In May last year, alpha.gov.uk emerged blinking into the limelight. It was the product of a true skunkworks operation – a few guys (and they were mainly guys) – tucked away on a disused floor of a government building in south London. The site had rough edges, but it pointed in an exciting direction:

• Satisfy common requirements first
• Use fewer, better words
• Hire developers, don’t contract systems integrators
• Know – better still, create – your tools and technology stack
• Think about design and typography
• Engage with feedback as intelligent human beings

Tonight, its successor, (beta) gov.uk was revealed. While it looks different, for sure, it’s still closer to alpha.gov.uk than direct.gov.uk in scope, and you’d be forgiven for wondering what’s really changed in eight months. But lots has, even visible from the outside.

First, it’s not a skunkworks project. The Government Digital Service team responsible for gov.uk now is unrecognisable from the team in Hercules House even three or four months ago. It’s a proper organisation in a nice building, led by someone with clout, and staffed with headhunted external expertise and carefully-winnowed survivors from the projects it has taken over. There’s pace and optimism and pride in the air over there, in more concentrated form than I’ve encountered in any other part of the public sector in the last year or so.

Second: Alpha, the team behind it, and the political context into which it was born, determined that this new approach won the three-way battle of influence, leaving Directgov/The Club and Business Link/Serco effectively knocked out for the count. That victory wasn’t a given, by any means. But it matters hugely, as the internal debate switches from whether to how.

Third: the tentacles are spreading. The tweets of people like Paul Annett and Stefan Czerniawski suggest that GDSers aren’t just building the core information site now. They’re starting to get out there in the government buildings across the UK where online transactions get built for real out of monstrous Oracle databases and J2EE middleware. It’s there that the money gets wasted and the user experience for millions of people gets sacrificed, even more so than in the convoluted circumlocutions of Whitehall press releases. It’s not visible on gov.uk yet, but it’s coming.

So, it must be a fantastic feeling for the GDS team to have got this far, having built something truly elegant – designed, in the real sense of the word – in a way that government’s digital presence often hasn’t been.

But they’ll know too just how far there is to go:

• it has to scale, assimilating more of the online experience end-to-end,  for businesses as well as citizens, somehow providing an elegant solution for edge cases as well as the popular ones. Revolutionising how news and policy content is created and opened up for public participation is in itself a huge challenge.
• it needs to practice selective deafness, smiling at but ignoring those with apparently reasonable but ultimately harmful requests to pull the project in a thousand different directions.
• it needs to box clever, now there’s a big target painted on its rear, and find ways of persuading those in and around government’s existing online services that the vision can include them, will benefit from their experience, and that they’ll benefit from being involved (with judicious use of a bit of my-road-or-the-high-road)
• it needs to turn digital by default from a slogan to a fact of life within government, overcoming decades of reliance on advertising, grid-led communications and reluctance to let daylight in upon magic both in terms of process and policy. I’m conscious of straying close to cliché there, but ultimately GDS needs to show that decisions based on analytical data and user-centred design lead to better outcomes than those based on seniority or consensual expediency, and that alone is a huge challenge.

Gov.uk is a stake in the ground – a signpost to something better and some examples of what that looks like, as much in terms of process and culture as in terms of pixels. If it can manage the transition to the next stage, it’ll be onto a winner and we’ll all be the better for it.

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Dan Slee’s  excellent suggestion of a ’20 thoughts’ format for reflections on UKGovcamp seems to have caught on, so here’s mine – more about the format than the content, in many cases. That I think Dave Briggs and Lloyd Davis are the very finest of fellows goes, I think, without me saying.

1. No royalty: we’ve been queasy about ‘keynote’ slots for the likes of Chris Chant or Mike Bracken, and while they invariably deliver interesting stuff and I’m glad they made the effort to come, I’m coming to the conclusion that format isn’t what UKGovcamp is about.
2. Leave the crowd wanting more: two days was a fun experiment. One would keep up the energy levels more, and make it a more manageable endeavour.
3. There’s a right size: it’s a great venue, and while we weren’t physically squashed, 260 people is a very big Govcamp. 130ish on day 2 felt quite laid-back. 200-220 would be just right.
4. The grid needs managing: if it’s a one day event, with that many folks, we need to think about the grid a bit more. Tim Davies getting it online was a masterstroke, but we still had sessions in the wrong size rooms, and avoidable clashes. Thinking caps on, there.
5. Talking is doing: the ‘doing day’ concept on Day 2 wasn’t quite right, even though some great things did get done. What makes UKGovcamps special are the serendipitous conversations and real-world encounters of online friends, not apps built or hard skills learned.
6. Porous boundaries are what really matter: ditto, those serendipitous encounters are possible because the normal barriers between central and local government, supplier and commissioner, senior and junior, don’t intrude. So it’s a shame the name badges had organisations and not Twitter handles on them, for that reason alone.
7. Moral support matters: we don’t put enough emphasis on the value of Teacamps, Brewcamps, Govcamps etc in just bringing likeminded folk together and winding up their their springs. Of course it’s a worth a Saturday if it gives you the courage to face the next 12 months with a grin and Twitter-stream of encouragement. Talking in small groups beats listening in big ones, mostly.
8. More kids please: thanks to Maya (4) for being our youngest (and frankly, best behaved) govcamper. We need to find ways to make it easier to bring kids along; they suffer us checking Twitter at home when we should be playing with them, after all. Kids should never be barrier to govcamping.
9. We’re building up some lovely oral and visual history: five years on from the virtually pre-hashtag #ukgc08, we’re building up a phenomenal archive of govcamping on Flickr (this year’s special thanks to David Pearson, Ann Kempster, Harry Metcalfe and AShropshireLad) and in the last couple of events, audio, thanks to the splendid Cathy Aitchison, who was quietly interviewing folk throughout – her lovely 2011 interviews are here.
10. Govcampers change: from the very start of day 1, some seasoned govcampers set up camp in the corridors, and barely ventured into sessions. For them (me included), we got a huge amount from chatting to friends old and new, without necessarily doing the full grid-sessions-timetable thing: “a year’s worth of meetings in a day” as I heard someone describe it
11. There are plenty of (better) places to hack: UKGovcampers are a different crowd. We didn’t really expect a hackday, and we didn’t get one.
12. Microsoft have ‘got’ it: whilst SharePoint and IE are tough to forgive, Microsoft’s UK Government team in Charles Eales, Ian McKenzie, and Dave ‘Mr Bing’ Coplin, have got behind the event in just the right way. They’re spending thousands supporting UKGovcamp, approaching it with humility and good humour, and I for one salute them.
13. You can’t go wrong with retro sweets: I’m no affiçionado, but our supply of Maoams didn’t last long, and elicited some squeeing.
14. The Govcampers are way ahead of the politicians (and policy officials?) on open data: while the consultations and speeches are talking in vague generalities about the commercial potential of open data and the political imperative of transparency, it looked like the debates at Govcamp 2012 had moved on to data cleanliness, real-world semantics and public engagement with data and data portals.
15. WordPress is a way of life now: There wasn’t the traditional Simon Dickson session from what I could see, but there were sessions throughout the two days which touched on WordPress – from its role in ‘radical’ website deployment, to how to make it mobile. It’s out there, people are getting on with using it. I didn’t even get to present my slides on ’5 strategies for managing WordPress multisites’, which I’ll have to blog here at some point – but we’re at that sort of level now, I think.
16. We need our own pub: Saturday’s whole-pub experience (admittedly with smaller numbers) was a lot more pleasant than Friday’s. Bravo Hadley for finding us such nice places, and we need to bargain on almost everyone turning up to Govcamp (a free event, on a workday… truly remarkable).
17. The rules of Open Space are there for a reason: time is limited, and when I found myself in sessions which weren’t quite doing it for me, I exercised the Law of Two Feet now and again. We should make really sure all Govcampers and session leaders are cool with those rules, so everyone gets to the end of the day feeling in control.
18. There are still some tyrannical bosses out there: a sad but spirited email I received on Friday morning read: “I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it today. I will see you tomorrow though: luckily the boss can’t dictate what I do on Saturdays”. If Fridays remain part of the programme, maybe we need an alternative prospectus for use by such Govcamping heros to persuade recalcitrant bosses that it’s the most productive day out of the office they could possibly spend.
19. We need more govcamps: and there’s going to be another healthy pot available, as there was in 2011, for people to run their own events either based on an area or an interesting theme. More details about how to access it soon.
20. We’re growing up and calming down: I didn’t expect the brainstorm on a digital maturity model/assessment tool to be as well-attended as it was. We came up with a load of stuff, from digital literacy and organisational engagement to staff policies and the basis for decision-making. But as Shane has remarked, the crowd this year didn’t feel as nervous or angry as we did back in 2008. Happily, things have moved on.

Photo credit: David Pearson

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Hands up who says they work in ‘new media’? Me neither. While we’re not quite in a digital by default world, this stuff has been around for a decade and a half. Even in the public sector.

One topic I’d like to think about at this week’s UKGovcamp on Saturday (the ‘doing’ day) is whether we can come up with a way of thinking about public sector digital activity in terms of a maturity or capability model, that could be applied to help teams and individuals set goals and maybe even benchmark their effectiveness. For instance, it might:

• Help teams to think about how sophisticated the organisation is at adopting and managing social media as part of official Communications and day to day communication
• Provide some material for people thinking about their CMS features and procurement, to factor in the kinds of activities and processes those tools should be supporting in 2012
• Offer insights into team size and structure, what the roles are in managing digital projects effectively (I’m deliberately not saying ‘digital communication’, for now)
• Give everyone some ready-made benchmarks to help evaluate impact, and if not hard numbers, then at least an open-source process for getting to an assessment of digital effectiveness

I’ve got a small commission – a day’s paid time – from the digital team at the National Audit Office to contribute towards managing the process of collating this, writing it up and sharing it for the benefit of their own team and others. We’d really appreciate input from a wide group on what a maturity model might look like – and indeed, whether it’s the best approach to take.

The idea would be to brainstorm at UKGovcamp, take the ideas away and write them up into a draft structure, get more feedback on them here, and then publish a methodology or framework of some kind under a Creative Commons licence for anyone to use and take forward. Hopefully we’d make it flexible enough to work for anything from a Whitehall department to a district council, and something that anyone who’s reasonably switched-on digitally can deploy without needing to bring in an expensive consultant (or even a reasonably-priced one).

Who’s up for helping with that?

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So he’s off. Neil Williams, head of digital at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills today swaps pinstripes for his dress-down trademark hoody and joins the growing team at GDS.

To be fair, he’s been there on and off for nearly a year (as his colleague remarked to me yesterday: ‘emotionally, he’s been gone for ages’), but at least now he’s free to work full-time on devising a platform for government to communicate its corporate content better online. That’s a job every bit as big as the Citizen & Business product, but then he knows that.

He’s made a hell of an impact in government websites, and social media too in his time in government so far. The first Miliblog. The Ministerial webchats. And that Twitter policy.

The thing about Neil, and why he’s such a bonus for GDS, is that he doesn’t just do the sexy stuff. When Neil and team pushed to build a shared service platform to save £2.5m over 3 years, the process wasn’t exactly Agile. He’s managed a big team, in tough times, and still kept them creative, motivated and (largely) cheerful, from what I can see.

So good luck Neil. I look forward to your conversion to fully-fledged Shoreditch hipster. I suspect I’ll see you around

p.s. You can probably turn on idiotica.co.uk again now, right? Bernard Matthews can’t sue you again now.

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It’s been 18 months since I last walked the mean streets of Westminster as a civil servant. There are things I miss about the old lifestyle: having the scope to run with projects on the ‘inside’, being in the loop on the latest goings-on in government, and most of all, having a great team around me.

I blogged in May about the experience of the first year of going freelance. So mainly to cheer myself up as I bash away at this lonely laptop while web teams around Whitehall stagger back from convivial Christmas lunches, here are my stand-out memories of 2011:

1. Visting The Guardian with Tom Loosemore and the Heads of Digital in the January snows: my first glimpse of Mike Bracken as a cheeky little fact-finding expedition I set up to Kings Place got a vision of things (and as it turns out, people) to come. Government has lots to learn from The Guardian’s ‘mutualisation‘ strategy, for instance.

2. Following the UKGovcamp & Mailcamp buzz: a big ol’ Govcamp even by global standards, made possible by the team at Microsoft, the inimitable style of Dave Briggs, and a list of sponsors who funded 10 more events and kept the buzz going through the year, including a surprisingly interesting afternoon about email. 2012 looks like there’ll be more of the same, with at least as much in the pot to support more events – and we’re going to be talking email again too.

3. Helping the ‘puffer fishes’: in March, I helped the team at public participation specialists Involve to relaunch their site in WordPress, enabling them to reinvigorate their blogging and make it easier to achieve what they’ve termed the ‘puffer fish’ effect – amplifying the impact of a small, talented team. In May, University Alliance did the same. And in September, Lord Sainsbury put across his vision for the Cambridge Chancellorship with my first little foray into HTML5 – which was probably the clincher  in his narrow victory, I suspect.

4. The Dads & iPads: in the still-early days of the Single Domain project, Simon, Neil and I huddled round a pedestal unit in COI’s Hercules House, trying to figure out what digital engagement might look like as part of the Alphagov project. We didn’t crack it, but a brains trust which came together a few months later helped the ideas along the way, and hopefully we’ll start to see some concrete outputs, and more critical friendship, in 2012.

5. The first commercial outing of The Social Simulator: the Social Simulator platform gives teams realistic experience of the tools, norms and force of the social web, and in 2011 we put dozens of people from emergency services to retailers, transport companies to government press officers through their paces, hitting them with crisis scenarios amplified through Twitter, Facebook and online media. The first big outing of the platform in April was one of the most high-pressure days I can remember, terrifyingly real – and lots and lots of fun. I’m hoping to ramp up the Social Simulator element of Helpful Technology’s work in 2012, including growing our work with emergency services via a new partnership with Likeaword and some social media shenanigans at British APCO 2012.

6. The launch of The Collective Memory: this little service for the British Science Association collates evaluations of public engagement projects around science - there are some neat little touches which deserve a proper blogging one of these days (CSV data downloads, embeddable widgets, front-end user profile management etc), but I mainly remember the late nights learning WordPress’ new custom post and taxonomy functions. If you think WordPress is really a blogging tool, think again.

7. Training the Press Officers: for over a year now, I’ve been part of the team delivering social media training to central government comms teams, alongside my partners-in-crime Simon and Giles from Claremont PR with help from Dan Slee, Dave Briggs and Tim Lloyd. We’ve had some lively sessions on digital engagement, social media PR and using Agile techniques to manage digital projects, but perhaps the highlight for me has been seeing the enthusiasm of press officers – often kept too busy (or sometimes too afraid) by their senior managers to think about the landscape they find themselves in - discovering new tools and techniques and starting to use them.

8. Seeing the Department of Health homepage: in August, the Department of Health switched its main corporate site to WordPress. I have to be somewhat cagey about my involvement for contractual reasons, but let’s just say I was chuffed. The team at DH are, basically, in the zone digitally-speaking right now, turning an oil tanker of a publishing operation into a nimble frigate of engagement, or more accurately, a flotilla of frigates, all guns blazing. I’ll stop now.

9. Getting AAA certification for a WordPress site from Nomensa: in November, work I’d done with DCMS for the eAccessibility Forum went live, including a version of a WordPress theme tweaked to meet the requirements of AAA accessibility, which I talked about at Simon’s inspiring second WordUp Whitehall gathering.

10. Relaunching the FCO blogs: blogging is about more than software, but shifting the FCO’s blogs to WordPress (and pursuing my own daft point of pride by migrating 70+ blogs and building a Disqus exporter as part of the project) makes new things possible and old things easier. To quote the Single Domain mantra – the new platform takes the ‘faff’ out of the process, and showcases the incredible stories of our diplomats in more pictures and languages.

Anyway, enough of the smugness. Time for a mince pie, and a raised glass of mulled wine to the clients and associates who’ve made 2011 a corker. Hope you have a Merry Christmas and a great 2012!

Photo: Paul Clarke

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After last year’s 24tips series, we’re back for 2011. Austerity has bitten even the Tips, so rather than a whole blog post each day in the run up to Christmas, this year I’ll be sharing some of my favourite bookmarks by gradually building up the list below. Sit back, pluck a mince pie from the velvet cushion next to you, and enjoy:

25th December: Teach yourself to program in 2012
If you’re a non-coder, or dabble a bit but fancy a new challenge, why not try taking up coding (or a new language) in 2012? It’s the new Latin, after all. Here’s a good round-up of places to start.

24th December: Start making your own infographics
Every last nonsense press release comes with an infographic these days, but if you want to start making your own (entirely sensible) ones, check out this list of tools and services to get started.

23rd December: Bin the ‘print this page’ button
In 2012, ‘print this page’ buttons will become as embarrassing as blink text and animated gifs: for years now, CSS has supported print stylesheets, which reformat your content neatly to fit the printed page – where navigation and footers just waste ink and those neatly underlined links can’t be clicked on. Here’s a great tutorial on what you need to consider in building your print stylesheet.

22nd December: Generate website screenshot thumbnails
Need to grab a bunch of same-size screenshots, or want to build website previews into your application or theme? Try Thumbalizr, a neat little service which generates thumbnails of a given URL in a range of sizes, with a decent free tier with room to grow if you need more features or requests.

21st December: Don’t get Rickrolled (or worse)
Short URLs are great, but where will you end up if you click on http://helpful.im/sNAiix - a useful page of information? porn? or a phishing site that will hijack your insecure, outdated work web browser? LongURL is there to help – either as a one-off, to help you unscramble that suspicious link a friend has just sent you, or to build into your own sites via an API to help wary visitors see a tooltip about where the link goes before they click.

20th December: check what Googlebot sees
What’s Googlebot (and those other search engine spiders) actually seeing when it comes to your site? Give this Robots.txt checker a spin to spot errors – I just realised I wasn’t disallowing things properly).

19th December: Structure your data
Again, not one to raise on the first date, but a nifty little tool nonetheless: Mr Data Converter asks you to paste in a bunch of data from a spreadsheet and get it back in a variety of other structured formats: HTML, XML nodes, JSON or even a PHP array. Handy for testing, or as a quick way to turn Excel data into a clean HTML table to paste into your CMS. Worth bookmarking.

18th December: Learn Regular Expressions
You won’t regale the locals down at the Fox & Hounds with this particular skill, but on the flip side, knowing how to piece together a good regular expression when needed may free up hours of drinking time. They’re little search patterns – like Find + Replace on steroids – designed to match different characters in a given chunk of text. With them, you can make your server do clever redirects, convert thousands of rows of spreadsheet data in seconds, or build nifty scrapers to grab web content. Learn and practice at RegExr.

17th December: Make your email newsletters nice the easy way
Contrary to popular belief, HTML email is not the spawn of the devil: it’s actually quite a nice way to read stuff on a digital device, when done right. The hassle is in making it look nice, given that email clients are stuck in the browser wars of 2001, and if anything, going backwards. Step forward MailChimp (again) and their neat little tool to take a regular chunk of HTML + CSS and turn all the styles into inline styles within the HTML, so your newsletter can look beautiful in whatever vile email clients your recipients use.

16th December: Make a favicon
People have come to expect those little custom icons in their browser tabs and favourites – save the fiddling in Photoshop and make your favicon by uploading a base image file at Favikon.

15th December: Generate a fake identity
Whaaa? This one’s a bit spooky – say you’re looking to test your new app or profile page with some realistic data. Credit card numbers, actual postcodes, NI numbers, job titles etc – right down a valid UPS tracking number and a QR code. Fake name generator randomly creates worryingly detailed individuals to do just that.

14th December: Try out some A/B testing
While research is great, nothing beats trying out some alternative approaches and working out what actually changes visitor behaviour – like this great case study from Luke at MoJ highlights. Visual Website Optimizer lets you try out two alternative versions of a new feature on your site to see what the impact is on clickthroughs.

13th December: Find harmonious colours
Brand colours only get you so far: often you want to find a lighter tint to use as a background, or want a harmonious contrasting colour which doesn’t exist in the brand palette. Amongst my go-to sources of help for these jobs are the venerable SlayerOffice Color Palette Creator, Elvan Online’s Color Scheme Generator or the lovely Color Scheme Designer. Keep it harmonious, man.

12th December: Learn DNS
You don’t have to be a hardcore developer to need to dabble in DNS management from time to time: whether it’s setting up a domain to work with Google Apps or hosting a WordPress.com blog at your own URL. If you want to spend 10 minutes getting straight on A records vs MX records, TTLs vs priorities, check out DNS University.

11th December: A layer of context for your site
Most people know about robots.txt, the file that tells a search engine about where to go (and not go) on your site. But there’s a bunch more you could look to create, from the occasionally-mentioned humans.txt or .vcf to the little-known p3p.xml.

10th December: Audit that content
Big websites full of overgrown content: where do you start to hack it back? PageCrawler is a nifty little tool to generate a content inventory for a given site, similar to a sitemap, giving you the head start you need in going through the redundant, outdated or trival…

9th December: Find the perfect icon
If you’re looking for an icon – or just want inspiration about how other people have tried to represent ‘sharing’ in icon form – check out iconfinder.com. Icons found are complete with the licence terms, many of which are open and let you reuse the perfect icon you find in your own projects.

8th December: What do you mean it looks funny in Internet Explorer?
Making Things Look Nice in Internet Explorer 6.0 is happily a dying requirement these days, but it still crops up from time to time. I run – count them – four separate virtual machines on my Mac to emulate IE6-9 and testing is often slow and annoying. There’s a lovely cheap and cheerful alternative though: Browserling. Pop in a URL, choose a browser and version, and up pops the screenshot (admittedly with a bit of a delay if their servers are busy, but the basic package is free after all). Brill.

7th December: What’s powering that site?
‘Nice site,’ you think ‘I wonder how that was built. Looks a bit like WordPress and yet…Drupal?’. BuiltWith is a neat little tool (hat tip: Simon, who enjoys that kind detective work) that lets you pop in a URL and get back a summary report about the web server, cacheing technology, CMS and front-end technologies a site is running. You could figure quite a lot of it out from hunting around the page source, but BuiltWith is quicker.

6th December: Combining RSS feeds
There are all kinds of situations in which you need to munge some RSS feeds together: maybe to create a bundle of bloggers, or get results from two different Twitter searches, or maybe to pipe into a dashboard. Anyway, with the recent Not Helpful changes to Google Reader, your options are braving the complexity of Yahoo Pipes or… the simplicity of ChimpFeedr, a byproduct of the guys who made MailChimp. Just paste in the feed URLs you want to combine and, voila.

5th December: The perfectly-proportioned placeholder
You’re testing out a new site template, bored of your WordPress site header (940 x 198px) or looking to find some filler content for that 462 x 201px carousel:  do you faff around in Photoshop to find the right image for the slot? No, you head over to lorempixel.com, where a URL like http://lorempixel.com/462/201 gives you just what you need.

4th December: What’s taking the time to load on your page?
Now that page speed affects Google ranking, it’s worth optimising the images, javascript and HTML in your pages. Here’s a neat little tool from Site Confidence that charts how long each element of your page takes to load, so you can go after the biggies.

3rd December: Get inspired with data visualisations
Infographics and data visualisations are all the rage. There’s bubble charts, and heatmaps and… er… er… lots of others. If you’re looking for ideas about more engaging ways to present your data, check out OCSI’s CLG-sponsored ‘Improving visualisation in the public sector‘ resources, especially their impressive catalogue of examples.

2nd December: Audit your site against SEO guidelines
Here’s a great, concise checklist from SEO experts SEOmoz, which takes you through the steps you need to take to optimise your site for search engine rankings. No magic, just things to do.

1st December: Keep a copy of page exactly as it was
FreezePage lets you pop in a URL and preserve a full copy of a given URL – useful if you spot a news story or blog post you suspect will be deleted, or simply want to archive a page before it gets swallowed up by linkrot. Could be the perfect tool for simple ‘before and after’ demonstrations when screenshots aren’t quite enough.

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I’ve written a piece for the Guardian’s Public Leaders Network on UKGovcamp, as part our plan to broaden the reach of UKGovcamp in 2012:

Informal, social-media driven events like UKGovcamp and the recent WordUp Whitehall have an important role in bringing together SME suppliers, open source specialists and government digital teams to share practical experience and make connections. Participants in the January 2011 UKGovcamp heard a presentation from Defra, which had recently replaced a static 20,000 page corporate website with an open-source platform based on WordPress, working with long-term Govcampers, Puffbox Ltd. Since then, a trend has emerged with the Departments of Health and Transport joining them. DfT alone recently calculated savings of £150,000 per year on CMS licences and a 70% reduction in hosting costs.

One public sector IT conference is much like another. CIOs from large organisations talk about the impact their innovative strategies are having on the bottom line. Vendors talk in buzzwords about their new ‘turnkey’, ‘as-a-service’, ’2.0 products’. Panels of shining case study speakers talk about the successes they’ve achieved… though you come away somehow unsure how to emulate it. The coffee’s OK, the company is passable. It’s a day out of the office.

UKGovcamp isn’t like that. It’s an ‘unconference’, or a free-to-attend event without a predefined agenda, where the sessions are proposed and agreed at the start of the day. They’re written on scruffy post-it notes and added to a big grid on the wall. Govcamp participants consult the grid throughout the day to work out where they want to go next, and there’s plenty of time for the informal hallway chats which, let’s face it, are the best bit of any conference. The so-called Law of Two Feet applies: people move freely between sessions which interest them, tweeting, blogging, snapping pictures and filming as they go. What emerges is always a high-energy, dynamic event which leaves people buzzing with new ideas and connections for weeks afterwards, because they’ve been talking and hearing from their peers inside and outside the public sector, rather than listening to the great and good.

The first UKGovcamp took place in January 2008, initiated by Jeremy Gould, a civil servant from the Ministry of Justice. The 2012 event – the fifth in the series – will be the biggest yet, with around 250 participants over two days. For a second year, Microsoft UK are providing a venue for the event at their London Customer Centre, keeping the Govcampers in food and wifi, and taking the jibes about Internet Explorer and Windows with good grace.

The 2012 event is shaping up to be a new style of Govcamp, following up the traditional mix of presentations and discussions with a new ‘Doing Day’, where participants work on practical solutions to the issues being discussed. Nobody knows quite what will emerge, though it may involve the hacking together of new web apps, collaborating on writing policies or strategies, or training colleagues in new skills.

Govcamping has grown into a year-round movement of smaller events (think: LibraryCamp, Shrop(shire)Camp, Localgovcamp) as well as monthly, informal ‘teacamp’ get-togethers in London and Birmingham where the talk is of social media and the new public sector IT, amidst the tea and Victoria sponge (none of it publicly funded).

If this all sounds a bit hippy and Californian for a UK public sector audience…. well, come and walk a mile in our sandals. The combination of tight budgets, consumerisation and socialisation of enterprise IT, and politicians’ expectations of digital-by-default public services has clearly shaken things up in the last couple of years. The Cabinet Office is leading perhaps the most credible effort in a decade to bring more open source and cloud-based tools into the public sector, tackling the gnarly barriers of procurement, open data and IT security head-on (their open data team are submitting a regular blog to the Public Leaders Network).

In this turbulent new environment, the informality and openness of govcamps are the key to their success. By leaving job titles at the door, mixing people from different sectors with different agendas and experience, they become a source of contacts, inspiration and good old-fashioned moral support which promises to help deliver real change in public sector IT.

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Guardian Public Leaders Network free to receive regular emails on the issues at the top of the professional agenda.

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At Simon’s recent WordUp Whitehall event, I presented on the process I went through on a project with BIS/DCMS to create a discussion platform for the eAccessibility Forum. The site went live yesterday, thanks to the sterling efforts of the DCMS Digital Comms team and their WordPress-smart IT colleagues – with a press release from the minister, no less.

I’ve also contributed a post to the site which describes my journey from ‘not very much’ to ‘still pretty minimal’ knowledge:

The challenge with accessibility guidance is seeing the wood for the trees. As a developer, you need detail about specific colour contrast ratios for example, and suggestions of tools and code samples that might help you. But you also need to retain a sense of what the general principles are too – why accessibility rules are written the way they are, as well as whether or not a particular piece of code meets a checkpoint.

The key point from a developer’s point of view, as I made at WordUp, is that WordPress can be made as accessible as you need it to be – it’s just PHP, HTML and Javascript after all. And even for non-gurus like me, it’s doable.

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It’s one thing to run a pitch, compare proposals, pick one, and turn down the others. It’s sometimes hard on the losers, but people know where they stand: they tried, they didn’t get it.

But sometimes it’s not as clear cut as that. Sometimes, you’re not quite sure what you want to buy, you chat to a potential supplier, they send you a proposal of some kind, you ponder it, things get busy or the landscape changes, and the timing isn’t right to take it forward. Or maybe you’re crystal clear what you want, you get proposals in, and the wheels come off when the boss changes, or the budget’s frozen, or the procurement department get involved. Either way, the glorious battle of the pitch ends not with a bang, but a lingering whimper, as I was reminded of by a crisp little post from a former colleague which randomly re-appeared in my Reader today:

Just as I’d given up on the piece of work that had looked so promising back in September, it comes back to haunt me.  They still want to work with us (and so they should, we’re great) they just need to sort out the incumbent agency and re-draw the spec.  But they LOVE the proposal so could we just bear with them until, maybe, November?  So the waiting continues.  And while I’d love to affect a blithe indifference, I  really, really can’t.

I’ve been on all sides of this unhappy situation – as a supplier, a commissioner and a middle-man. It’s awkward, and leads to dodged phone calls and unreturned emails and all manner of bad feeling and chasing. It’s annoying on the supplier end too for obvious reasons: maybe they thought the deal just needed rubber-stamping, or their commercial director was counting on it to meet a quarterly target.

So if you’re on the buying side of the equation, here’s five strategies for killing off a brief in ways which minimise the collective gnashing of teeth (n.b. if this reads like a pissed-off supplier, I’m really not, and I didn’t mean it to come across that way…):

1. Before you start, make sure both sides are clear about the difference between a speculative enquiry and a formal request for proposal: don’t confuse a chat about ballpark costs and potential strategies with a request for a fully-costed approach which takes a big investment of staff time. Writing it down in an email is a good idea.
2. Writing it down is really important: a verbal brief, from the supplier perspective, is often a PITA. It means all you have to go on are your notes, often based on a stream-of-consciousness conversation with a potential client. If you need to pass it on to a colleague to write up, Chinese whispers come into play. So if you’re buying something, spend 10 minutes jotting down an email with at least (i) a one sentence description of your goal; (ii) a list of the constraints that apply, including time, politics and budget if relevant. Thinking it through in your own head by writing it down really helps refine an idea.
3. When things get stuck, don’t be afraid to say ‘I don’t know’, and proactively: if for some reason the project gets stuck, it’s better to be honest and communicative than definitive and evasive. Answer the phone, send a holding response to the chasing email (or before it arrives) – don’t pretend there’s certainty or likelihood where there isn’t.
4. Be frank about your enthusiasm for the idea and the proposal: sometimes the proposal that materialises from a chat, or even a more formal brief, isn’t quite what you had in mind… but there’s not a simple yes/no decision to be made. Be blunt with your suppliers. Suppliers crave more detailed, first-hand feedback from clients on proposals (especially the unsuccessful ones), because they so rarely get it. If the proposal missed the point, rubbed you up the wrong way, was too expensive, or if on reflection the proposal showed your brief was a hare-brained scheme in the first place, tell them (probably easiest and safest in a phone call).
5. Control the next steps: give negative feedback to some sales guys and they turn defensive (‘Well you never said…’), desperate (‘But we can do that! Give us a chance!’) or annoyingly determined (‘I’ll call you again next week…’), and nobody wants those kind of phone calls. Be very clear what you, as the buyer, want next. ‘Thanks. It’s great to know what you can do. Put me on your mailing list, and I’ll circulate your spec sheet to colleagues in case they can use you’ or maybe ‘I appreciate the effort you went to. The project is pretty much dead now, even though I wish it wasn’t. I will be in touch if it comes back to life’. Don’t call me, I’ll call you.

Note that I didn’t suggest producing a 3 page evaluation matrix so you’re able to give people a post-procurement letter which says they scored 74 out of 100 and thus didn’t win the work. That kind of thing wastes everyone’s time, often out of a desire to cover arses. Similarly, I didn’t suggest writing a 53 page brief (seriously, I’ve had those), asking for everything from TUPE compliance to estimated taxi costs. Volume of briefing material isn’t what’s useful, clarity is. Suppliers don’t read long documents, just like you don’t. Give them a 3 page document that really nails what you’re looking for and the constraints on delivering it, and you’re much more likely to get the proposals you want.

There’s more than a blog post’s-worth of material about what’s wrong with procurement, but you can make it a whole lot less painful by being clear & concise, being a communicative human being, and staying in control.

 Photo credit: Mark Van Laere on Flickr

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The clue was in the 150pt slide Simon put up at the start of the day, but actually I think he was just catalysing a conclusion most of the participants in Whitehall’s second WordUp event came to independently: we’re on the verge of a new era of Sharing.

12 months ago, only Number 10 and Defra were running WordPress-based corporate sites. Now the Departments of Health and Transport are too, accompanied by GCN, FCO, DCMS and old hands BIS and DFID all running significant WordPress projects. Whereas last year, just launching a WordPress site in government felt brave and radical, now it’s virtually mainstream – thanks in no small part to Simon’s blog and organisation of WordUps. The environment for WordPress in Whitehall is certainly benign, with the new open source procurement toolkit, and a man in charge who thinks the old ways are, well, unacceptable.

So we’re at a new, and quite challenging frontier now. Whereas a year or two ago, we sought permission to use this little blogging tool for serious things, now we’re asking ourselves how to make it do those serious things better. How to handle a library of 60,000 legacy PDF files, or structure content across a network of sites using an agreed classification. How to run a network of 50 bloggers more efficiently, or offer users great organisation-wide search. How to build vibrant social networks of government communicators, or create tools accessible to the highest standards.

And the answer to many of these is: it’s time to tackle these challenges as a community, just as the founders of the open source project we’re all using originally intended.

Two different perspectives today came from Pete Westwood, one of only 6 WordPress Lead Developers worldwide, who talked about the philosophy and management structure of the WordPress project; and Paul Gibbs, a Core Developer of BuddyPress, who shared his journey from hobbyist to open source project leader. Whereas the rest of us mainly talked about making WordPress jump through hoops, they presented it as a project – a community, and an often personal journey – rather than just software.

And that’s the challenge for WordPress in Whitehall: whether and how to become Whitehall in WordPress.

The plugins, themes, widgets and thinking on show today were impressive, but there’s clearly scope to help solve each others’ problems more quickly, effectively and cheaply by sharing what we’ve learned and created. And if the Whitehall community can benefit, why not the wider WordPress community which has provided us with the tools we use? Collaboration – through submitting bug reports and patches, writing reviews, rating plugins, contributing plugins, creating translations and documentation – is baked into the core of WordPress, and the tools to make it easy, like Trac and the Plugin Directory, are there waiting for our input. The White House has done it, albeit for Drupal.

But it’s not a no-brainer. Money and human resource are tight. Timescales in government are often challenging, and talented developers are in demand. On the outside, those who supply WordPress to government are often small agencies and freelancers themselves, with projects to finish and new business to win.

Contributing to open source projects takes time, patience and commitment. The benefits are often indirect. It’s hard to measure the satisfaction of seeing your code appreciated and reused, and it’s a visionary boss who recognises the value in spending paid time on it.

Of course government stands to save money through greater use of open source, and it’s great to hear repeated commitments to promote reuse across the public sector. But what would be truly visionary would be to embrace the ethos of open source itself and commit the time of civil servants and part of the budget of commissioned projects to giving back to the open source projects which made them possible. That’s what Simon was on about when he caused a bit of a stir.

Sharing code on your own site is a start, and using code-sharing platforms like Github is better, but let’s go the whole hog and contribute back to the projects themselves. I’m making that my early resolution for 2012.

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