What does more for less look like?

The public sector has been paying lip service to the idea of achieving ‘more for less’ for several months now, whilst in many cases conceding that the end result is inevitably less for less. This week, Neil Williams and his team at BIS showed that there’s a way to deliver something better whilst spending less than they did before. And they did it twice.

There’s clearly still enthusiasm in government for engaging citizens, service users and civil society in policy development, ensuring that people have an opportunity to comment and contribute. In the past, BIS would have met this requirement by developing new sites – albeit using low-cost technologies – sometimes in-house and sometimes using external developers. Each project cost was small, but the marginal cost was proportionately high. Wheels, reinvented.

Jenny and Neil commissioned me to update the work I previously did on a WordPress theme for commentable documents, Commentariat, but with the twist that they wanted a platform they could deploy entirely in-house not just for the project in hand, but for future projects,  without buying-in technical skills each time.

Commentariat2 is the result as seen in BIS’ Growth and Skills strategies. In Jenny’s words:

We’ve been making a selection of consultations and key documents commentable for while now for a variety of reasons: to engage new audiences, create debate, dialogue and awareness around policy changes, reach niche audiences who have a wealth of expertise to share with us and each other etc.. Seems to be working because policy colleagues now come to us with expectation that we can deliver this and they don’t ask “Why should I?” but “What’s the best way to do this?”

We were also feeling the pinch of the financial pressures not to outsource web development. I felt that on the one hand we had lost contractors and fixed term staff with technical skills and on the other hand we are expected to do more work in-house. So I feel genuinely empowered by this: conversations with colleagues are no longer slanted by whether they’ll have to pay for it or whether we can turn it around.

I won’t go into massive technical detail about the platform now, except to say watch this space. In a nutshell, using the user-friendly features of WordPress 3.0 and some customised extras, Jenny and colleagues now have a tool ready to go for almost any document that gets thrown at them, and can make the kind of changes to look and feel that previously required freelance help. It’s possible I’ve not thought this through…

But arguably the more significant launch of the week Neil has blogged about on his site. Quietly, Neil and his team have built an enterprise-strength shared hosting platform and commercial model for BIS and its extended family of partners using SiteCore and Eduserv. So when the Skills Funding Agency was launched, the marginal cost of their new website was tiny. And when the Export Credit Guarantee Department needed a new infrastructure, the BIS platform was a no-brainer. And so on, and so on, including this week the British Hallmarking Council perhaps the nicest looking of the partner sites so far. As I commented on his post:

[guessing] it cost the partner probably an order of magnitude less than a new standalone site would have done, and several orders of magnitude less than a site with that level of CMS functionality and hosting would have done.

When converging sites, it’s fairly easy to skin-and-link (as it’s known in the trade), or just hack an old site down to a few pages within the parent CMS, but this approach delivers a site with its own identity, which meets all government rules at low cost, and which gives the BHC folk a platform to do their own digital engagement.

It’s also nice because it creates a sense of partnership and common endeavour between a Whitehall department web team and its partners, pooling development and training costs, using skills more effectively and hopefully establishing a common respect for the different roles and styles of different public sector organisations.

Truly, more for less. Neil and his crew should be on commission.

How to work with online communities

Of all the projects I worked on at DIUS/BIS, the one I am still most proud of is still going strong, if quietly, today: the Mature Students partnership with The Student Room and Directgov. When I wrote about it in February 2009, I explained:

There have been some good examples of ministers engaging with online communities as part of consultations, notably Lord Darzi and Netmums as part his Review, as well as the semi-formal partnerships for discussion we set up alongside the New Opportunities white paper. But more sustained engagement with these forums is still a rarity, despite the fact that communities’ interests and those of government are often very well aligned.

Nearly 18 months later, I’m not sure much has changed, and that’s a huge missed opportunity. These big, interest-based communities are the yellow brick road to the Big Society – the epitome of cognitive surplus put to good use – demonstrating the kindness of strangers, the warmth and passion of human beings and the magnetic pull of experience every bit as strong as that of place. Dave Briggs, as ever, got there before me:

Those spaces which include forum-type elements are pretty much always the most popular. Think about the Ning sites you belong to, or the Communities of Practice. Try as you like to get people to blog, or contribute to wikis, it’s the forums they always gravitate to first.

It’s not that government doesn’t want to engage with online forums, but rather that the different models of engagement aren’t very well understood yet. The Netmums ministerial webchat is almost a cliché now, but direct engagement with forum administrators to achieve something longer term, or as a source of insight or feedback, isn’t very widespread or sophisticated, at least from what I can see.

So it was lovely to catch up  yesterday with Jamie O’Connell, Marketing Director of The Student Room at his funky Brighton HQ (pool table – check; dartboard – check; guitar – check) to chew the fat about how the relationship between government and big forums like his can be deepened. And let’s be clear, it is big. This is no hyperlocal forum – the site has 2.8m unique visitors a month, with 500,000 registered members and around 27,000 new forum posts each day. To describe it as a forum is a bit misleading, as there’s a whole load more functionality including wiki pages of high quality user-generated advice on everything from homework to relationships, and a fully fledged social networking platform and insight service (@TSR_Insight on Twitter) in the pipeline for later this year.

Why try to rival Facebook though? Interestingly, The Student Room’s members have told the team that when they want to collaborate with classmates who aren’t necessarily friends, they’re forced to create duplicate profiles to separate the friends-only pictures from the more career-safe stuff. Conversely, in a forum on the scale of The Student Room with its team of volunteer moderators, the anonymity of abstract handles like bunty64 and doughboy actually allow for more frankness about personal experience, and willingess to engage constructively with strangers, and in fact don’t tend to lead to systematic trolling. There are dozens of these kinds of insights, drawn from the team’s willingness to engage with users when designing the platform. They’re also a fascinating bit of good PR for yoof in general.

There’s more in the slideshow podcast below that I recorded with Jamie:

But anyway. What really interested me was the kind of models that Government in particular might adopt to work more sustainably with big communities like The Student Room, Netmums, Patient Opinion, Army Rumour Service, BusinessZone, Pistonheads, Horsesmouth and the many others. Here are some:

• One-off webchat with a senior figure/expert (e.g. swine flu webchat with DH expert on Netmums)
• Asychronous Q&A by video (e.g. Yoosk.com on Army Rumour Service)
• Policy team watching a forum thread to get insight into issues (e.g. BIS Credit Card consultation)
• On-site sponsorship/display advertising (e.g. UCAS, Red Bull on The Student Room)
• Identifying key communities members and ‘sponsoring’ them to be ambassadors (e.g. Apprenticeships on Horsesmouth)
• Commission community platform, with some tweaks, to deliver a key policy programme (e.g. Patient Opinion Trust feedback, School of Everything directory of learning opportunities for BIS)
• Establishing online community as a distinct space for peer discussion at arms-length from government, but with reciprocal links to official information (e.g. financial support for mature students BIS/The Student Room)

but there could also be:

• Recruiting community members to tell their stories as bloggers
• Analysing data on topics discussed/anonymised member profiles as a source of customer insight/trends
• Using forum moderators’ expert skills to moderate other projects at low cost, e.g. government crowdsourcing websites
• Tapping into technical skills of online community teams, to create platforms and tools for government campaigns/projects
• Working with communities to host widgets encouraging feedback on government policymaking initiatives
• Getting moderators to kick off well-signposted discussion threads about new government strategy launches or proposals
• Recruiting community members to low-cost online focus groups or audience panels to help road test or co-design new services or policy options
• Running competitions to source stories, images, films, ideas or whatever from target audiences
• Equipping community members to become peer-supporters or buddies, e.g. about mental health issues
• Recruiting new staff via communities, getting existing staff to engage online with potential recruits to answer questions

… and so on. In short, there are as many ways to tap into and use these incredibly precious resources as there are facets to human nature. And it’s because of this humanity – and hopefully goes without saying – that communities need to be treated with respect. On the one hand, there is a strong current of volunteering and willingness to help good causes. On the other, there’s the need to eat. Sure, Government is strapped for cash, but there are lots of ways Government can help without spending much money:

• Reciprocal linking should be the basic minimum, ensuring communities who work with you get a prominent link and/or badge on your site back to theirs, sending them helpful Google juice
• Connecting front line staff or policy officials to the community so they become actively involved with the site and listening to discussions helps to cement the relationship and keep the feedback loop working
• Inviting community admins to government events and launches, Q&As with the Minister, press conferences and so on, helps demonstrate that they’re taken seriously as a route to important audiences
• Offering prizes for competitions, showcasing the creative work of members on a national platform, offering work experience, internships etc
• Making sure agencies are clear that you want to deliver campaigns/policies via existing online communities – they’re probably less constrained procurement-wise, but don’t necessarily have those community relationships
• Keeping in touch is often overlooked, but is the basis for keeping each other updated about potential opportunities you might not hear about otherwise

The next step: Meet The Communities

But there are many other ways to build relationships, and lots more experience to share. To help explore this further, I’m helping to convene Meet The Communities, a free, one-off event probably in Central London during September, bringing together some of the leading online communities with the government clients, PR & digital agencies for an afternoon of storytelling and speednetworking. It will be a chance to put faces to names, hear how other organisations work with online communities, and make some personal connections.

If you’re interested in taking part either as an online community owner, potential government client or agency, leave a comment below or send me a private message via the contact form and I’ll put you on the list.

Newsroom: the backstory

Cast your mind back if you will to chilly February, amid the growing crescendo/death spiral of pre-election communications. Neil and his team were finishing off the new corporate website, having shunned friends and family for weekends on end. A member of the senior management team came bounding back from a cross government meeting where they had been shown this, and, in a nutshell, they wanted one too.

The brief was helpfully loose: make it easier for the media to access the information they needed via simple link in the bottom of a press notice, without generating a load of extra work for Press Officers. From the Digital team’s perspective, we wanted to increase visibility of our YouTube and Flickr content for media, ensuring that these channels get promoted in every news release. Oh, and the kicker: make something technology independent, that could survive the imminent move from WordPress to SiteCore, without incurring external costs. So we set out to develop something based largely in client-side technologies (i.e. Javascript and CSS) which usefully aggregated corporate announcements, multimedia output and press office contacts for mainstream media and bloggers in a single place – frankly, more of a technical and design challenge than a strategic one, but a fun one nonetheless.

There were half a dozen or so information sources to play with*:

• Press Releases, ministerial speeches (RSS feed)
• Tweets from corporate accounts (RSS feeds)
• Videos on YouTube (RSS feed with multimedia enclosures)
• Flickr photos (API)
• Podcasts on SoundCloud (added by the team later, again, RSS feed)
• Contact details for Press Officers & key facts on policies (static text)
• Email alerts for media to sign up to via GovDelivery

*We also had a plan to add a couple of extras which were built but not yet used. Case studies published elsewhere online were to be tagged using a corporate Delicious account and imported into the newsroom using the RSS feed for the tag. Urgent statements or rebuttals put out by a Press Officer out of hours sometimes aren’t issued as Press Notices in the normal way, so we set up a private Tumblr site to which these could be emailed, which could be embedded or imported into the Newsroom, again via RSS.

The primary tool in our arsenal was the wonderous Feed2JS, which takes an RSS feed and gives you a snippet of Javascript to embed which will render it for you in HTML. It’s free and awesome (and you can even self-host it if you want). This little tool helps single-handedly render the majority of the Newsroom content, the code snippet tweaked slightly to ensure the <noscript> alternative ensures the site degrades fairly gracefully for non-Javascript enabled browsers.

I also developed a couple of code snippets to render the content of a Flickr account or set as an RSS, HTML or Javascript snippet, and likewise with YouTube – feel free to grab the code from those links if that kind of thing is of use to you.

• Version 0.1 (click the image to enlarge) was a good proof of concept, built in an empty page template on our old WordPress site. But there was too much to take in for a notoriously lazy audience.
• Version 0.2 was an improvement, splitting the content into more manageable chunks with a natty Apple-style navigation bar and some concertina sections done in Javascript – but it still felt hard to differentiate the content types on the page
• Version 0.3 was almost there, introducing some nice little icons for the different content types, using CSS to help visually distinguish the lists, and losing the unnecessary mission statement with some DOM-rewriting to save valuable pixels for this audience. And then we moved to SiteCore and purdah struck, so…
• …Version 1.0, which you can now see in all its glory transferred the code into a new CMS and migrated across a stylesheet. The team added SoundCloud podcasts using its RSS feed, in the same way as the other media types.

Early feedback on the prototype from journalists was positive, the Press Office got a nice-looking tool which required literally zero additional work beyond emailing over their contact list, and Neil got one of his much-loved quick wins – and within SiteCore too. Props for this one to Rhys and Ian in the BIS Digital Communications team.

Photo credit: Victoria Peckham

More for less: three cheap ideas to do now

I’ve been chatting to quite a range of folk grappling with the issue of what to do – on a shoestring – in the digital space with their Department in this brave and uncertain new world. It’s fair to say that digital plans in government right now have to take account of three realities:

1. There’s no money left, so to speak. An exaggeration of course, but all round central government at least, there’s appetite to do things at low or no cost – not just do ‘more for less’. Perhaps more than I predicted, the squeeze is accelerating senior leaders’ appetites to make strategic bets on digital channels as a solution now, instead of the mañana approach which has tended to prevail in recent years.
2. Like most leadership transitions in big organisations, there’s a change curve being followed, with the sense of pace and excitement in the early days, whilst still there, now being overtaken by the process of reviewing, reorganising and strategising, before the full weight of delivery really kicks in. It’s a crazy busy time in some parts of government, but still an uncertain, wait-and-see game in others.
3. Perhaps most seriously, communications and marketing especially as a discipline are out of favour politically. The freeze on advertising and marketing spend is as much mood music about the tone and purpose of communications under the Coalition as it is a way to save actual money.

Here are three ideas I would be looking at:

Build links with online communities

Everyone know Netmums, of course. But there’s a big wide world out there from The Student Room and Moneysupermarket to Pistonheads and Shooting People; The Poultry Keeper to Runners Forum – plus a thousand hyperlocal and hyperniche blogs some with suprisingly influential readerships.

Members feel ownership of these spaces, so it’s not good enough just to buy ads or spam a discussion thread (though buying a few ads might be a nice way of showing support). If your team feels comfortable moving away from broadcast messages and branded campaigns, working directly with online communities offers a way to talk directly with a highly-targeted audience and build a two-way relationship with them. That sounds like a cliche but it can really work, with discussions and links in these spaces living on longer than any PR agency retainer would have done.

Start to map out the forums and communities in your arena using good old search tools, Twitter lists and Facebook groups. Put out feelers to the admins and moderators, pay some visits their offices if they have them and buy some coffees. Find opportunities to work together so when something comes up, you can phone a friend. Will Perrin reports some good stuff from HM Treasury along these lines, supporting the Budget last week.

Help colleagues learn to tell their stories

A key element of achieving a more authentic tone in communications is giving voice to members of staff to tell their stories, within the constraint of remaining a cohesive organisation. DFID, UKTI and the FCO do it with their bloggers, fast-growing startups like Huddle do it on Twitter or like Abel and Cole on their blog. The Auckland Theatre Company’s Posterous blog lets interested audiences into a virtual green room to learn more about the company.

In times of austerity, encouraging staff to tell their own stories is paradoxically thrifty: it develops and extends their skills, it increases their engagement with their work, it helps them build new partnerships with people who can help on the outside, it helps the organisation make links between different areas of work, and become more comfortable collaborating with others. And of course, it presents a human, open account of what the organisation does to the outside world. Which in turn becomes more appreciative of what an ambassador, a policy official, a faststreamer or – gasp – a press officer, actually do.

Set up something simple with Posterous or Tumblr, or something a bit cleverer with WordPress.com. Recruit half a dozen varied interested amateurs to get involved, and expose them to how other bloggers think, write and respond. Help them film things on their phones or take pictures when the words aren’t coming easily, and channel their posts through someone in Comms who has the gift of common sense.

Put together a listening strategy

This is also a good time to develop a plan for how monitoring and feedback will be gathered and used – the scale of response to the Programme for Government and Spending Challenge suggest that Britons in their thousands are potentially willing to contribute their ideas to the Coalition.

But it goes without saying that there’s no point inviting comments unless you can review them properly, and even then, it’s better to be able to point to a timescale and process for responding in a way which makes the exercise worthwhile for all concerned. So it’s good to see the Spending Challenge team setting out that they will monitor blogs, social networks and WikiLeaks (excitingly), and provide some indication of how ideas will be filtered. But to save yourself time and pain later, put together a short listening strategy now, setting out:

• The organisation’s goals in reaching out to new/different/larger audiences online
• The key principles that will guide online discussion and listening (openness about scope, any constraints on debate, moderation policy, commitment to review feedback and so on)
• Some of the channels and tools that the organisation will use to listen to its audiences, how these will be listened to and by whom across the organisation
• How listening will be followed up by the people who can do something about the feedback, and what help is available to those team

This isn’t just another notorious Twitter strategy (fine as that was). By thinking some of these challenges through now, Ministers and policy officials will get better advice not just on what tools to use, but on how to make digital engagement something sustainable and credible in the coming years.

Photo credit: Here’s the thing…

Good and bad transparency

I’m trying to work out why I’m uneasy about the recent announcement of the transparency revolution sweeping Whitehall. It’s not as if I’m a civil servant any more with a vested interest to conceal. As a developer, and an SME hoping to win public sector work, and a taxpayer, you’d think I’d be cock-a-hoop that I’ll be able to hold officials and politicians to account more easily from now on.

But I’m uneasy, and I think that’s because I’m troubled by the nagging doubt that the unintended consequences of transparency are often unpleasant and I’m not hearing much about their mitigations in public policy and discourse on transparency at the moment.

Let’s separate out four examples of transparency:

Opening up state-managed, non-personal datasets for wider use at low or no cost is Good Transparency. Too often, officials publish or simply file away useful datasets – lists of postboxes, recipients of New Years’ Honours, public sector vacancies and so on – in formats such as PDF that make it harder to turn that data into useful services for public good or commercial enterprises. We should make this data more readily-accessible, in flexible formats, and happily, that’s exactly what a Cabinet Office team has been doing very successfully for a year. That’s not really transparency per se, it’s just good publishing practice. (Yes, the fight to open up Ordnance Survey maps was a struggle, and is arguably a cross-subsidy by the taxpayer for work previously funded by the users of OS products. But I’d argue the wider social benefits of free mapping data outweigh this).

Opening up government contracts to a wider range of bidders, and so that smaller bidders in particular can win work, and understand how the labyrinthine government procurement machine works, is clearly a positive example of transparency too. It’s more controversial, in that what might on one hand drive down costs, might conceivably make it easier for cartels to develop, or inhibit the willingness of bidding companies to be frank and detailed in their proposals. And without reform to the very process, risk appetite and above all length of government procurement, simply being able to read more of the documents won’t entice more SMEs to get involved. But those problems are fixable, and greater transparency in this field is likely to secure real economic benefits.

Opening up performance data – timesheets, civil service salaries, government spending, MP’s expenses, whatever it is that enables rankings and comparisons in individual or institutional performance to be determined – isn’t such a clear-cut positive. We know that setting targets or criteria, and above all publishing data on performance against them, inevitably focuses effort on those, and risks distorting job performance in other areas (there are better sources on that, but I can’t find them right now).

Let’s take Joe Harley, now infamous for being one of the Whitehall high earners, with an annual salary of £245,000-249,999 for his work as CIO at the Department for Work and Pensions. Nice work if you can get it for buying a few computers, the media will say. Now, I don’t know if Joe does a good job or not (I don’t hear much about DWP IT failures – so he’s doing OK, right?). In fact, I don’t really know what Joe’s job is, or what the challenges are in delivering IT to support 120,000 people and managing a roughly £856m budget. I don’t even know what CIOs in other sectors earn, or how well they do their jobs relative to Joe, or whether someone better would be found to replace him if he were to go elsewhere, given the civil service recruitment freeze. All I know is that Joe works for DWP and earns just under £250k, and that that is quite a bit more than the Prime Minister.

It’s not that opening up performance data is a bad thing per se. But in opening up what will only ever be a selected few datasets which describe characteristics of an individual or institution’s performance, it’s human nature to draw inferences about quality and appropriateness which the data in front of us don’t justify. It’s a lesson MPs and MySociety learned a while ago, which is why they add a spurious statistic – how many times an MP has used alliterative phrases – to MPs’ profiles on TheyWorkForYou, as a gentle reminder that rankings don’t tell the whole story. Next time the civil service top earners list appears, I’d love to see an inside leg measurement data column (though I suspect this might show some remarkable, if somewhat spurious, correlations).

Opening up the decision-making process – ministerial and senior officials’ diaries, campaign contributions, voting records, lobbying, policy documents and briefings – is similarly troubling. Lawrence Lessig, in his essay ‘Against Transparency argues strongly that the ‘naked transparency’ movement risks applying undue cyncism to politicians’ behaviour, ascribing motivations to actions which don’t take account of why politicians make the choices they do:

I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

On one hand, I don’t like the idea of policy being bought, if it happens. But I’m not sure that knowing which industry groups a politician or civil servant has met is necessarily enlightening in itself. In my experience, a Secretary of State’s chance meetings with ‘real people’ at constituency surgeries and visits influence their thinking pretty strongly too, but the data would be unlikely to show that.

Government is a fascinating study in unintended consequences. Its scale and diversity, and the interplay between ministers and the civil service, the centre and the frontline mean that things often don’t go to plan. Broadly-speaking, government is a risk-averse organisation in many ways, sometimes to the extent that on occasion it has preferred ineffectiveness to perceived impropriety, waste to uncertainty.

The coming wave of transparency could transform this in a hugely positive way, using open data on costs, opportunities and performance to become a much more creative, cost-effective and agile institution, mindful of the money it spends and the results it achieves, and ensuring individuals are accountable for their work.

But it might make things worse, frightening senior managers into becoming more guarded, taking fewer ‘risks’ with even small amounts of money, and focusing on the process to the detriment of the outcome. It may also make public service less attractive not only for those with something to hide, but for effective people who don’t want to spend their time fending off misinterpretations of their decisions and personal value for money in the media. And to mirror Lessig’s point, it may push confidence in public administration over a cliff, in revealing evidence of wrongdoing which in fact is nothing of the sort.

Two cheers then for the revolution sweeping down the corridors of Whitehall. But let’s be mindful of its consequences as yet unseen.

Photo credit: Da Goaty