2010.

More information about the release of post code data can be found on the Ernest Marples blog.

Digital Economy Bill

The Digital Economy Bill has recently been introduced to Parliament and is due to go to committee stage shortly. This bill contains a large chunk of the actions and recommendations from the Digital Britain Report earlier in the year (with a number of strange and scary additions). There is a lot of talk about this at the moment and the effect it will have on the digital life and innovation in the UK. You can follow the progress of the bill on the Parliament.UK website, or on twitter using the #debill hashtag. If you want more information on the bill and how it might affect us, there are a large number of blogs and websites dedicated to the issue.

Directgov

This brings me to one of the last bits for this entry, and I make no apologies for the shameless self-promotion here.

Direct.gov.uk is the UK Government’s official website for the general public. It aims to collect all the public facing information into one place and make it easy to find. Unfortunately, its usefulness and ability to achieve this aims has been called into question. Personally, I’ve never liked the website and can never find information I want from the site (in fact, I tried several times to find information relating to bits in this post but gave up).

Consumer Focus has recently published a report on the website that analyses how well it delivers on its promise. As I alluded to earlier, this report is available online in fully commentable format. We are encouraging everyone and anyone to send us their thoughts on Directgov, what the problems are and what can be improved. Similarly, if you think it is doing something right, we want to know that too. You can find out more about the report at http://directgov.consumerfocuslabs.org.

I believe there will be a series of workshops planned for early in the new year to identify ways of engaging people in digital public service development. You can sign up on the site to be kept informed (and I’ll no doubt be publishing the information here as well).

Looking back at everything that has been achieved and everything that has happened in the last nine months, I’m actually quite excited at what we can do by this time next year (election permitting of course!). I have my fingers crossed 2010 will continue making leaps towards open government.

This brings up an interesting questions – how do schools inform parents and students that they are going to be closed? Traditionally, schools have informed local radio stations which have spread the news. This however comes with a number of problems – most importantly, not everyone can receive the local radio station. For example, one member of my family goes to Hereford Sixth Form College, which informs BBC Hereford & Worcester, and Wyvern FM of closures. However, here in Abergavenny, we receive neither of these stations.

The college could phone all parents – but with over 1700 students, that would be nearly impossible. Parents ringing the college would freeze up the phone lines. Maybe the schools could use the internet to pass this message? Hereford Sixth Form College does just that – an emergency message has been displayed on the homepage since Monday morning detailing the current status of the college.

What if there was one central resource for information on all schools? One website address for parents to remember – a website which was updated by each school to show their status. Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich suggested this yesterday morning. He purchased schoolclosures.org.uk and challenged DirectGov (the UK’s government gateway) to produce the site ready for the next day (today).

DirectGov must have pulled out all the stops, because just 28 hours later, schoolclosures.org.uk was released as a beta to show how the system might work. This is fantastic work from a government department – not something you will usually hear from me. Being able to take an idea to a working system in just under 28 hours is no mean feat – but is something the government needs to get used to. Well done to everyone who worked on this!

Of course, no one system is going to solve the problem. But with all systems, schools, and government departments working as one, there is a real chance to make an event like this easier on parents and pupils.