One day, all this will be blogs

February 10th, 2010

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.

Filed under Government, WordPress | Comments (8)

Unleashing a Government response

January 18th, 2010

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.

Filed under Government, Technical, WordPress | Comments (5)

The Audacity of Growth

January 8th, 2010

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:

Collate the content about support for economic growth on our site in a single place, making it more easily accessible to media and stakeholders
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)
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
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.

Filed under Development, Government, Technical, WordPress | Comments (7)

Different strokes for different folks

October 27th, 2009

At Reboot Britain earlier this year, I did a short talk on the direction of online consultation, and mused that the future would be about:

Different strokes for different folks: multi-layered consultations that work for stakeholders and citizens
Getting ideas from customers and the front-line
Making consultation documents themselves more accessible and understandable

Today at work, the team are launching a couple of projects which I think take us a step onwards in our journey towards better consultation.

Thanks to Puffbox working with Jenny Poole at BIS, the Annual Report of the National Student Forum, the independent group of students advising ministers on student issues, has a rather nice new website. I think he built it in SharePoint or something.

It’s a sign of the direction we’re tending towards in commentable documents, based on our experience to date. Our first foray, Innovation Nation, took the executive summary of a document and made it commentable. Subsequent projects took whole documents – one epic example running to 245 printed pages – and made them commentable. We’ve learned two things: (i) concise documents seem to work better; and (ii) specific and action-oriented texts seem to elicit more engagement. So for the NSF’s report, we’ve pulled out just two areas – one a set of visions for students, the other a set of issues for universities and colleges to consider – and opened these up for discussion (with some rather nice Scribd integration Simon developed). It’s a nice-looking site, good value and turned round quickly. [n.b. why the .com URL, you convergence-minded people ask? We'll be working with the Forum on convergence in due course, but bringing their site into the fold seemed a good first step, given their unusual status and a challenging timescale].

The second launch follows up the Prime Minister’s weekend podcast where he outlined plans to address sharp practices by some credit and store card companies. The new credit and store card consultation is explicitly about raising awareness as well as seeking new ideas from stakeholders and consumers. So working with the policy team, we’ve come up with a layered consultation that hopefully brings the issues to life:

For stakeholders, there’s the full PDF file and impact assessments with traditional response channels or online comment
For more interested consumers, debt advisers and intermediaries, there’s a plain English translation of the 100-page document, boiled down in 10 crisp and clear pages, developed by Corinne Pritchard of Simply Understand – plus a 3 minute podcast summary
For people with a more passing interest, there’s a simple poll which lets you find out about the five main areas, and see what the hottest issues are for others (code here if you’re interested)

The work from Simply Understand is simply outstanding. For a very small consideration, they’ve produced something which is clear, elegant and more impressively still, does justice to the original and keeps the policy authors on-side – Corinne has shown it can be done.

There’s some interesting online engagement around the consultation too, from the launch on GMTV by MoneySavingExpert’s Martyn Lewis co-ordinated by the Press Office to the discussion thread in MoneySupermarket.com, taking the discussion out to where credit card users are already talking. It’s been a really good team effort, led by Alistair Reid, with support from Rhys Stacker and Michael Morgan and the Consumer Policy team.

It would be great to hear feedback and suggestions as always, and ideas for where we might go next. If you’ve run commentable consultations yourself, what did you learn from them?

Filed under Government, Social media, WordPress | Comments (5)

World of WordPress

September 21st, 2009

There’s plenty of WordPress-powered online properties in Government right now and some very busy freelancers building them. For a while now, I’ve been trying to compile a list of useful people, agencies, tools and resources for WordPress, so I thought I’d kick it off here. It’s obviously incomplete, and mention here does not necessarily constitute personal recommendation.

Please add any additions, amendments or feedback in the comments and I’ll amend this post over time so it becomes a bit of a living resource. If you’re an agency/developer and have client permission, I’m happy to add some portfolio URLs to your entry below.

Agencies & freelance developers

The Awesome Web (Jenny Brown, @jennybee)
Davepress.net (Dave Briggs, @davebriggs)
The Dextrous Web (@dextrousweb)
Harrisment (Jonathan Harris, @harrisment_uk)
InterconnectIT (not used them, but look pretty specialised – reviews welcomed)
Popokatea (Laura Whitehead, @littlelaura)
Public Platforms (Joss Winn & Tony Hirst, @josswinn & @psychemedia – CommentPress experts)
Puffbox.com (Simon Dickson, @simond)
Sweet Interaction (Simon Wheatley, @simonwheatley)
Visudo (Eddie Tejeda, creator of Digress.It – see below)
We Are Social (@wearesocial)
The Workshop (Sheffield based)
Worth Digital (Brighton based)
Zed1 (Mike Little, @mikelittlezed1)

Worth also joining & asking on the WordCampUK mailing list. More info about WordCamp.

Hosting providers

Bytemark (seems to assume slightly more command-line savvy than some hosts)
Eduserv
WebFusion
Memset
uRevised
I seriously need more options in this category. Please recommend good UK-based WP hosts.

Useful themes & plug-ins

40 Free Wordpress themes, Six Revisions
All in One SEO Pack (adds features to improve search ranking of your blog)
BackupWordPress (automatic backups for a WP install)
BuddyPress (social network theme/plugins)
Category Order (lets you drag/drop categories, handy to tweak menu order)
Commentariat (comment on sections of a document)
Contact Form 7 (flexible email contact forms)
Digress.it (formerly Commentpress; comment on paragraphs of a document)
Google XML Sitemaps (auto-generate Google sitemap.xml documents)
My Page Order (lets you drag/drop pages, handy to tweak menu order)
[ Podpress ] (upload podcasts, generate feed, add embedded player to your posts – but mixed reviews about compatibility/support – not a silver bullet for podcasting)
Post Ratings (add star ratings to posts)
Sociable (add social bookmarking links)
Subscribe2 (let users sign up to email notification of new posts – Feedburner also accomplishes this)
Subscribe to Comments (add tickbox to comment form so commenters get email notification of new comments)
TinyMCE Advanced (adds extra styling features to normal rich-text editor)
Widget Logic (switch widgets on/off on different parts of the site through basic logic)
Wordpress multi-user (host multiple WP blogs on one install, a la Wordpress.com)
WP Super Cache (speed up your blog)