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.

Round-up

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the BIS webbies (not for me though; I’ve been putting my feet up for the last week in rural Suffolk). A quick round-up of some of the highlights:

A new website for BIS: Neil’s team, working with our corporate IT unit and EduServ, have been working ferociously hard, at times uphill, and for the last umpteen weekends, to merge the old DIUS and BERR websites into the new site which launched over the weekend. Neil has the skinny. There’s a huge amount of work and care gone into the site, some really clever technical touches and some solid planning to help us adapt to whatever Providence throws our way. As Neil explains, we’re aiming for some fairly radical openness about the site going forward – you can easily see what it cost, (and what it will save), what its predecessors cost, what customer insight it’s based on, and what our real-time web traffic statistics are – and tell us what works and what doesn’t in a new GetSatisfaction forum. Fantastic work, chaps.

Like Simon, I’ll admit to waving a bittersweet farewell to the interim, WordPress-based site which helped us manage f0r 9 months. I’ve got a future blog post brewing on the pros and cons of lightweight tools, and plan to say more there.

Who Gets The Tip? We’ve kicked off a little campaign to encourage hospitality businesses to be transparent in how tips and service charges are divided, by encouraging consumers to ask the question ‘Who Gets The Tip?’. It’s a very brief, rather unusual project combining social media and traditional PR as equal partners and working with the excellent Diffusion on the online aspects. I particularly love the intro video, made in-house by, and starring, the team. Top stuff, led by Jenny. When you’re out and about, ask your waiter; and if you know someone who runs a hospitality business, suggest they generate a pie chart of how they split their tips, and add themselves to the Google map.

Company Charges consultation: We’re still experimenting with formats for online consultation, and the latest project is a niche consultation on changes to company regulation. We could have just whacked some PDFs up there and had done with it, but the policy lead was keen to offer more scope for online interaction between respondents (who don’t tend to dabble in mainstream social media). So the interactive response site built entirely by the talented Alistair Reid is an interesting WordPress/Scribd hybrid, which hopefully makes a big document more navigable and, well, interactive. We’ll see how it goes. It’s a sad consequence of the tightening of public sector finances that we’re having to say goodbye to Alistair at the end of his contract. He’s a fantastic all-round webby, social media maven, copywriter and colleague. For goodness sake, somebody hire him, quick.

Social Media channels survey: back in the autumn, we conducted some popup-survey and focus group user research into corporate site visitors – but what about our social media channels? With audiences consuming our content through RSS, email subscriptions, desktop clients and web interfaces, how can we get quick, cheap, useful feedback to help us evaluate those channels? Alistair and team have come up with a neat approach to promoting the survey: make a video, take a picture, send some tweets. Give us your thoughts.

As you can tell, I’m hugely proud of the team. They’re awesome.

One day, all this will be blogs

When DIUS launched its Science and Society consultation in July 2008, I took the opportunity to throw the kitchen sink at a consultation, digitally-speaking. Not all of it worked (in fact, hardly any of it did, you could argue), but I learned some useful lessons and the policy team have maintained their appetite for engaging online. My first proper WordPress site long outlived its intended lifespan, continuing as a blog with a bunch of pages for expert groups of scientists to continue their deliberations in public.

But as these things do, the limitations of one-thing-turned-into-another became more apparent over time, and it became clear it was time for a rebuild. We’re putting that live today.

Simon Dickson of Puffbox has done a nice job on the project, cleverly deploying WordPress multi-user to host a set of linked blogs for the groups, with a unifying homepage and RSS feed. It’s a good fit for the job, enabling the secretariats to the groups to manage their own presence, post up minutes and draft reports, and use WordPress widgets to promote special announcements.

But there may be the makings of a more profound point here – which Simon has made to me before with a curious smile – about government web platforms of the future. I’ve been asked a few times over the last month or so ‘How large can a WordPress site be and still be workable?’. I’ve tended to suggest, perhaps, 500 pages as a workable limit, unable to conceive of managing complex content trees and thousands of pages in a tool built for blogging.

But will the government websites of 2015 need to look like the behemoths of today? In departments where policy is key, stakeholders need to be involved and where ‘whats new?’ is the primary question users ask, could the departmental sites of the future be a series of linked blogs, written by enfranchised and enlightened policy officials, engaged with by stakeholders, and summarised on new lifestream-style corporate homepages supported by a meaty document and data library search and solid archiving?

I’m not pretending this site is the future here and now. But it’s an interesting thought.

Oh, and watch that curious blue bar at the top. There’ll be plenty more of that if Neil gets his way.

Update: Simon blogs his part of the story

Update 2: I failed to mention in the original post that Jenny project managed this project, keeping a tricky internal supplier (i.e. me) on course. Thanks Jen.

Unleashing a Government response

A quick one – today at work we’re launching ‘Unleashing Aspiration’: the Government’s response to the review of access to the professions, which was led by Rt Hon Alan Milburn MP and reported last year.

The digital brief was, on the face of it, not massively exciting – it’s a long document, covering 88 recommendations, with a small but informed audience of policy, media and stakeholder visitors – many of whom will go through the whole document in detail almost however we publish it.

But this kind of document does set an interesting challenge for online presentation – it’s really as close as policy documents get to a faceted classification in information design terms, with responses to each recommendation organised by theme, by audience affected, and by the Departments who are leading on each – and with lots of embedded links to other initiatives. The policy team, though tight on resource, are interested in following the comment and discussion around each of the recommendations.

So it’s also a natural fit for WordPress, where the Themes are defined as WordPress categories, and we use WordPress tags to indicate audience and lead department. Commenting is built-in, as is the facility for tag and category descriptions, which provide a space for useful ‘virtual chapter’ overviews. By offering the ability to cut the document up in so many ways, it provides a variety of accessible entry points for different audiences, which is promising raw material for digital engagement outreach, for example to student communities or the third sector.

It’s not going to win any design awards – it’s intentionally quite neutral and clean with just some simple colour-coding – but I think it’s an unusual and potentially helpful approach to enable readers to get into a document of this kind through different routes. It’s also been a good training exercise for the team – props to Alistair Reid for getting his head around the anatomy of WordPress in barely a week, and doing rather more cut-and-paste than is strictly healthy.

The Audacity of Growth

If there’s one thing Barack Obama taught us about the power of digital by the manner of his election, it’s that email still counts (and, for that matter, still works when you’re in government). For a while, I’ve been determined to focus more on how we use email as a corporate communication channel, particularly in the context of needing to justify why establishing new websites often isn’t a good idea.

We launched a project at work today that’s hopefully a step in the right direction: a kind of souped-up landing page for our new strategy for supporting economic growth, Going for Growth.

We’re probably not alone in having a few big policy themes which embrace a multitude of announcements, speeches and initiatives. The challenge for digital communications – well, for all communications, I suppose – is bringing these big themes out in ways our audiences can understand, and not losing the wood for the trees. Even on our own small interim site, thematic information is scattered across press releases, speeches and policy pages, making it hard to explain the drivers of policy, the history or the direction it’s going in.

This time, the initial request was for a new ‘portal’ but it quickly became clear that an aggregator would be a better fit for the content, audience and the commissioning team, who would be moving on to other things after delivery. So the page we built is designed to:

1. Collate the content about support for economic growth on our site in a single place, making it more easily accessible to media and stakeholders
2. Curate relevant content from other parts of government, demonstrating the cross-government nature of the policy, and hopefully engaging other government departments with communicating it in partnership with us (more later on that)
3. Explain the vision and origins of a somewhat abstract strategic policy, as well as the progress to date and the future direction in an accessible way
4. Engage audiences using channels which enable us to build up a community around this content

Our corporate site is WordPress-based (for now) but the page template itself is really little more than a shell. What’s interesting is what WordPress makes possible through its flexible RSS-with-everything approach and knock-yourself-out unrestricted approach to templating. But the interesting stuff happens elsewhere.

• The document itself is hosted on Scribd and embedded on a page, offering a pleasant browsing experience without the hassle of building a full HTML version. The PDF is of course downloadable too, for committed readers. There’s a video on YouTube (two in fact), press releases on NDS and the archive film of the livestreamed launch via Number 10′s provider. (And a bit of live tweeting around the launch itself, if you count that).
• We’re making liberal use of Feed2JS to help render an RSS feed as a list, comprising items across our site tagged in WordPress with ‘growth’.
• More interestingly perhaps, we’re using the social bookmarking service Delicious (as pioneered by Puffbox for the Governance of Britain site) to collect relevant announcements elsewhere in government via our corporate Delicious account, again tagged with ‘growth’. The RSS feed of these bookmarks then powers a little list on the page, enabling us to keep this content fresh easily, without needing to manually edit the page each time – it’s just a bookmarking job.
• In order to make better use of GovDelivery, a service we used previously just for powering email alerts to changed pages, we asked the team to set up one of their widgets – copying an idea done elegantly by the Highways Agency. These widgets offer a handy, embeddable version of items from an RSS feed (in our case, Piped-together) of Growth news from BIS and elsewhere, with built-in email subscription to topics from across our site. In principle then, these widgets offer a window into what Government is doing to support growth beyond a single Department and in a format which any Department or stakeholder could pick up and use for minimal effort. For instance, Number 10 kindly picked it up as part of their coverage of the launch:

The site was still put together, in-house (kudos for this project to Jenny, Michael, David and Rhys), fairly rapidly to meet a moving target, and there’s still plenty of work for us to do. The list of email subscriptions offered to you via the widget still needs tidying up; we still haven’t quite provided the killer resource for media that I’d hoped to I think; and though it’s less of a nightmare than an independent microsite to manage, it’s still likely to be headache to migrate across to a new CMS.

But we’ll keep tweaking, and with this low-cost patchwork of tools, hopefully we’ll nudge closer over time towards the goal of a truly engaging, useful and workable channel for policy news.