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Adding RDFa to a consultation

Steph — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:00:43 +0000

Recently, I’ve been involved in a project to ensure our consultations support RDFa markup, to make them indexable and reusable by third parties, including Directgov. Without duplicating the quite accessible and useful COI guidance, I thought I’d summarise here the process involved from the perspective of implementing the standard with minimal prior knowledge of the whys and wherefores.

Why bother?

As of Jan 1st 2010, it’s now a mandatory requirement for government sites. But more importantly than that, it’s a Jolly Good Idea to provide a low-maintenance way of enabling other systems and services to grab a list of consultations from your site, and identify the important metadata about them, including the closing date and how to respond. Short term, it will make services like TellThemWhatYouThink and Directgov more useful, but in terms of the bigger picture, it will expose the opportunity to get involved with policymaking to a wider audience, and reduce the hassle for those who are already part of our regular stakeholder group (by making possible new services such as auto email alerts, RSS feeds, cross-government updates and so on).

What’s involved?

RDFa offers a simple way to add meaningful information to existing web pages, which can be extracted easily by software (as opposed to hit-and-miss ‘scraping’ of regular web pages). As a lay person, I’d say there are three key principles which I can articulate:

Be unobtrusive and minimalistic: taking this approach lets you add extra items to pages which aren’t seen by regular browsing visitors, but which are accessible to software robots looking for them. It’s also not ‘an extra thing’ to maintain and serve like an RSS feed, so reduces risk, in theory.
Offer clean data: through being consistent in how data about the consultation is described, the idea is that RDFa helps to extract very clean information about the consultation – for example, an unambiguous closing date, a response email address, an exact postcode, all in formats which can then be used in other ways (plotted on a map, listed on a calendar, turned into a mailform on a website etc)
Extend existing conventions: the most complicated aspect of implementing this particular specification is that the authors have gone out of their way to find existing wheels rather than reinvent their own. So they use Dublin Core metadata to describe authors and organisations; vCard to describe response contact information; plus nods to DBPedia and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) to support these major semantic web initiatives. Only for the gaps where specific consultation information needs to be marked up is there a new standard introduced, using the namespace (prefix) argot.

In a nutshell, the process involves tweaking the template for your consultation pages, adding extra metadata elements and attributes. This is only as easy or hard as your CMS makes it. It’s important that it’s right though – even a few ‘broken bits’ could render the page useless to a software robot trying to extract data from it.

How to do it

Read the COI guidance (and give it to your developer), which is the most comprehensive guide, with useful illustrated examples. There’s also a worked up HTML page showing how this works, and of course you’re welcome to look at ours (which I *think* are right, based on feedback from the gurus).

As an example (but again, you should read the official guidance) I found I needed to work through the following:

ensure we have a single page per per consultation
amend the DOCTYPE, if you’re using something like the standard XHTML strict/transitional version. Needs to tell requesters of the page that it contains RDFa
add some attributes to the element, highlighting the namespaces (vocabularies) you’re referencing in the document
add Dublin Core metadata elements/attributes to your page element if they’re not there already
ensure we have a wrapper
around the consultation information which again references the namespaces (vocabularies) you’re using. This also identifies the name of the organisation publishing the document
add some Dublin Core metadata attributes as within this
identifying this as a consultation
add some Dublin Core attributes to key bits of the HTML, such as the consultation title, start date, closing date and description, marking these as such – and in the case of dates, ensuring there’s a machine-readable data format value in the attribute. Also add a unique identifier – a reference number – to each consultation (not something we’d done routinely before)
ensure the contact details for responses is carefully structured using vCard format, with separate ‘Full Name’, ‘Street Address’, ‘Locality’ and ‘Post Code’ elements, suitably marked-up with attributes. Since vCard doesn’t cover the specific case of a consultation with an email reply address, for example, these elements are marked up with the new argot: namespace attributes
add Dublin Core-based attributes describing the file attachments – the consultation document itself, and any related ones such as appendices or Impact Assessments

UPDATE: in retrospect, it was foolish to attempt a blog post about code without some code examples. I’ve tried and failed to find a half-decent code syntax highlighter plugin for WordPress, but the following couple of screenshots hopefully illustrate the before and after situations for the contact information part of a consultation:

Before, plain HTML:

After, with RDFa added (and marked up more semantically as a list item within the consultation metadata)

What help is available?

I worked from the examples given in the COI guidance and the pioneers in this at the Ministry of Justice. The COI Digigov team are your allies in helping to implement this, and should be able to answer queries and/or direct you to sources of further implementation advice and support.

In terms of online tools, you can see whether your RDFa is visible to suitably-equipped applications using Mark Birbeck’s tool or bookmarklet, if you prefer (and he should know; he invented RDFa).

Good luck!

P.S. If you Know About This Stuff and feel I’m giving duff advice here, please drop me a line in the comments or via the contact form and I’ll correct. Thanks.

Baby steps in Social Media News Releases

Steph — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:16:05 +0000

The thinking goes: the old fashioned press release, with its carefully-crafted marketing-speak, stilted quotes and page or two of text is on the way out. First, the intended audience (journalists) don’t trust the content. Second, it doesn’t fit with the multimedia format of broadcast and online news. Third, in an age of blogging and citizen journalism, there’s a wider audience out there for the raw information sans spin.

The Social Media News Release (SMNR) updates the old press notice and video news release for a social media age. Factual bullet points instead of marketingese. Embedded video and images for media outlets and bloggers to use. Social bookmarking buttons to help users to spread the word. Related documents and context to help the lazy or time-poor to put the report in context.

I think there’s a real opportunity for government press officers here: by preparing more engaging news releases, we can give stretched media organisations the raw materials they need to cover public sector stories, help set the context of our programmes and announcements, and strengthen trust in government as a source of authoritative, credible information. The example of the H1N1 swine flu materials published by the US Center for Disease Control is a rather nice one, complete with embeddable widgets.

Rather haphazardly, I’ve been trying to do the same for some of the launches I’ve worked on. Early attempts were very basic. A more recent effort (with more planning) was a bit more comprehensive. But now, I’ve got the luxury of piloting it properly, with Rhys Stacker – a former DIUS press officer and talented photographer – and Elliot Reuben at the helm.

Naively, I initially thought we could write a spec for a software tool to help us deliver SMNRs, and roll it out. It quickly became clear that actually, there are more cultural change and technical obstacles involved in preparing, creating, publishing, promoting and assessing SMNRs than I first realised. There seem to be four main challenges:

Getting the right content: capturing content with the appropriate tone, quality and range
Publishing it in the right format: finding a platform which presents it right, including multimedia files which others can take and reuse, and publishing it in a timely way
Promoting it to the right people: identifying who might be interested (e.g. specialist bloggers) and telling them about the release
Tracking its impact: assessing who is using it, how, and how it could be improved

We’re trying out PressItt, a free hosted SMNR service, which Rhys used today to collate an SMNR about our minister’s opening of a new research facility – complete with high resolution images and a podcast of the minister’s speech. To my mind, it’s an impressive effort – simply converting and publishing the various components. And it’s step forward from our first attempt, which featured video clips of the launch of DIUS’ Learning Revolution - but which took 3 days to finally edit and publish.

This is still a relatively new and untested area of digital engagement for UK government, so we’re still feeling our way through successfully completing the process itself, let alone successful outcomes from it. But to my mind, that’s exactly where we should be, hence my documenting our baby steps.

Learnings so far? Planning is everything: know what we can capture, and line up the people and gear to do it. Editing and uploading takes time. Busy press officers can’t realistically take this on as a new responsibility – it needs dedicated focus and expertise, at least for now. Promotion is tricky – tools like Social Media Library offer the promise of helping us target the right bloggers and tweeters alongside our corporate channels, but it’s too soon to tell what really works. The process is getting quicker with practice: while brands like Ford have produced impressive SMNRs, they’re focussing on big product launches, rather than the types of regular events and publications we’re currently aiming to cover in this way.

We’ll keep on trying, and seeing what works, and look forward to feedback and suggestions as we go.

Unblocking the Blockers

Steph — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:45:34 +0000

OK, it’s time to be a bit subversive.

We have the Civil Service guidance on participation online, and yet in organisations across the UK, public servants and others are being prevented from engaging online at work thanks to restrictions placed on their internet access by their IT providers. Some of these are well-intentioned: designed to prevent malicious attacks through unguarded use of attachments to webmail messages. Some are questionable, but understandable, like blocking access to webmail to prevent leaking of sensitive material. But often, they’re just bloody-minded and a symptom of a lack of understanding that social networks, wikis and online video are increasingly important tools that people need to access from work in order to their jobs properly. As one person told me today: “It’s OK, I can call up X to get temporary access to that site, but still, it makes me feel subversive, like I’m doing something out of the ordinary which isn’t a real part of my job”. We won’t get anywhere with digital engagement unless we start treating colleagues as trustworthy adults.

(Note to managers: if people abuse the access they’re offered, discipline them according to the acceptable use policy they’ve signed up to. If you’re not aware of how they’re spending their time at work, why on earth not?)

So let’s try and build a picture of access to social media tools from the workplace. Please run my social media test suite survey from your workplace machine and let’s see who the blockers are. I’m happy to publish here, or in the survey results you can see when you complete the survey, any appropriate explanations or justifications from IT providers. I know there can be good reasons for limiting access, and we should separate those from the bad ones.

Finally, as it says on the front page of the survey, don’t attempt the survey if you have the misfortune of working somewhere really prehistoric and draconian: if even attempting to access social media sites will get you in trouble, please don’t.

UPDATE: the results are in.

Update: who blocks?

An incomplete field-spotters guide to the jungle beasts of the social media enterprise

Steph — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:04:19 +0000

Herewith in a half-dozen crisp pen-portraits, a description of some of the characters you are sure to meet as a missionary for social media in the curious jungle of social media in the enterprise:

Macaques are fun and infuriating. They love to experiment, grabbing something and leaping away to play with it. They’re sociable types too, but defend their own space. You’ll wonder where that thing of yours went, only to find a cheeky macacque making a rude gesture with it, and then throwing it at you when you turn your back.

Camels are generally miserable, unyielding and obstructive where possible. They do Real Work, have always done it a certain way, and won’t be persuaded that any other way exists. They cast you a look of disdain through their long eyelashes, and give you a sneaky kick if you get too close.

Puppies are endearing (I told you it was a strange old jungle). They crave attention and have seemingly boundless energy. Never too busy to play with a new toy, they gnaw things to shreds, unleash loo rolls throughout the house and run up expectantly for the pat on the head they know they’ll get.

Crocodiles lurk in the shallows and appear at first to be a helpful log to cross the stream. Big mistake: they’ll cost you an arm.

Owls watch and learn. You hardly notice they’re there, as they tentatively edge along the twig towards you. They aren’t afraid of new ideas and do things thoroughly and deliberately. In fact, because they take time to learn and practice, they often end up as the experts.

Bison are herd animals. They do things when others do them, and don’t want to be the first to explore a new domain. They worry that striking off in a new direction will leave them exposed. And they know, rightly, that lions come and go like the seasons, but the herd will always remain.

Photo credits (Flickr): Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton, chotda, Tambako the Jaguar, meantux, Dom Dada and me

The power of unconference

Steph — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:22:54 +0000

I think it was clear it was going to be a good day during the introductions. Around fifty youth workers, technologists and others with an interest in youth participation from as far away as Lancashire, Devon, Norfolk and Wiltshire had gathered at DIUS on a Saturday morning for UKYouthOnline, organised by Tim Davies. With that much enthusiasm and experience in the room, Tim’s gamble on the open space conference methodology was sure to pay off – even if only about a third of the participants had ever attended an unconference before.

Tim’s a phenomenal facilitator, motivator and organiser, and I think that’s what really made the unconference model work: having just enough structure and infrastructure to enable the interesting, serendipitous conversations, demonstrations and one-to-one meetings to take place.

It was also the first time I’d played the infamous social media game, in a great session run by Dave Briggs (taking time out from tending to the needy and applying creams and lotions in his Social Media clinic). If you have a group of people interested in using social media tools for engagement but not sure which ones to choose or where to start, it’s a good way of thinking through some of the strategic choices involved.

I learnt a whole bunch of things:

Examples of how the Facebook MyOffice application is being used as a collaboration platform between youth workers and young people: a great example of going to where the audience is, rather than building a new and unfamiliar platform for them to use
Sprout, a widget-building application. Probably best for prototyping since there are some question marks over accessibility
The fascinating work being done in organisations with different but parallel challenges to my own: Oxfam GB, The National Trust and the British Youth Council, amongst others
The sophistication of youth work on social networking services: for example, the subtle enhancements to privacy in user profiles introduced by the new Facebook
Ultimately, the value of truly co-designed online projects, especially when it comes to services designed to be used by young people. I’m still too inclined to go it alone, when I think the lesson of youth work generally is to find appropriate ways to put the power to develop solutions in the hands of young people themselves. I wonder what a co-designed online consultation might look like if we were to bring in the stakeholders, scientists, employers, learners and front-line staff that we want to hear from?

It was also really encouraging to see the enthusiasm and help I got from facilities colleagues and others in DIUS transforming a run-of-the-mill government building into a really good unconference venue with wifi, pizza and the works in terms of AV equipment, registration desk etc – all on a shoestring budget. I’d really encourage others in government to think about what their central London buildings could help to make possible on a weekend. Thanks are due to DIUS colleagues or alumni Justin Kerr-Stevens (for wifi), Michelle Lyons (for social reporting), Jo Simmons and Kim Worts (my boss and a senior civil servant, hopefully now a convert to unconferences).

I presented some analysis we commissioned from Forrester on how young people are using the internet, social media and social networking services – it led to an interesting discussion about issues of gender, and how we design for the social aspect of using the internet with friends (as opposed to a solitary experience) and recognise the challenge of media fragmentation and continuous partial attention. More to come on that one in a future post, I’m sure. For now, here are the slides:

How are young people using social media?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social networking youth)

Thanks again to Tim and everyone who came along for their inspiration and ideas.

No related posts.

Welcome to the machine

Steph — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:04:09 +0000

I spent an interesting hour in the company of a long-serving colleague today, as part of a project we’re doing to look at the baseline skills and awareness of social media in the organisation. Peter (not his real name) first worked in the Department for Education in the late 1960s, and painted me a picture of what life was like:

“A letter would come in, and would go to the Registry. There were three sets of files: Policy, Premises and Correspondence. The Registry folk would work out which set of files the letter belonged with, and file it. Then I’d receive the file, together with a note about the letter. All the information about the matter would be kept in the file. Sometimes, if the file related to a school that had been established for decades, the file would be enormous. So they would send me a form asking which portion of the file I needed, and I’d send that back to them in the docket, and then back would come the file. I’d read the letter, maybe telephone a colleague to check something if I needed to – bearing in mind the cost of telephone calls – and then I’d write my response in longhand and give it to the typing pool. It would come back within 24 hours, and I’d check it. If corrections were needed, I’d send it back and have it redone. And then the letter would go out.”

I’m sure in some ways the basic process of civil service work is much the same today – I remember the manila registry files myself from when I started, just five years ago. But it made me stop and think about the scale and pace of change. Twenty years ago, few civil servants would have regularly worked with a computer. Ten years ago, email would have been a novelty for most. Now, we’re wondering why it’s seeming so tough to embed a blogging culture amongst a workforce of whom over 30% (PDF) started work in the 1970s and 64% of whom were filing their first dockets before Tim Berners-Lee’s vague but exciting idea was even conceived.

Douglas Adams was right:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 35 is incredibly exciting and creative and, given opportunity, you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really

Later in the day, between spells of digital docket-filing, I stumbled across the Civil Service values, namely integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. We live in a performance-driven world, where it seems everyone is judged on results and targets achieved, deadlines and service agreements delivered. The what, not the how. And yet those values describe a different type of organisation: one in which the credibility and trust of the public rest at least as much in the processes it follows as in the results it produces. Rigour, transparency, independence. Curiously, I think social media, with its potential to expose organisations to scrutiny from passionate outsiders can help deliver as much on these process objectives as on the delivery ones. So maybe we shouldn’t just make the case for the adoption of social media by government from the perspective of quicker/faster/cheaper but also argue the potential for greater transparency, scrutiny, reflection and independence.

I think that’s one for the registry file.

A new conversation

Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish

Steph — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:55:55 +0000

One day, when I can retire from all this social media stuff and become comfortably rich on the conference circuit, I’ll pepper my sell-out keynote speeches with colourful metaphors like the following:

Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish.

Accept that sh*t happens
So much communication today – from the public and private sectors – is predicated on the belief that silence, rebuttal or defensive lines will be enough. It won’t, not these days. Even if it makes the issue die down for a bit in the mainstream media, in the long run it will blow up again or gnaw away at your brand corrosively to make you look foolish, dishonest or even mildly unhinged. Similarly, social media quickly exposes fabrication and humiliates those responsible, so if you have skeletons in the closet then you’re best off coming clean. Try using the tools of social media to polish turds at your peril.

Lesson #1: expect sh*t, and go equipped with the tools to deal with it.

Take responsibility for it, and for clearing it up
Scoopers accept that it’s up to them to clear up the mess, even if there’s nobody looking and even if it’s not easy. It’s not that you couldn’t just leave it – you might get away with that a few times – but eventually it will catch up with you, or you’ll find yourself in a community which is overrun with the stuff. In practical terms, that means it’s your responsibility – as customer service agent, a press officer, a policy official, whatever – to engage in the process of helping put the screw-ups right when you find them. That doesn’t necessarily mean whistleblowing (but there’s a role for that too), but it does mean being prepared to muck in yourself and recognise that you can help to fix it.

I’d love to see more public sector organisations using services like GetSatisfaction to help identify and address problems in service, harnessing the passion and ideas of our customers to help us solve the problem. Social media helps big organisations to turn frustration into solutions, and to spot the holes in customer service or policy more effectively than mystery shopping, market research or even [sharp intake of breath] classic consultation. But it means being seen to stoop and scoop, which we’re often not ready to do.

Lesson #2: own up to mistakes, and use some of the tools out there to help people help you put things right.

Do what people do in civilised society
Nobody wants to live in a world of polished turds – it makes for a more cynical, frustrated, insular community. Social media can restore some of the sense of community where we give and take, praise and criticise, and earn a reputation based on the contribution we make, not the image we try to manufacture. The civilised organisation, the collaborative state, behaves honestly in the social media ecosystem, whether that’s introducing yourself, crediting the work of others, admitting mistakes or being up front about what you’re doing and why.

Lesson #3: be nice.

I’m so gonna regret writing this when someone picks me up me in the future for polishing a turd of my own. But for now, wish me luck next week as I work with some colleagues to broach one of the hardest topics in social media: scoop, don’t polish.

Image credits (from top): Minor Prophet, Johannal, Robertotostes

Blessed are the developers

Steph — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:00:40 +0000

This week, I took a trip down memory lane and revisited a (non-government) project I last worked on nearly five years ago. The ‘temporary‘ system I built back then is still going – amazingly – but the team wanted some changes made. Various people had dabbled in the code since 2003, most recently the organisation’s team of Romanian programmers. The problem was, my former colleague complained, though cheap those guys didn’t really understand the project, moved onto other stuff and ended up delivering a half-upgraded system which was worse than what was there before.

Today, I had lunch with some proper government techies. This social media stuff is all very well, they said, but what about accessibility, and security, and data protection, and support? To paraphrase their argument, the dabblings of people like me trigger an avalanche of expectation which people like them are then commanded to deliver on. Frustratingly, it’s not that those guys aren’t innovating – just that the incredible stuff they’ve been developing hasn’t managed to see the light of day.

So I’m starting to think this means two things:

If we want to be creative in how we apply technology to the problems of government, then we need to draw a line under the extent to which we outsource IT. Though they’d beat you to a pulp with one of their white papers for saying it, you’ll never get real innovation in web communication from the big outsourcers. For that, you need a guy in the corner who does this stuff out of pride, not for money and doesn’t need a spec to tell you how it should be built. It comes from leaving just enough breathing space in the day job for the in-house techies to build the stuff they think is cool, and ensuring it gets in front of the right people. It comes from the developers still working on the project their boss told them to stop working on six months ago. Like Spolsky says, we need to treat our good in-house developers like the superstars they are and recognise just how much talent we have sitting within government if only we could – dare I say – unlock it.
Social media tools lower the barrier to entry, but only so far. WordPress.com, TypePad, Ning and SurveyMonkey are great. They let people like me take our meagre knowledge a long way. But we have a responsibility to stop others who understand less about these tools than we do from running away with the idea that this means government webbery has fundamentally changed: it hasn’t. More than ever in a converged, transformed, empowered world, we need the enterprise CMSes, the resilient hosting and the focus on making stuff that’s accessible to everyone. A swiss army knife might save you on a camping trip, but it’s not exactly the tool of choice when you’re refitting a kitchen, and quite right too. We need to understand which of our projects are camping trips, and which are kitchen refits, and choose our tools and teams accordingly – making sure the senior decisionmakers understand the distinction too.

To a non-techie, it can feel like your grumpy developers are just being obstructive when they tell you that they can’t just deploy that blog site you wanted overnight when that guy at the conference said that you could do it yourself on WordPress.com in half an hour. But chances are – if your techies are any good – it’s not obstructiveness at all: it’s professionalism.

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Hassles and Handycams

Steph — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:57:46 +0000

“Let’s do some video case studies”
“How about a little montage of the Minister doing the visit?”
“We could do something on YouTube – you know, liven it up a bit”

There’s something compelling about film, which is why so many events and launches open with an uplifting compilation to a jaunty soundtrack. They set the scene, tell real people’s stories, bring events to life, make the conceptual personal.

Expectations seem to be changing. In a YouTube world, I think it’s fair to say that the assumption is now that effective government communication online will incorporate video, whether it’s formal, informal or full-blown interactive.

But it’s easier said than done.

A number of recent projects have brought me face to face with the world of video and the practicalities of making it happen:

You need the gear to record video, or access to people who can do it for you (at a significant cost)
You need to find a way to look after and manage any in-house gear
You need people to project manage each shoot, getting the people lined up, the venues arranged etc
You need release forms and briefings (speeches, bullet points, background notes, whatever)
You need to manage the expectations of Important People who are used to being interviewed by the BBC with autocues
You need some way to edit what you shoot
You need a grasp of aspect ratios and codecs, video formats, frame rates and embeddable code
You need somewhere to put it and process for getting it OK-ed
You need rules about what you publish and how you moderate comments
You need an answer when someone says: “So why exactly are we doing this?” and when someone says: “So how come the YouTube ‘related videos’ show a girl in a G-string?”

All of which can be done. But the hardest bit – and why I have newfound respect for graduates of media studies courses – is that you need to know how you tell a story through video. Talking heads are fine, but often dull. Proper film-makers know about finding interesting locations, putting interviewees at their ease, which bits to keep and which bits to chop, how to do intros, transitions, titles, splicing clips together, fixing the sound and colour balance, storing and converting the footage and lots more. And too often recently for me, it’s just been a cheerful civil servant with a Handycam and an Important Person wondering why the outputs aren’t a bit more polished.

The answer might be to leave this to people who know about video – just brief it out and leave it to the professionals. But I think video is becoming like typing: one day soon, the practical skills to communicate through video are going to be as normal as being able to put together a Powerpoint presentation – you don’t bring in an agency for that. In the same way that bullet point slides look dated these days, fairly soon the smart kids will be making their points with vox pops, Qik streams and mini-documentaries, and we’ll see film-making skills creep into person specifications and CVs for people in communications roles.

I think it’s worth it: the prize will be a much more engaging and authentic way of communicating.

Happy Birthday YouTube

Adventures in social consultation

Steph — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:25:58 +0000

Some consultations are basically dull. Some are politically-charged. Some are hurried. So when the Science and Society consultation came sauntering along, it was clear this was an opportunity too good to miss. It’s a genuine call for ideas, casting the net wide to improve the way that science is communicated, understood, taught, and recruited for. What can we do to improve trust and confidence in scientists? How can we get more high quality science broadcasting and more intelligent media coverage of science issues? How can science be taught in school in more engaging ways? Interesting stuff.

These issues are ripe for a more interactive, distributed approach enabled by social media – a truly ‘social consultation’ – where the issues are conveyed in an engaging way and people can respond in whole or in part through a number of channels, whether in our space or theirs.

Inspired by the truly groundbreaking Governance of Britain site that Puffbox developed for Ministry of Justice, we pitched the idea of a ‘hub’ site to the policy team, as a focus for the debate online and a technology solution to the challenge of harnessing the activities of stakeholders in a manageable way.

Like most consultations, the full document runs to 50+ pages with 34 meaty questions. Whilst virtually everyone has an interest in some of the issues, virtually nobody is interested in all of them. So our big experiment with this project is the idea of ‘widgetising’ the consultation questions so that bloggers or website owners can easily host a debate about the few issues which interest them and their network.

Complementing this is some truly remarkable content. My phenomenal new colleague Georgia – originally in the office for a week’s work experience – stayed on for more, organising the interviewing and filming of ten eminent scientists, broadcasters and policymakers you can watch on the site talking about the consultation. We’ll be aiming to keep the blog area fresh with these personal perspectives over the summer.

There’s the second outing of a CommentPress-powered ‘commentable’ version of a document, allowing visitors to leave public comments on specific questions or paragraphs. It’s not a panacea though: the CommentPress theme out-of-the-box needs a bit of work to make it robust and accessible, and we’re hoping to smooth some of the rough edges over the next few weeks.

Tracking the wider online debate is where we’ve borrowed most liberally from the excellent work of others: bringing in Parliamentary mentions from TheyWorkForYou as originally demonstrated by TellThemWhatYouThink; a Deli.cio.us account to publicly share links on the site as pioneered by Governance of Britain; and an internally-focussed Netvibes-based dashboard to help officials keep track of online coverage.

A bit of a kitchen-sink approach? Maybe, but we’ve tried to apply some strategy to our choices:

- Yes to a Facebook group (we’ll be running events later and want to widen our network)
- No to liveblogging or streaming the launch (it was a fun event, but the online audience would be too small and frankly we’ve got more engaging content)
- Yes to Twitter, but owned by Rhys – our dynamic, hip-to-the-Flickr Press Officer – and explictly corporate, science-oriented, and low volume
- No to forums: with a comment-enabled blog, CommentPress document, widgets and Del.icio.us roll we think we’ve got more applied channels for feedback

As a result of all this, I’ve spent a lot more time in the guts of WordPress than I had done before, and it’s been a positive experience virtually all the way. Believe the hype – there’s much more to it than a blogging platform – especially when teamed with the excellent SimplePie for RSS. Creating a theme from scratch is easier than it seems, honest. We’ll put the code we’ve developed into Google Code’s repository after the project in case others can benefit from it.

With so many virtual plates spinning, we’ve undoubtedly made mistakes and missed some tricks – please do help me out by showing us where the holes are.