Reloading commentable documents: introducing Read+Comment

At TeaCamp today, I’m taking the Campers through one of my new projects, Read+Comment, designed to offer hassle-free publishing of commentable documents online.

It’s based on some work I’ve done recently for BIS, updating the Commentariat WordPress theme so that the team can roll out more flexible sites around their strategies and consultations, and do it without needing technical support hence saving money and time.

From an outsider’s perspective, it looks like digital engagement in the UK in this specific area are going in three directions:

1. Collaborative drafting and detailed commenting on a document, using platforms like WriteToReply
2. Crowdsourcing, reviewing and prioritising ideas, using platforms like Delib’s OpinionSuite
3. Ongoing engagement around a strategy, where the document or questions are the stimulus for a wider discussion, using blog-based platforms and social media channels, like Commentariat

Personally, I’ve always been interested in refining and perfecting number 3 – it’s where there’s the greatest potential in the short and medium term to engage stakeholders beyond those with a strong professional interest, in meaningful discussion about what government should do.

So I see Read+Comment as the next phase – a platform that makes it possible to publish a document online, and build an engagement platform around it, in hours rather than days, for hundreds rather than thousands of pounds, while staying within government rules on websites.

The Directgov Review is a nice example of the platform in action, garnering over 100 considered views in a couple of weeks, from a wide range of informed stakeholders. The cloud-based platform coped fine with the spike in traffic when the site was launched, and the team moderating the comments went from a standing start on a Friday, to a live site on a Tuesday, with virtually no training or support.

Looking forward, there are two big milestones on the roadmap over the next few months: one, to build a bigger support infrastructure around the site as the volume of hosted documents grows; and second, to build in a monitoring and tracking dashboard into the WordPress backend, so it’s easy to see how your project is going and report on the results.

If you’d like to test out Read+Comment on one of your projects, please drop me a line or give me a call on 020 3012 1024.

Don’t be down with the kids

I started my career in market research, where soliciting the views of under 16s is frowned upon without rather a lot of faffing around getting hold of parental consent. Online, surveys tend to ask if you’re older than 16, and if not, chuck you out.

On balance, it’s probably a good thing that dubious marketers and market researchers aren’t able to ask intimate questions of youngsters unregulated, but the problem is that similar approaches have tended to be adopted by organisations looking for public comment on policy. Tim Davies, who is basically best described as the all-round guru on strategies for youth engagement through social media, highlighted this problem recently.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I had rather more strongly-held and frankly interesting views on politics and public policy when I was 15 than I do now. To be told to go away isn’t really good enough, if as Tim says, there really isn’t any legal basis for doing so.

So in developing my new platform for online commentable documents, I’m keen to ensure the default moderation policies take a more thoughtful approach to enabling young people to take part, without putting themselves at risk. Thanks to help in the comments of Tim’s post, I’ve come up with this, which I’m hoping to link to from the comments form itself as well as within the standard moderation policy:

If you are aged 16 or under, you may want to talk to your parent/guardian about the ideas on this website and the opinions that you want to express. Please don’t leave any personal details that might identify you (apart from in the email address box, which won’t be published anyway), and you may want to use your first or last name only, rather than your full name.

It’s just a start, and I’d welcome suggestions on how it might be improved.

Photo credit: Morguefile

Open data on the cheap

Jimmy Leach, Head of Digital Diplomacy at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office blogged earlier about a quiet little project his team have rolled out, using extended RSS 2.0 feeds to provide access to the FCO’s travel advice data.

As he says, the key thing for publicly-funded organisations is to get the information out there, which is why the corporate platform, and even corporate social media channels, are just the beginning. RSS feeds are a tried-and-tested technique for ensuring content can reach a wider audience:

Anyone can follow the latest alerts and changes using our travel advice RSS feeds in a standard reader like Google Reader or Netvibes. But you can consider this a call to developers to use our feeds as they want, to make our data useful, to add relevant information, to create visualisations, mobile apps or map-based viewers, incorporating extra machine-readable data about locations, contact details, reviews, ticket booking, all sorts of information and services that you wouldn’t expect a government department to provide, and, hopefully, pulled together in clever and innovative ways that you wouldn’t expect from a civil servant.

The existing travel advice feed on the site contains the alerts, the advice, the news and the embassy details all rolled into one. It does the job. It’s useful and relevant but it is also blunt and we know there are ways we can do it better.

We have started the ball rolling by creating some test feeds containing additional custom elements, so that each element in the feed is generated from a single field from our database of travel advice.

Inspired by Matthew Somerville’s use of iUI to fake an iPhone look and feel to his Train Times application, I’ve put together a little demo of how the FCO’s new feeds might be repurposed, with a little app optimised for iPhones which takes the latest alerts, visualises them on a map, and enables you to get the phone number and opening times for an embassy if you need it. It’s a fairly silly little proof of concept, but hopefully it shows that RSS feeds don’t just have to live in newsreaders. And it’s what Andrea DiMaio has decreed.

The bigger point here is about open data and cost. Most enterprise CMSes can generate RSS feeds, and it’s a technology that almost all developers and webbies feel comfortable with. So without the cost and complexity of building and mantaining a full API to their database, a corporate public sector organisation has been able to support reuse in a quick and simple way. Jimmy has asked for thoughts from developers and others on how the feeds might be cleaned up and made more useful, so do give him your ideas.

The innovation problem

Innovation vs Process. Social Media Ninjas vs IT Managers. Agile vs Waterfall. A few tidbits from the fringe of recent O’Reilly’s OSCON conference caught my eye in the last week or so, and helped me think about these age-old battles in a new way.

Simon Wardley‘s session takes a bit of following if enterprise IT isn’t your bread and butter, but is packed with rewarding gems, specifically using the lifecycle analysis curve (introduction, growth, maturity, stability, decline) as a model for understanding the respective roles and purpose of innovation and process: or why your fast-growing organisation seems to be getting more bureaucratic:

(hat tip, Dennis Howlett).

Rolf Skyberg, Head of Innovation at eBay has some great slides analysing innovation models, particularly mapping out the new idea development process, from ideation through filtering, implementation, integration and monetization – and that you can do it the conventional way or the innovative way, but at some point those tracks have to merge. It’s a fairly elementary point that corporate ‘innovation schemes’ generally fail to acknowledge, leading to frustration and waste. It applies to government crowdsourcing too: at what point does the innovation track merge with conventional policymaking and delivery – and what happens to good ideas along the way?

(hat tip: Dave Briggs)

I think lifecycle analysis and an understanding of how innovations become process (and how process is then in turn innovated) might help to resolve a few old chesnuts.

How about disproving the old one-CMS-to-rule-them-all silver bullet? Fact is, web technologies are at different stages on the curve:

As, perhaps, are we all

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.