The website is based upon a system I built a few weeks ago to monitor our own expenses at Consumer Focus Labs . The site was designed to match the processes at Consumer Focus, but when Richard and I realised that MPs expenses were being published, we realised we could make use of the same codebase with a few minor changes.  I need to note at this point that the website was a personal project and not supported by Consumer Focus.

We rushed through these changes on Wednesday afternoon, sorted out some hosting and put the site up. Our initial plan was to get a few interested people to help us convert the data and start loading the information into the site bit by bit.

When the data was published yesterday morning, I realised how much of a mammoth task it was going to be. After a quick discussion, we decided to set up a generic username and password for the admin system so that lots of people could help convert the data.

Once MySociety posted the site on Twitter, everything went crazy. It very quickly became clear that the basic back end was a data entry nightmare and things needed to change. Some changes were quickly scoped out and implemented in between untimely distractions such as this and real work. We removed a number of fields from the forms including location since any location details had been completely redacted from the PDFs. I hacked some of the code to make things work and broke the site a few times in the process.

By 5.30 when I left the office to head home, I was absolutely shattered. I decided it was best to take a step back and take stock before making any further changes. I’d like to thank everyone for their messages of support through the day, and also everyone who sent in useful feedback. I haven’t been able to implement all of them yet, but hopefully a few more will be added over the next few days. I’d also like to thank the Guardian and Financial Times for mentioning the work we’ve done.

So, what lessons can be learned from this exercise?

Firstly and most importantly, plan! We threw the site together assuming the overall format of the data would be similar to the expenses claims made at Consumer Focus. In fact, it was much more complicated, and much more fragmented, with some (almost all!) crucial details missing. We also should have put much more effort into the data entry part of the site. While a basic system might be ok for internal use among a small number of people, it really isn’t appropriate for a crowd sourcing site- particularly when so many things can go wrong.

It is also worth considering that speed isn’t everything. We launched the site at 8.30am on Thursday. The Guardian waited until 3.30pm to launch their site and it was still successful. In hindsight we probably could have waited for a while and got things right first off.

Where next for WhatTheyClaimed.com?

I’m going to try and make some more changes over the next few days, in the hope of making things work a bit better. But in the long term, I don’t have the time to commit to the site. So if anyone is interested in taking over the project and giving it the attention it deserves (and needs!), then get in touch – whattheyclaimed@dafyddvaughan.co.uk. I’ve already had messages from a few people interested in working on the site.

Consumer Focus Labs will be publishing its expenses using the original system shortly – if you are interested in that then keep an eye on our website for the announcement. We’ll also be releasing the code for anyone to use to produce their own expenses websites. We hope that MPs will make good use of it to publish their expenses in the future.

Firstly I need to make a few disclaimers. Obviously the views expressed here are my own and not that of my employer – Consumer Focus (if you want the organisation’s view, you can see it here). I’ve also not read every paragraph in the 240 page report – some parts nearly sent me to sleep, so I skipped past them to some of the more interesting sections.

Overall, I can’t help but feel a little bit disappointed with the report. To me it doesn’t seem to go far enough - although a guaranteed 2Mbps broadband connection to every home in the UK makes a good headline, it’s poor compared to other countries such as South Korea (which is rolling out 1Gbps connections). It also skirts around some issues such as copyright fair use and leaves a lot to chance.

The report outlines 2 phases of broadband development in the UK. The first is the Universal Service Commitment (USC) which aims to provide a base to the whole country; the second is the Next Generation Broadband Network (NGB) which will provide for the future.

Universal Service Commitment (USC)

Digital Britain outlines its intention to provide every home in the UK with a minimum of 2 Mbps broadband by 2012. This will be part funded by the production of the NGB networks, with the rest funded through the underspend in the Digital Switchover budget. Initial thoughts are that this is great – everyone in the UK will have broadband of a ‘satisfactory’ quality. However, things soon start to fall apart.

Countries like South Korea are currently achieving 50 Mbps as a minimum, with some places getting as high as a 1 Gbps connection. When put in this context, 2 Mbps is exceptionally poor. Also, when you delve into a bit more detail, it turns out that this speed is actually optimistic.

Some homes will not be able to get broadband though traditional means, and so the Government is going to rely on mobile networks and satellite to provide the USC in these areas. The report suggests that 2 Mbps is unlikely for these houses, and connections of between 1 and 1.5 Mbps is more accurate. So actually, a 2 Mbps USC isn’t really correct.

Next Generation Broadband (NGB)

This is the next phase in broadband development and aims to provide broadband speeds of around 50 Mbps by using technologies such as Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) and Fibre to the Home (FTTH). Digital Britain expects that market investment will fund this deployment and anticipates that it will reach approximately two thirds of the population.

Assuming BT and the mobile networks do reach this target, that leaves about a third of the UK back on the not quite 2 Mbps USC broadband. This quite obviously is not acceptable, so a fund is being set up to provide NGB to this final third (called The Final Third Project).

The Final Third will be funded by a 50p per line per month levy on all fixed lines from next year. Contrary to some reports, this includes residential copper lines (like your BT phone line), business copper, ISDN and cable telephony lines (like those provided by Virgin Media). You will not have to pay this levy for mobile phones as they already pay license fees for network upgrades.

After all of this, it is expected that 90% of the population will be covered by NGB, leaving a poor 10% with USC speeds.

Illegal file sharing

This is of course a big bone of contention among many people. The interim report issued in January suggested the creation of a Digital Rights Agency which would be responsible for tracking illegal file sharers. This final version has moved away from this proposal and aims to stick with an industry lead effort, although supervised by Ofcom the industry regulator.

The report outlines a commitment to reduce illegal file sharing by 70-80%. This is a huge commitment, so they aren’t just leaving it to chance. If the industry effort of writing letters to account holders does not reduce numbers significantly within 12 months, Ofcom will be able to force ISPs to introduce ‘technical measures’. These might include blocking of sites, protocols, ports, bandwidth capping (speed and data transfer), bandwidth shaping and content identification and filtering.

However, for this to happen, Ofcom will need to ask Parliament to legislate.

Copyright fair use

Unfortunately this important issue gets all of a one paragraph mention in the document which makes no commitment to resolve the situation. As a result, it remains illegal to copy music you already own to your mp3 player.

Conclusion

As you can see, it is a bit disappointing. The USC isn’t quite the 2 Mbps they promised, NGB relies on the market to do the right thing, no clear direction on illegal file sharing and no movement at all on fair use.

I’ve not gone though everything in this post; there are a lot of other planned actions including the digital radio switchover, tax relief for video game makers, and the digital public service programme. Maybe next time!

Image courtesy of Media Guardian and Wordle.

Counting started yesterday after Thursday’s vote, and stretched into the early hours of the morning. Although we still have incomplete results (as I write this we are still waiting for Northern Ireland and Scotland), we have a pretty good picture of what has happened. Unfortunately, two parts of the North – Yorkshire and Humberside, and the North West have voted for the BNP, who now have 2 seats and for the first time, a proper platform and funding structure to support them in the future.

It is a dark day for the UK.

I’ve been tweeting the result announcements throughout the count and it was quite comforting to see the response of some of the other people on Twitter. A lot of people are disappointed that this has happened. How did it happen though? Why did they get in?

I received this message from someone I know last night while the results were coming through:

“No one gives a f about politics! Stop boring everyone!”

It is thoughts like this that has allowed the BNP to get into such a prominent position. While I understand that not everyone is as interested in politics as me, some people obviously do not understand how important it is. Politicians are responsible for making decisions that affect everything we do. People should care about who gets in and who doesn’t.

Part of the reason the BNP got in is not necessarily because more people voted for them (in fact, their percentage share only increased by 1.4%, which in reality is not that much), but because people didn’t vote for any of the other parties. In fact, with a turnout of just 35%, a lot of people obviously just didn’t vote at all.

I have a pretty strict viewpoint on not voting – if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about the state of the country. So to everyone who didn’t vote in this election, you are as much to blame as the people who actually voted for the BNP.

Of course blame must party lie with the politicians as well - if they hadn’t been milking the system, we might not have been in this situation.

I understand how screen readers work and have tried out some myself, but seeing someone use one in a real situation was really humbling.  I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult it is to use a large part of the internet for someone who suffers from a disability that affects their ability to use a computer.

Robin showed off number of web apps that worked well with screen readers such as FixMyStreet.com, a service that allows you to report problems to your local council.  Another site that worked well was Google Maps (in particular the ability to get directions to a specific location).

What really surprised me however was how poor the accessibility was on new Downing Street website.  When the size of the text on the site is scaled up, the design just breaks completely.  For a public service website, this is quite disturbing, and really needs to be addressed ASAP by their web team.

I wonder how many other Government / public service sites do not consider these issues?

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.

Following his election in November, his team continued their use of aspects of social media to keep people informed during their transition to government. Visitors to their Change.gov site were encouraged to submit their ideas and join in the discussion.

As he was being sworn in at the official ceremony, the new White House website was launched, featuring the new, clean look we have come to expect, simple navigation and the all important blog. This website is perhaps the best website from a government I’ve ever seen. I can only hope that this trend continues not only in the US, but here at home in the UK.

Throughout this week, social media has been making the headlines – and one site in particular has been getting a lot of attention. It is of course, Twitter – the addictive micro-blogging service which allows you to post 140 character updates about what you are doing, and things that interest you. The site has finally hit the mainstream, being discussed on radio, in newspapers and on TV. Various figures show that UK visitors to Twitter have skyrocketed in the last few months.

Not only are we now starting to see a proliferation of celebrities on the service, but also MPs, and members of local government. A fantastic site called Tweetminster has been set up to allow people to locate members of parliament and prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) who are using the service.

I think it’s brilliant to see government start to use social media. I feel that it is important for government and the people that are supposed to represent us connect with the country, listen to us, and respond to our ideas. I believe that the use of services like Facebook and Twitter will help reinvigorate politics and get people involved in how their country is run.

I hope that this trend continues, and if it does, 2009 could turn out to be the year government finally ‘gets’ the internet. In the meantime, I’m going to do all I can to help it along.

As a web developer, hosting provider and internet user, I do not understand how such a scheme would be possible.  There are a number of issues that need to be considered before anything like this is implemented in this (or any other) country.

Firstly – the majority of websites available on the internet are not hosted on servers based in the UK.  As such, they are not under the jurisdiction of our laws.  Additionally, hosting costs in the UK are significantly higher than other countries such as the United States and Europe.  This poses a huge problem for such a scheme as the majority of websites are likely to ignore the requirement of content ratings and there is nothing our government can do apart from completely block access to unrated sites.

A rating scheme is also clearly open for abuse.  As proved with cinema, video and game rating schemes already in place, a large proportion of people do not pay attention to them.  Parents continue to buy 18 rated games for children of much younger age.  In the case of this scheme, children would probably still be able to view websites not suitable for their age group unless there was some way of verifying their age.

Some sites already implement an ‘age filter’ of sorts.  For example, the Guinness.com website asks for your date of birth before you enter the site.  It doesn’t take much effort to work around this filter.  It also isn’t best practice to provide your date of birth to any website as it could potentially be used for identity theft.  Unless there is a way to safely and accurately identify a user’s age, a rating system can only act as a guide and would still require parents to monitor usage of the internet.

A further concern is how a website will actually be rated.  Technically it is possible to rate the content of a website through the use of Meta tags (and a W3C standard already exists – PICS).  But this plan would rely on a level of trust between website owners and users.  What would stop me from running a “harmful” porn website, and classifying it as “suitable for all ages?”  A safer way to do it would be using third party rating systems, similar to the way secure certificates are provided at the moment.  However this would likely incur a cost to the owner as the third party would need to validate the content of the site.  An additional cost in development is likely to force website owners to look abroad for hosting services that do not require this level of regulation – harming the UK industry and making the rating system useless.

The only ‘safe’ way a rating system could be done is through an independent government funded organisation whose sole job it is to rate websites – similar to the BBFC.  However this opens a whole new can of worms.  Who would regulate the regulators?  How can we ensure that the ratings are fair?  How can we ensure that an anti-government website isn’t deemed “dangerous” and blocked by internet providers?  How will it be paid for (it is bound to be extremely expensive)? An existing scheme like this has already come under heavy fire in recent weeks after the Internet Watch Foundation added a Wikipedia page to its block list, essentially stopping the whole of the UK from editing the site.

In the end, it just appears to be another plan by a government minister who does not know how the Internet works.  For those who have read my blog for a while, I posted about a similar plan in May by the Home Secretary who wants a national database of all emails and phone calls sent in the UK.

Now, I’m all for making the internet safer for children and vulnerable people.  However, systems already exist to do this – there is plenty of “Net nanny” software available to stop people accessing websites with certain keywords or content.  You can even buy hardware solutions which will do it for you.  We do not need the government deciding what is safe for us to view.  This just brings us another step closer to countries like China.

I think it is about time the entire government is sent back to school to learn how the real world works, because they have quite clearly forgotten.

You can get more information at Techcrunch and The Social Programmer.

This strikes me as a great idea – not only could it save money by just having one brand instead of 200, but it could help people recognise the work that government does.

After reading the article, I decided to take a look at branding used by our government here in the UK.  I surprised to learn about the sheer scale of central government and the huge number of brands in use.

The UK Government is comprised of around 45 departments & ministries (such as the Department for Transport and HM Treasury).  It also has approximately 72 executive agencies – these are organisations that have a degree of autonomy but are still linked to a particular department (such as the Food Standards Agency, Office of Fair Trading and the Crown Prosecution Service).  In addition to these, there are at, last count, 827 Non-Departmental Public Bodies (source: Cabinet Office, 2007).  These are agencies that are sponsored by government to deliver a particular public service such as the Environment Agency, the various arts councils and the British Potato Council.  You can find lists of the various departments / agencies on wikipedia (1 & 2).

It should be pointed out that this is just central government – it does not include local government (council councils etc), or the regional governments of Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (or their associated public bodies).  Furthermore; it does not include organisations such as the Police, Fire department or the NHS.

A large number of these organisations have their own branding – that’s nearly 1,000 different corporate images!  The amount of money spent developing; maintaining and re-developing these brands must be astronomical.

The cabinet is regularly re-shuffled, which sometimes brings with it department splits, mergers, disbanding and creation.  In the last few reshuffles for example, the Department for Constitutional Affairs merged with some parts of the Home Office to create the Ministry of Justice; the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) was split in half, becoming the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS); the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was created; and the Office of Deputy Prime Minister became the Department for Communities and Local Government.  Quite a few changes!

With each of these changes, an old brand has been retired, and new brands created.  Gone are the Department for Constitutional Affairs, Department for Education and Skills, and the Office of Deputy Prime Minister.  Now we have five new brands in government.

If the Government just had one brand – “HM Government” or “UK Government”, with just one logo, one typeface, one style, the amount of money that could be saved during each reshuffle could be huge.

Now I’m not suggesting that we replace all 944 brands with just one - that would be a bit draconian, however, a substantial slimming down of brands within central government makes a lot of sense.  What do you think?

For those that don’t know much about the US government, I thought I’d put together a “Crash Course” in how it works and what these elections are for.  This crash course has been inspired by “A Crash Course In…” a series of articles that appear in the Waterfront every fortnight written by Dan Shaw – Deputy World News Editor.  There may be inaccuracies in this, so apologies in advance!

A Crash Course in… The US Federal Government

The US Federal Government is made up of three branches – the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches.  The aim of the three branches is to ensure the decisions made are in the interest of every citizen.

The Executive branch of the US Government consists of the President of the United States and his officials.  In total, nearly four million people work in this part of the government, including over one million military personnel.  The President has a wide range of powers, including the ability to propose new laws.  Many of the decisions made by the President are overseen and scrutinised by the two Houses of Congress.  Presidents and Vice Presidents serve for a term of four years but are allowed to hold their office for a maximum of 8 years.

The Legislative branch consists of the two Houses of Congress, the first of which is the United States Senate.  The Senate is made up of 100 Senators – two from each State and each serving for six years.  Every two years, a third of the Senate are up for re-election – this third is known as a “class”.  The Senate’s responsibilities include the passing of new laws (much like the House of Lords in the UK) and appointing new ambassadors, judges and cabinet officers.  The second house – the House of Representatives – is made up of 435 congressmen from around the country.  The number of seats from each state is based upon their population and each seat is re-elected every two years – congressmen can be re-elected an unlimited number of times – unlike the President of the United States.  The majority of new laws are introduced in the House of Representatives.

The Judicial branch consists of the Supreme Court of the United States (a panel of nine judges), the Courts of Appeals and the District Courts.  The purpose of these courts is to ensure that laws passed by the other two branches are constitutional.  The members of the Supreme Court are nominated by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate.  Once appointed, members serve until they retire.

Elections are held every two years to elect the members of the House of Congress and a “class” of the Senate.  Every second election, the President and Vice-President of the United States also elected.

I would advise anyone who reads this to go and download the movie from the website and have a watch. For a party election broadcast, I’m surprised. Its actually quite funny and I can’t wait for the next episode to air on Thursday. However it set me off thinking about how the Conservatives are planning on countering this advert. Are they going to follow the same sort of format… picking on Blair? or are they going to do something different?

If they go with the same format, what object / animal would they portray Blair / Brown as? Comments appreciated.