Of course, with a new government brings a new direction. Steph Gray, a former civil servant working in the technology arena has written a fantastic overview of what might happen to public sector IT over the next parliament. While these potential plans seem to focus on large scale IT projects, we’ve already started to see the effects of the new government as it has attempted to make its mark.
Within hours of David Cameron stepping into Number 10, public sector websites underwent a huge change. Most policy generated for the previous Government was cleared from department websites and consigned to The National Archives, Twitter and social media accounts were updated, and in some cases entire websites were replaced.
DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) launched a new, temporary website to differentiate between new and old policy. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) on the other hand have left most of their policy in place, albeit with a warning stating that it relates to the previous government.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) website saw one of the biggest changes with a fantastic new design. The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) also got a new website, but this time under the new name “Department for Education”.
Both of these departments now have brand new Twitter accounts – @dcms and @educationgovuk. Unfortunately, they both already had accounts prior to 12th May – raising questions as to why they needed new ones. The old DCMS account (@dcmsgovuk) still lives on, dormant and not updated. No one appears to have bothered to inform their existing followers of the presence of the new feed. The DCSF account (@dcsfgovuk) has suffered an even more drastic fate. An account which at one point had some 4000 followers was deleted along with all of its content.
Other departments handled their changes a bit better – Downing Street rebranded all of their social media accounts to “Number10Gov” for consistency. Their twitter account was renamed, leaving all of their followers and previous content intact. This, in my opinion, is a much better way of handling the change.
We have made changes to the Number 10 website and our profiles on twitter, YouTube and flickr. http://bit.ly/8YK3tk
UK Prime Minister
Number10gov
In general these immediate changes have been a mixed bag. Some have worked well – such as the changes to Number 10 and the new DCMS website. Others appear to have not been thought through – such as the new account for DCSF. Unfortunately however, there has been no consistency between departments or government as a whole.
This of course has been the first major change in government since the rapid growth of social media platforms, so quite clearly there was going to be a bit of trial and error. Hopefully next time the public sector will be a bit wiser when it comes to social media and not leave their followers hanging or disconnected.
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Just over a year ago I joined CF Labs as one of the developers working on innovation and making data publically available. When I started, Consumer Focus was a pretty new organisation still getting to grips with its role and getting everything into place so it could undertake its duties properly. In the middle of all of this fun, the three man CF Labs team was put together to experiment with a new way of doing things.
Since day one it’s been a non-stop rollercoaster. After my previous role, I wanted a challenge – something I could really get my teeth into. You certainly can’t say the last 12 months haven’t been challenging!
Our first few months were spent getting ourselves set up and figuring out our role. I made the switch from Windows and ASP.net to Linux and PHP. We built the Recalled Products website as our first project. We talked to all sorts of people and attended events in London and Cardiff.
After a while, we realised that although some colleagues understood what we were doing, many didn’t have a clue. They had a vague idea that there was a “web team” based in Cardiff, but not much else. This was exasperated further when they found out that we were a “web team” that didn’t work on the organisation’s own website but did this other stuff that they didn’t understand.
We found that this lack of understanding was creating barriers to our objectives, so we refocused our efforts within the organisation. We continued on some of our original ideas, but looked at how we could make people aware of our way of thinking. This led to us taking over the corporate website and removing some of the issues that were causing confusion. Since then we’ve talked and talked and talked to anyone that will listen; we’ve gotten involved in policy discussions; and helped with producing reports.
Now, a year after starting, we are starting to see things falling into place. We’ve got teams regularly asking us for advice and suggesting things we can do. We have a huge number of projects underway and we’ve got more work than the two remaining team members can shake a stick at. Over the next few months we will hopefully start to see the benefits of our change in focus.
Looking back, it’s amazing how far we’ve come. It may not seem like much to most people, but we’ve made huge strides forward. It’s been frustrating (very frustrating) at times, but at the same time very rewarding.
In the last 12 months, the whole innovation & data agenda has moved on rapidly. We’ve seen the appointment of Tim Berners-Lee, the launch of data.gov.uk and the creation of the Institute of Web Science. The Greater London Assembly has released its own store of data, Ordnance Survey data is being opened up and people are finally starting to recognise the benefits.
Of course, we still have a huge way to go. A few people still don’t understand the concept – some might even feel intimidated or threatened by it, but we will get there eventually.
So did I make a mistake jumping to public service? I don’t think so. If you’d asked me this afternoon I’d probably be giving a different answer. I have bad days like everyone (today was a perfect example), but overall it’s fantastic. I love the job – I get to build websites, design systems, go to events and meet interesting people, but most of all I get to influence the way people think about technology, the web and data. It’s frustrating at times but challenging.
What advice can I offer to any organisation wanting to set up a similar team?
- Start small but give them a wide remit – let them figure out what is achievable and the best way to go about it
- Give them their own computers and internet connections – tying them down with corporate network security will just frustrate them and make it more difficult to do the job
- Reduce the paperwork – there will always be an element of paperwork, but look at how you can make it simpler or they’ll spend all their time doing that rather than what you want them to do
- Look inside before moving outwards – it’s no use having this fantastic team if people inside the organisation don’t understand what they do. Look for projects they can do internally first.
- Go to events – the more events the better. Talk to other people in the industry, get yourself known
- Don’t be afraid of failure – teams need to learn from their mistakes to do a better job.
- Be fluid – never plan more than a month or two in advance, by the time you get there, the plans will be out of date and useless
- Don’t be afraid to ask advice. There is a huge community out there willing to support you, make the most of it.
- Finally, and most importantly, if you want an innovations team you must provide the right supportive environment to allow innovation to occur. Restrictions and procedures will stifle free thinking and make your team useless.
Most people will be aware of the concept of a hack day – a number of designers and/or developers getting together for a day to build ‘cool stuff’. These sorts of days happen on a regular basis and quite a few interesting projects have come out of them.
On Friday, Charlie and I attended a hack day with a difference. The ScraperWiki Hack and Hackers Hack Day was designed to bring designers, developers (hackers) and journalists (hacks) together to see what they could do. While other hack days may have involved journalists in a media capacity, this event involved journalists from the beginning.
After an introduction to how the day would work, we all split out into groups and started to work on our projects. I worked with Charlie, two other journalists (Ian and Annamarie) and another developer (Edmund) to investigate new election candidates in the safest seats in the country. We mashed together data on constituencies, candidates and then did some good old fashioned journalism to fill in the blanks
Other teams worked away on other projects, only interrupted by the food and drink provided. Finally, at the end of the day we sat down to present our work – eight projects in total. It was amazing to see what different directions the different teams had gone in.
A few of the projects used data to begin investigating a story. One group looked at the transport data released by data.gov.uk and mapped it onto constituencies; another group looked at awards paid out by Enterprise Ireland. Richard Pope looked at the register of interests for London Assembly members and plotted how often and where they were taken out to lunch by third parties. The largest group produced “They Write For You”, a mashup that demonstrates how many MPs write articles in newspapers.
Other projects were more focused towards building tools such as a system that allowed you to classify the output of data.gov.uk data (e.g. Excel, CSV, PDF, linked data etc.). A last minute entry also wrote a scraper for UK bank holiday dates (a much needed tool for developers!). A final fun project scraped all of the horoscopes for the last year and analysed the most used words for each star sign – producing some fantastic visualisations.
The day aimed to explore how hacks and hackers could / would work together. I think the quality of the projects created show that it is a good match. Journalists have an eye for a story that us developers might not have. While we may enjoy throwing tools together and mashing up data, we don’t necessarily know what makes a good story. Similarly, journalists don’t necessarily know or understand what developers do and how we do it.
Lessons were learned on both sides and show the growing importance of data based journalism. As an experiment, I think it was a success and certainly should be repeated again.
If it is – I will be first on the list to attend!
Thanks must go to Channel 4/4IP for providing the venue for the day, Richard Pope and everyone from ScraperWiki for organising the event and helping us get working.
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Photo: lewishamdreamer (from Flickr)
The past 36 hours haven’t been the best for those travelling with Eurostar. Five trains were stranded for hours in the Channel Tunnel without power, light, food, drink, heating or information. A further train became stuck near Ebbsfleet yesterday evening.
The focus today is on the cause of the incident and the safety procedures. However the issue that concerns me is how public service companies like Eurostar handle communication in such emergencies. Poor communication can lead to frustration, anger and even panic. I’ve experienced this in much less drastic circumstances when commuting to and from Cardiff by train.
Today the media are reporting that Eurostar passengers were given no information about what was going on. People at stations had similar experiences. Even the public and media had no idea of the unfolding events until late on Saturday morning.
It seems a standard practice for UK transport companies to ignore incidents, keep quiet, disappear and leave customers to their own devices. It doesn’t take much to keep people informed – even if there isn’t any ‘useful’ information to give them at the time. Even a simple “The track ahead is flooded; we are awaiting an engineer to confirm we can proceed” provides re-assurance that something is happening.
There are three distinct audiences in any incident, each with different information needs. Those directly involved (i.e. train passengers) who need to know when they will reach their destination. Those affected through waiting to travel or waiting to meet passengers, and everyone else (for example the media and general public).
Open communications to all three groups is key, but how can it be done effectively? Which channels should be used? Well, every possible channel actually. If you are preparing a message it doesn’t take much more effort to push this out on all available options
By example, recently I’ve read reports that Eurostar didn’t start updating Twitter until 14 hours after the incident began. Some have suggested that Twitters low usage justifies it being left until last. But for passengers on trains with phones and computers, this may be the only way that information can be easily received. It only takes one person with access to disseminate the details.
Communication (or the lack of) is a big problem when it comes to any form of crisis. Yet the prevalence of new social media communication actually makes communication easier than ever. Businesses of all kind need to recognise this and plan to make best use of it. I hope that Eurostar and those providing public services learn the communication lessons of this weekend.
On a final note – Eurostar’s social media company behind (We Are Social) has come in for what I believe is unjustified criticism. They actually did a great job given difficult circumstances and went well beyond the requirements of any contractor. The poor communication lies squarely with Eurostar. You can read about “We Are Social’s” involvement on their blog and a interesting response from Grapevine Consulting about the criticism levelled on We Are Social.
]]>Britt Selvitelle (Twitter) – The Future of Frontend Engineering – Learning from Twitter.
Britt talked about their front end platform and how they now see their website as “the web client” of twitter, in much the same way as TweetDeck is a desktop client and Tweetie is an iPhone client. They all connect to the Twitter Platform. He also talked about “Twitter Labs” (working title), a way of releasing some of the tools they are developing internally.
Simon Wardley (Freelance) – The Future of the Cloud.
I think I actually heard Simon talk at FOWA Dublin on a similar topic or at the very least a similar style – slides in the hundreds for just a 20 minute talk.
Simon pointed out that not many people really know what ‘cloud computing’ is, and that we are destined to have lots of problems if there is not a common interface between them all. Some people develop using Amazon’s cloud APIs, others using Rackspace. If one of these shuts down, you have to redevelop using a different set of APIs. This is certainly a good point; interoperability between the different cloud providers is going to be a big future issue.
Sanj Matharu (Vodafone) & Joel Moss (Codaset) – Your App + Mobile Widgets = Awesome
This talk showed an example of how to build an application for a mobile phone using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Fantastic – an easy way to build mobile applications at last. But. This is only for one particular type of phone on the Vodafone network. OK, so is the iPhone, but the difference is number of users. If we could produce an application using HTML, CSS & JavaScript for lots of different phones, I’d be very very interested.
Robin Christopherson (AbilityNet) – Live Demo of Screen Reader Issues
I’ve seen Robin talk 3 times now, and all of them have been fantastic. It amazes me that even now, website accessibility is not thought about at all. It isn’t seen as important, and in some cases, hasn’t been considered. I’m going to write a further post about this shortly, so keep an eye out. In the mean time, try using Facebook with a screen reader. Good luck
These are pretty much all the notes I have. It’s not a lot, but it covers some of the most useful bits of the day. ]]>
Last week I attended the Future of Web Apps conference in London. For those who haven’t been before – this event is run by Carsonified (a web agency based in Bath) and covers the latest thinking around developing Internet applications. I went along to the FOWA event in Dublin earlier in the year, but this one was much bigger and spread over two days.
The event covered topics such as how to market your web applications, new development methods to make development quicker, HTML5, accessibility and cloud computing.
For the benefit of those that couldn’t make it to FOWA, or want to refresh their memory, here are some of my (very) rough notes from day 1 of the event.
Kevin Rose (Digg) – Taking your Site from One to One Million Users
This talk was all about how to get the most out of your users, based on Kevin’s experience with Digg. Communication is key, but it also helps to feed user’s ego a bit!
Mike McDerment (FreshBooks) – Three Vital Marketing Systems for a Successful Web App
Mike’s talk outlined three elements a site needs to help you market your application: tracking, storage and reporting. While Google Analytics does a fairly good job of the tracking and reporting, you can’t drill down to a per user basis (based on your user accounts). Nothing quite makes up for having your own raw user data.
Dustin Dias (Twitter) – The Future of JavaScript Design Patterns
Dustin talked about JavaScript with a surprising number of references to corn. The thought was that JavaScript frameworks are not necessarily the best way to go as they frame and affect the way you work. Either way, the best thing to do is love the language, because JavaScript is not going anywhere.
Addison Berry (Lullabot) – Passion and Paychecks: Open Source Lessons
I don’t really have any notes from this talk, but Addison was talking about open source and money. Essentially, it is a myth that there is no money to be made in open source. It is also important to be passionate and happy about what you are doing. If you are not passionate, and if the people who are working for you are not passionate, then you won’t do a good job.
Francisco Tolmasky (280 North) – Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications
Again, no notes for this one, but Francisco showed off a new visual development tool. 280 North are the makers of Cappuccino, the open source framework for building applications. Atlas is a visual editor for making these applications (there will be both Windows and Mac versions). With Atlas, you can produce an application in minutes, and it looks fantastic. Can’t wait for this to be released.
David Prager (Revision3) – Get Niche, Rich, and go Mainstream
David’s talk was all about how to start off your web application. The overview is to pick a niche (or “nitch” as he pronounced it), and build out from there.
Osama Bedier (PayPal) – Payments innovation will unlock the Web’s potential
Osama talked about micropayments and PayPal’s new APIs. PayPal believe that micropayments will change the way the web operates. Their new APIs will make this possible.
Chris Abad (Spymaster) – Advanced Web App Marketing Strategies
Chris talked about the annoying but very successful Spymaster game on Twitter and how they planned it. It is essentially a standard viral marketing technique – make something interesting so people will share links (or better still, just post it to their twitter stream automatically).
Cat Lee (Facebook) – Going global: The Future of Facebook Connect
Facebook showed off the latest extension to Facebook Connect. Now any website can make use of their crowdsourced translation engine to make their sites multi-lingual. While the talk was pretty much a sales pitch for Facebook Connect, the topic was interesting. I’ll be having a play around with this when I get the chance.
Bruce Lawson (Opera) – The Future of HTML5
This was probably one of the most interesting talks from the event. Bruce showed off some of the new aspects of HTML5, explained the new tags, which browsers they work on, their accessibility and their backwards compatibility. There is some fantastic stuff coming out of HTML5, but I can’t help but think it is a slightly backwards step and we could end up with horribly messy code with unclosed tags. That is one of the reasons why I like XML and XHTML. Anyway, HTML5 is not yet ready for production environments, so we will have to see how it is used in real life.
Chris Thrope (The Guardian) – How The Guardian is using APIs, Frameworks and Tools to Build a “Mutalised” Newspaper
Chris talked about the Guardian’s efforts to embrace new technology. Unlike some other newspapers, they are embracing the new way of dealing with things. Chris also talked about how they built some of their online applications such as their MP expenses site and their twitter conversations engine. I’m probably going to come back and write a seperate entry about the expenses site shortly, as I had a bit of my own experience in this area! Chris showed off their Guardian DataStore and how people are using it to produce other data and statistics.
For me, this first day didn’t quite live up to my expectations. It spent a fair amount of time talking about marketing and the past, but not enough about the future and going into the development aspects that I enjoy. That said, as I’ve been reading through the notes, there seems much more useful and interesting information than I first thought.
I’ll be posting my notes from FOWA day 2 tomorrow.
]]>I wanted to spell out why I’m pleased Neil has written this document.
There is a lot of skepticism about new media in Government. Many people are scared about it – I partly believe this is because of the lack of control. With ‘old media’ people had a pretty good idea of what they were getting into. With ‘new media’, its well, new, big, scary and uncontrollable.
There are concerns about risk – what happens if someone posts something that looks bad or isn’t accurate? What happens if someone posts something early? There are concerns about competition – does using one service unfairly promote them over their other commercial rivals? There are concerns about the resources needed to manage the service, and concerns about the public value. All of these are valid concerns and but can be managed.
Risk can be reduced, competition can be looked at (in the case of Twitter, what competition is there?), value can be measured. Its just a case of how. This is what this document does – it explains to people (some of who have no idea what Twitter is) what it is, and how to mitigate the risks involved.
There are a lot of people involved in Government who are digitally switched on, want to use social media, and understand how to use it. But there are also people who have no clue, and still can’t work out how to turn on a computer. This document is for those people – to reassure them that we’re not going to make their lives more complicated than they already are. The document shows them that the risks, in reality are no greater than someone leaking information to the press (which they can do just as easily offline as online). It shows them that Twitter doesn’t use a lot of resources, and it helps them understand how it is going to be used.
To Neil – thanks for taking the time to write it. It’s an exceptionally useful document and hopefully will persuade a few skeptics that social media isn’t the evil thing it seems to be. To everyone else – government is cautious with this kind of thing. If we launched into something like this without any form of controls and it ended up swallowing resources, eating money and had little or no value, there would be – quite rightly – public outcry. We (myself included) would be calling for blood.
As a final note, I’d like to point out that I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Government skepticism about new media. I want to make it clear that it isn’t just government, but a lot of businesses and individuals to. I even know of web development businesses that don’t get social media – and don’t want anything to do with it. Things are changing – just be patient (please!).
As always, these are my views and not those of my (public service) employer!
]]>Karoo disconnects file sharers
Hull’s only internet provider – Karoo – has been disconnecting people accused of file sharing without the right to appeal. Although they’ve now changed their policy, as a monopoly provider, they have a greater responsibility to provide connections to all residents of hull.
Source: BBC News
Government departments are sticking with IE6
Aside from the fact that web developers (myself included) hate IE6 because of its complete lack of standards support, there are big concerns over its security. IE6 is over 8 years old and has been superseded by not 1, but 2 versions. Despite this, a number of Government departments/agencies (including MoD, DCSF and others) have no plans to upgrade to newer browsers.
Source: Kable
London – Swansea to be electrified
The train line between London and Swansea is to be electrified at last. Fantastic news for South Wales and about time it happened.
Source: BBC News
Publicising product recalls
Consumer Focus Labs has launched its first project (and several major revisions since). You can now sign up to receive notifications by email and RSS for product recalls from the EU.
Source: CF Labs Blog 1, CF Labs Blog 2
For web developers and designers the question of who owns your portfolio is an important one. It is a question that is not as clear cut as you might think. It seems that depending on your circumstances, you may not have any legal right to display the work that you produce.
The general opinion is split into two areas – freelancers and contractors/employees. If you are a freelancer, the answer seems pretty simple. Unless you have signed an agreement with a client that hands over all rights to them, you are the copyright owner, and so you can use it in your portfolio. If you are a contractor or employee, things are much more complicated. This isn’t helped by the UK’s outdated copyright laws, recently declared to be the worst in the world by Consumer Focus – the new public organisation responsible for campaigning for consumer rights.
If you are a contractor, you should check the terms and conditions of your contract. If there is a clause handing all copyright to your employer, then there is nothing you can do. If on the other hand, there is no condition, you might be covered by fair use (this is a part of copyright law that allows certain actions that would normally be regarded as infringement).
For employees, the picture is even bleaker. Anything you create during work hours belongs to your employer. This even covers things like photographs taken during work time using your own camera! In these situations, fair use might still come into play.
In the past, when the printed portfolio was king, this issue wasn’t that important. After all, who would know that you are using work you produced while in employment in your portfolio? Now that it is essential for a developer / designer to have a digital portfolio open to everyone, this is issue has come up time and time again.
I would argue that your portfolio is covered by copyright fair use as you are not selling on the work, and not causing the copyright owner financial harm. Additionally, you may be providing your employer with free publicity. If you do go down this route, it is important to credit your employer. Also remember that claiming full credit for something you didn’t do or only had a part hand in comes under a different issue – plagiarism (you can see my thoughts on this here). You could also argue that as a website is in the public domain, there is nothing wrong with a screenshot of it – sites display screenshots of other sites all the time – it is accepted practice.
Recently I’ve been talking to lots of designers about this topic. It seems that lots of web companies don’t mind their employees showing work on their portfolio. Some even seem to go as far as to encourage their employees to do it because of the extra publicity it provides. There are, however, a minority that see things differently.
Of course, I’m not a lawyer, so you shouldn’t take anything I’ve said as legal advice. However there are plenty of places on the internet that do offer this advice and these are well worth a read (1, 2, 3, 4).
If you are an employee and leave to take on another job or become a freelancer, you need to seriously consider the legality of your portfolio. Also remember that what may have been OK while you worked for the company, may not be once you leave.
What do you think? Should a designer be allowed to display a copy of the work he/she has done in their digital portfolio? Have you had problems with your online portfolio? Let me know – I’d be interested to gather a better picture about this issue.
]]>Aside from that, I managed to push out a new version of CllrTweeps. The new version runs from a proper database, enabling us to categorize councillors by party as well as councillors. It also gives us quite a good base from which to start adding new features, so keep an eye out for more announcements over the next month or two.
As part of the development of CllrTweeps 2, I’ve spent quite a lot of time looking at the websites of local authorities. The difference between some of them is staggering. Some councils have obviously put quite a bit of thought into the designs of their website and the services they offer online. This has made me think about doing a series of blog entries looking at council websites – possibly something similar to my local elections series last year.
For now though, I’ll leave you with an example of a great set of online services from Lichfield District Council. Their web team deserve a pat on the back for the good work they’ve been doing. Also, don’t forget to submit any ideas you have for APIs or online apps you’d like to have for business data at the CF Labs website.
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