http://puffbox.com/2010/02/10/networked-blogs-our-latest-science-experiment/

We had such fine plans to synchronise blog posts, too. Sorry I let you down, Steph.

Interesting suggestion from Will C about maintaining links regardless of departmental changes. One idea to toss in: there is an open-source, PHP-based, WordPress-friendly ‘short URL’ engine which might be the basis for this. You’d still be looking at some manual intervention and some crafty find-and-replacing if/when sites changed; but if it’s all in one place, maybe that’s bearable?

I imagine that over time users will have their own dashboard (igoogle type) and pull or let the relevant content be fired at them and that the sort of static sites we have been used to in the past have a limited past, i.e. agree with above – of course. Makes me wonder therefore about the future of the supersites….

You and I have discussed this policy blog farm vision a couple of times before and the more I think about it, the more I agree it should be the future. It has potential like nothing else to create direct, unnmediated engagement between officials and their audiences (which can only lead to better policy-making), and for a fraction of the cost of the behemoth sites. And how much static content is useful in an increasingly real-time medium? Beyond the basic facts about the organisation and what it’s about, some info on established legal and policy frameworks, arguably not much.

Things like accessibility, copyright, writing effective web copy, legal deposit of publications, propriety, parliamentary privilege, consistent messaging [and so on] would still need to be managed somehow, but oughtn’t scupper the idea of delegated, direct communication. In fact, I rather suspect it can’t be stopped.

@Will – great ideas as ever.

I’ve not been in Govt for as long as many people here, but it seems to me that policy team wishes generally seem to be one of the following:

- A stream of announcements, either new or noteworthy (i.e. your average blog)

- Document store

- Ability to message the audience (most have heard of newsletters but all seem to get RSS, Twitter, Feedburner notifcations when you show them)

- Feedback mechanism (everything from a panel with plain and simple contact details to commentable pages, twitter accounts forums and more)

- Handful of other page types (e.g. speeches, RDFa consultations)

- Interactive features (quiz, polls, commentable docs and whatever you invent next Steph!)

Throw all this together on a cheap and easy to customise platform and you’re on to a winner.

I’ve been thinking about a few ideas on top:

- How can users who’ve happened upon highly specific content such as Society & Society see the bigger picture and navigate to broader themes such as Science Comms > Science > Innovation generally > Growth generally

- Wouldn’t it be nice if urls and docs could stay the same irrespective of MoG changes (give every post, every doc and organisation a joinedup.gov permalink?)

- How great would it be if users had a more seamless experience when navigating from one govt department site to another? Could we throw in a bit of personalised content at the same time?

You’re probably way ahead of me already, I’m just throwing these thoughts in just in case. I’ve been sketching a few bits and pieces and can post them somewhere when they’re a bit more together.

I’m keen to hear more about any joined-up-without-being-centralised initatives.