• Why I’m going dark for purdah – Steph explains why he won’t be blogging during the election period. (I won’t be writing about work stuff during that time either for the same reasons, but intend to resume blogging about other interests and this could be a good time to do it).
• Richard Sambrook: Big Thinker – on how journalism has changed in the last 35 years and where it’s going next
• Opening Times – via @alistairreid, all UK opning times in one place.
• The benefits of blogging – DFID’s Julia on the back story of their frontline bloggers.
• Uncorrected Evidence 219 – Matt Tee evidence to PAC on gov comms. My Twitter doc gets a brief mention.
• Radical shift in Government ICT will save £3.2 billion annually in public money – Get in!
• Slides from GovCamp: Making the Political Sell – Simple messages for digital workers in government about where to focus the lines of attack.
• UKGovCamp as the future – “I suspect we are moving from “Homebrew Computer Club” towards “MS-DOS 1.0″, and as our small world grows, there are a few fractures along which it could splinter…”
• UK Govcamp 2010 – Sessions – Write-ups galore from the recent UK govcamp.
• Apps On the Move – What Does .Gov.UK do Next? – Some pretty good app development ideas here.
• Minister wants departments merged – Northern Ireland Minister proposing equivalent to merger of BERR and DIUS to create BIS.
• Google Reader Lets You Subscribe to Any Page on the Web – that is, pages without RSS.
• OMG: brains can’t handle all our Facebook friends – Dunbar’s upper limit of 150 meaningful relationships is the same online.
• In The Eye Of The Storm: Can Government Do Beta? Direct.gov Travel News – A constructive critique of Directgov’s travel news app.
• Amplicate – Making Your Opinion Count – A brand monitoring tool with a black or white outlook. (Everything either rocks or sucks).
• Fingertips transcription services – Reliable, cheap transcription services.

This is just a quick one to send you over here, to the team BIS tumblog Alistair set up, where I liveblogged my notes from two sessions at Govcamp 2010 today (alongside posts from @alistairreid and @lesteph). Namely:

• Setting up a group for public sector web professionals – progress from Socitm and how to get involved.
• Digital campaigns in government – how they are planned, who owns them, what the challenges are.

It was a great day, and a packed schedule, in the awesome venue that is Google UK – lending just the right kind of innovative atmosphere.

Open data was a dominant theme this year, and I dipped in and out of several interesting discussions, not least of all Richard Stirling from the Cabinet Office talking about the launch of data.gov.uk, merely 2 days after it went live to huge acclaim.

Inevitably I missed (and am about to miss – there’s a few sessions to go as I post this and head home to prior engagements) loads of good stuff. I am depending on good write-ups from others – especially the sessions on what digital means for the future of press officers, personal blogging, and defending digital innovation in a climate of cuts. I’ll add links here as I find them.

Meanwhile the Twitter stream is still going strong.

Updates:

• Steph ‘the machine’ Gray has blogged about his and Anthony’s session on being brave in an atmosphere of cuts. Awesome.
• Check out Paul Clarke’s great photos of the day on Flickr

Updates II:

• Organiser supremo (and now Epic Visionary?) Dave Briggs has blogged his reflections and a load of links here, including a de-brief interview with himself and Jeremy Gould
• Sharon O’Dea has posted her reflections and notes of the Socitm web professionals session, which are far better than mine
• Kevin Campbell-Wright has blogged here including a few notes from the session on journalism

Updates III:

• Dave’s updating his list now, so I don’t have to. Go see uncle Briggsy.

A lot of my focus at work lately has been about how we publish to the web – who’s doing it, with what tools, and to what standard.

While the boss is focusing on what goes up when and how to make it more engaging, I’m mainly working on three things:

• building the platform: merging two big government sites into one, as a shared service to merge many more
• building the people: making sure we’ve got an efficient and professional content management operation
• building the process: setting up governance to ensure quality and best value for the organisation and customer

Underpinning all three of these, I’ve been working in my spare time on a checklist of quality criteria for web pages.  (You know me, I love a good document).  Feel free to grab it in PDF or Excel if you’re interested in taking a look:

• Quality assurance checklist (Excel)
• Quality assurance checklist (PDF)

I’ve got my doubts about its practical application day to day, so I thought I’d share it here and get your feedback. It builds on work I did at my last place, owes a teensy bit to the much meatier Directgov equivalent, and has had some input from the guys in my team. But it’s also only a draft, was written outside work hours and is in no way an official publication from my employer, OK?

Here’s what I’m trying to achieve with this, if it flies:

• make it clear to everyone who creates or edits pages on the site what’s expected of them
• provide a basis for light-touch quality checking of their work
• bring a consistent and fair approach to giving feedback on skills and output
• show senior colleagues the breadth and importance of proper web content management
• help audit incoming content when sites are merged

So what say you? Useful or likely to be ignored? Too detailed or not detailed enough?

(This is a lazier than usual post for a lazy New Year’s Day. Normal service will resume when the year is in full swing…)

I don’t know about you, but I can’t so much as glance at someone else’s iPhone without wanting to grab it and have a nose at what applications they’ve installed. So for any fellow members of Appaholics Anonymous who read this blog, here’s what’s cluttering up my iPhone* on the dawn of the new decade:

Social web apps

• Tweetie 2 – the Twitter client to rule them all. Beats its major competitors (Tweetdeck, Twitterific) hands down on all fronts if you ask me. Only one tiny niggle: a bit too didactic on the etiquette of retweeting.
• Boxcar – does the one thing Tweetie 2 doesn’t, and does it very well: sends you push notifications of Twitter replies and DMs. Alerts you about Facebook too if you want. (Nah)
• Facebook – of course, Facebook. Gotta have the Facebook. The app can be a bit clunky and hard to find your way around though (a good companion to the full site, then) …but it beats trying to use Safari.
• LinkedIn – I mostly use it to accept new connections and supplement my iPhone contacts, but you can do pretty much most things you can do with the full site.
• Touch BB – a PHPBB forum client for iPhone. I use this every day, hooked up to a private forum I run for some old uni friends.
• Wordpress – if you’ve got a WP blog, you need this app – it’s great for deleting spam comments while away from a computer, editing existing posts or drafts, or drafting (short) new ones.
• Huddle – to be honest, I’m yet to have much call to use this. But as a member of several Huddle communities, it’s bound to come in useful soon.
• Red Delicious – I use this app to access my Delicious bookmarks and a bookmarklet in Safari to add new ones. Am sure there are better ways of doing this, any recommendations?
• Skype – one of the first apps I installed and I’ve never used it. I’ve never been sure why I need Skype, but am prepared to be convinced and so I keep it installed in readiness for my VOiP epiphany.
• Audioboo - as per Skype, I’ve barely used this but can’t bring myself to delete it.
• Photoshop.com mobile – easy to use and elegant app, useful for cropping photos and applying basic effects.
• Flickr – for quick access to my own photos on Flickr and to search for others, e.g. to use on this blog.
• Shozu – a powerful media sharing app that works with Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and more – and which I have barely begun to use. Keeping it to give it more of a trial run sometime.

Productivity apps

• Things – my ‘to do’ list app of choice. Much simpler than Omnifocus, mush better looking than ToDo. Syncs nicely with the desktop version over Wi-Fi. Only wish there was a cloud equivalent too.
• Evernote – for more substantial list making and occasionally taking photos of phone numbers on tradesmen’s vans.
• Quick Office - MS Word, Excel and that in your pocket.
• SimplemindX - An intuitive mind mapping tool.
• Pingdom – for checking server status of your websites.

News/content apps

• Newsie / Byline / Mobile RSS – I’m running these three clients for Google Reader and am yet to settle on any one which does it all (sharing, starring, offline reading, tweeting, emailing, unsubscribing, recategorising…) Your advice welcome.
• Independent / Guardian / Sky news / Thomson Reuters News Pro - I dip into one or more of these virtual ‘papes on my commute most days.
• Mashable - geek news on the move. I prefer using this sort of dedicated app to just using the RSS feed, but don’t ask me why!
  
• Instapaper – where saved webpages go to die, if I’m honest.

Travel and location apps

• Mini A-Z / Tube Deluxe / London Bus - aka the Knowledge.
• Directgov travel news – good work, fellas. Well worth checking before any long journey.
• AddLee.com – the best taxi firm in the world, in your pocket.
• The Trainline / National Rail - train times, bookings and live departure boards.
• Around me / ATM Hunter / Urbanspoon – pretty reliable for finding nearby banks, hotels, cafés, restaurants etc
• Fix my street – MySociety’s tool for complaining to the council about graffiti and potholes. Never used it yet but you never know.
• Google Earth – mainly for impressing old people. (Hello, dad!)

Music

• Last.fm – personal radio and streaming music; my music discovery engine of choice.
• Shazam – for identifying songs and buying them, and impressing old folk some more.
• In the Mood – for tweeting about what’s playing. Probably a bit annoying.

Telly & film

• Sky+ – lets me schedule my TV recordings from anywhere. Utterly awesome.
• Radio Times – because, although I wish there were more choice in the TV mag market, and in spite of it being utterly obsessed with Dr f**king Who, ‘RT Choice’ is probably the most reliable filter of decent quality telly around.
• Flixster – handy for seeing trailers of upcoming movies and keeping lists of stuff you’d like to see.
• Movie Genie - an IMDB client.
• [LoveFilm - doesn't exist yet, but I'm told it's coming. I love LoveFilm's online DVD rental service but an iPhone app for managing my rental list would make it so much better.]

Shopping

• Red Laser - another one for impressing people, this fun app lets you scan the barcodes of almost anything and get price comparison results for buying it online.
• Amazon / eBay UK – making it dangerously easy to spend my money.
• Ocado – yet to use this Waitrose online grocery shopping app, but if there was a Tesco or Morrissons equivalent I’d use it in a flash.

Reference

• Yell.com / Dictionary.com / Wikipanion / iTranslate / All recipes UK – these do what they sound like they do, and get you there in fewer steps than firing up Safari.
• Musée de Louvre – because it’s free and maybe I’ll be bored enough on a plane one day to improve myself wiv a bit of culcha.

Games

These are the keepers at the moment:

• Jewel Quest / iBlast Moki / Fling / Puzzle Bobble - Great puzzle games I never tire of and may never delete.
• Ravensword / Spider / Rolando 1 and 2 - Adventure and role player games.
• I Dig It Explorations / Robocalypse / The Settlers / Worms - Simulation and strategy type games.
• Fantastic Contraption / Crazy Machine / Crayon – Highly addictive physics games.
• Star Defense / Sentinel 2 / Tower Madness – Tower defense games.
• Speed Forge / 3d Rollercoaster Madness – Racing games.
• Scrabble / Hold’em / Table tennis / Arkanoid / Smart Go – Classic games.

Toddlertainment

Tried and tested on my two year old:

• Birds UK – bird calls and songs of all common British birds. Teaching daddy a thing or two in the process.
• Dora saves the Crystal Kingdom – and rides on a rainbow slide while she’s at it. And shouts a lot.
• Bubblewrap – mindless popping.
• Preschool Adventure - six activity games for toddlers.
• Balloonimals lite – inflate and pop balloon animals, without hiring a clown.
• Little Red Hen – the classic story, with animal noises.
• Pocketphonic – alphabet games
• Peekaboo Barn – animal noises
• iTot cards – great set of digital flash cards

Hmm, that’s a much longer list than it seems just from flicking through the screens on my phone.

And yet… with over 100,000 apps in the app store and counting I’m bound to be missing some gems. Personal recommendation counts for a lot against those odds, so I hope you’ve found my list useful and would really love to hear your suggestions too.

(H)appy new year and here’s to the next ten years of jaw-dropping advances in web and mobile technology. I’m rubbish at predictions but feel pretty confident in saying all this stuff will probably just look like Pong in comparison to what we’ll be using in 2020. (And my son will be better at using it than me).

*other smart phones are available. Hold your tongues, Android fans, I’m not an Apple fanboy.

• The state of the UK gov blogosphere – Great post by Dave Briggs.
• Why websites matter less and less – “Summary: Our audiences will increasingly find ways to use our web content that are more convenient than visiting our website. This won’t reflect well in our stats, but we shouldn’t fight it.”
• Rock Solid HTML Emails – Dead handy post about creating well crafted HTML emails that work in all clients (via @lesteph)
• Mockingbird | Wireframes on the fly – A nifty online wireframer (via @wilcallaghan)
• Contrast Analyser 2.2 – Free contrast checker for testing accessibility of your website colours.
• Millicent Pro – From the Audioboo people, a nifty tool for professional video (via @alistairreid)
• cardboard toys | kid-Eco toys – Very cool recycled cardboard play houses, castles, wigwams and so on – cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the plastic junk from Toys R Us.
• Run-Rabbit-Runs – Good source of chicken (and rabbit, if you must) houses and runs.
• bernetblog.ch » Blog Archiv » Twitter-Tipps: So macht man ein Konzept – britische Vorlage – Blmey, that’s me! Apparently the “no 1 blog in switz (tiny country) for media, pr, online comm, her translated to German”
• Mythbusters – Myths about the Civil Service. Busted.
• XEN Carousel « WordPress Plugins – Via Dave Briggs, this is a very nifty, simple rotating news/image carousel for WP.
• IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) Resources – A necessary evil.
• Classifications: Office for National Statistics – Statistical classifications and taxonomies, like occupation and sector.
• Can I have a new website? – Stephen Hale is blogging brilliantly so I don’t have to.
• More cynical sniping at Twitter costs – Ahem. I’m saying nothing.

Knowing what your customers are thinking is the first step towards making them happy. But how do you know what’s in their heads (without being Derren Brown)?

I’m some way closer to being able to read my website users’ minds than I was this time last week – thanks to two unrelated events which turned out (maybe supernaturally?) to be related after all.

The first was Gerry McGovern’s masterclass on web management. An inspiring, often amusing rallying call to public sector web managers to manage their sites properly: by identifying the top tasks users come to the site to do, and testing and re-testing those tasks continually to improve user satisfaction.

That’s a crude summary of a packed day’s course which has left a big impression on me. (If you get the chance, go). Among the many points which hit home were these:

• your website visitor is horribly impatient, even irascible, and 100% focused on a single task: find X or do Y
• in this mood, your website visitor is not going to think laterally – if they’re looking for ‘procurement’ and you’ve written ’suppliers’ they won’t even see the option is there
• using the right words in the right places is critical, so people can find the content in the first place (by searching and navigating) and understand it when they get there
• failing to get this right is almost worse than having not tried – an incomplete customer task is very bad PR*
• web managers (unlike other shopkeepers) are physically distant from their customers and more closely aligned with head office concerns and language – an imbalance which needs to be redressed proactively

(*Incidentally, writing this just reminded me of a visit to WHSmiths last Saturday – a non-virtual example of this customer service sin: chaotic, frustrating, and probably not long for this world).

At the second event, a meeting at Google, I heard about some incredibly useful tools for finding the right words which will help me put some of McGovern’s ideas into action. Most of these were new to me and might be to you too:

• The Wonder Wheel – explore a clickable mind map of the most popular related search terms from the results page of any Google search by clicking ‘Show options’ then ‘wonder wheel’. Great for a quick hunch-check or visual demonstration to your big cheese of how strongly one thing connects to another in the audience’s minds.
• Google Keyword Tool - type in a search term and see a long list of related searches and their relative popularity right now, or enter a URL to get rich keyword recommendations based on your site’s (or some other site’s) content. This does what the wonder wheel does plus a bit extra, in more depth and detail.
• Google Insights for Search - compare the relative popularity of search terms over time, correlate peaks and troughs to news events, and see suggestions for related popular search terms. Oh, and make funky embeddable real-time graphs like the one below.
• Google Ad Planner – enter any URL to see the demographics of that site’s user base, the things they most frequently search for on Google, and the other sites they visit based on all the data Google gathers from various sources. Wow. (And a bit Bwah-ha-ha).
• Insights for audiences and YouTube insights – eye-popping insights on video consumption and searches by different demographics, and (for logged in YouTube users only) amazingly useful graphs showing the levels of audience interest in any given video rising and falling as it plays, based on user behaviour while watching (pausing, rewinding, giving up and doing something less boring instead).

These tools are all free, enormously powerful and allow you to do seriously useful things beyond just buying up keywords for SEM. Like, just for starters:

• check why a particular page might not be performing as well as expected
• prove a point to a content author about the impact of organisation-centric language
• build a campaign (or write a better brief to a PR agency)
• identify sites your target audience is most likely to be using and place your ads there/send the digital engagement boys round (but less aggressively than that sounds, obviously).

Now shouldn’t you be crossing my palm with silver or something? I accept chocolate coins.

I’m a big fan of Gerry McGovern

I’ve read his New Thinking newsletter avidly for years and, in a couple of weeks’ time, I’m going to his masterclass on managing effective task-based websites. I can’t wait.

If you haven’t heard of him, Gerry’s a usability guru with a particular emphasis on writing and managing website content based on the tasks that users want to perform and – crucially – the words they carry in their heads at the time.

It’s a narrow focus and a simple message (pretty much how good web content should be, right Gerry?) So it’s remarkable how he never fails to find new and inspiring things to say on the topic.

Partly, he does this through interesting similes and juxtaposition. Occasionally, these veer on the bonkers.

Here’s my selection of the best and worst (they’re the same) McGovern metaphors from the past year’s worth of New Thinking. Just crying out to be made into a desk calendar, if you ask me..

• Nov 2008: Migrating website content is like pouring sour old milk into a shiny new jug
• Dec 2008: Browsing a badly structured site is like hunting for a toilet in a shopping mall
• Jan 2009: Hiding detailed information behind vague marketing spiel is like mistaking the web for chocolate. Or something (this one was a bit too obscure)
• Feb 2000: Paging through search results is like altitude sickness up Everest
• Mar 2009: The visual impact of good website design is like being frightened by a lion, being sold margarine and falling in love with Dyson vacuum cleaners
• Apr 2009: Facebook rides roughshod over its users like Napoleon on horseback
• May 2009: Aiming to increase web traffic is like wanting more people to catch swine flu
• Jun 2009: Senior internal stakeholders for your website are like needy children
• Jul 2009: Marketing communicators are like dog trainers
• Aug 2009: Announcing your website redesign is like telling Tony Soprano about your new kittens
• Sep 2009: Resisting new ideas is like going to an Irish funeral or doing strange and dangerous things with ovens
• Oct 2009: Links are New Yorkers
• Nov 2009: Using text on black backgrounds on web pages is like trying to read a grey book and using subtle link colours is like hiding roadsigns behind a curtain

And – like all good desk calendars – how about a favourite quote or three?

From: How many webpages can one person manage?

Some web teams are based on a distributed publishing model. In such a model the web team is often not responsible for any pages, but merely facilitates other parts of the organization to publish. This model has failed miserably in every organization in which I have seen it implemented in.

And from: Writing killer web headlines and links

There is nothing worse on the Web than welcoming people, and telling them about how you’re so delighted to announce the launch of, or about how on your website they will be able to find, or about how it’s now even easier to… Web content is brutal and to-the-point. Lead with the need. Don’t get to the point. Start with the point.

And best of all, from: How to create clear web navigation menus

“Come, little links, gather round,” said the designer to the links. And the little links gathered round, all happy and expectant.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” the designer said.
“Good news first,” the little links chirped.
“Well, the good news is that we think you’re very special links and because you’re so special we’re going to call you Quick Links,” said the designer.
“Quick Links!” they shouted in unison. Then a silence fell and a little voice was heard to say:
“Master designer, does that mean the other links are Slow Links?”
“Well no,” the designer replied. “It’s just that you’re special.”
“What’s the bad news, master designer?” another link asked.
“The bad news …” and the designer paused. “The bad news is that we’re putting you in the right column.
“The right column!” they said with horrified voices. A long silence.
“Bad master designer,” a disgruntled little voice said.
“Yes, bad master designer,” another said. “Nobody looks in the right column.”
“But you’re Quick Links! You’re special,” the designer said as the links began to close in.

If he comes out with any more gems like these at the class, I’ll be sure to write them down.

• BBC Democracy Live – Nifty live political TV and news thingummy via Simon Dickson.
• JobFact – community of anonymous employees – Compare your salary anonymously.
• Optimal Workshop – online card sorting tool – Fantastic and free online IA toys.
• Cybersoc.com: guide to using social media (in 6500 words) – Headshift on the basics.
• We don’t want to read your website. We want to write it - “Government should do nothing about us without us” – including running websites?
• New look FCO website – Stephen Hale on the new FCO website and see also FCO’s modest redesign for a healthy debate.
• Pesky People - because digital access is a human right (UN 2006).
• Twitter insights: Blaine Cooke @ teacamp – Q&A with one of the early architects of Twitter (so that’d be back when it used to fall over a lot, right?)
• The Social Media Marketing Blog: Recent Twitter Statistics – Useful presentation fodder.
• Mozilla Raindrop: Is the Intelligent Inbox Coming? – I live in hope.
• The myth of engaging with everyone /The myth of easy engagement. Who should participate and how? – Digital engagement isn’t about reaching everyone, and decisions are made by those who turn up. So how do you get the right people to turn up? This blog-off between Dave and Tim is required reading.
• Essential drum & bass albums! – Because you’re never too old.

As trailed, here come the notes of my contribution to the discussion about e-consultation at Government 2010 last Thursday.

The session’s title was “Digital engagement is everyone’s job: formal and informal consultation online” and also on the panel were Harry Metcalfe (Dextrous Web), David Price (Debategraph) and Kate Davies from YouGov (ably replacing Tom Watson at the 11th hour).

What follows are my speaking notes pretty much unedited, including the bits I didn’t quite manage to say. As you’d expect the more inspiring stuff came out during the audience Q&A, so if this post piques your interest you might want to check out the ensuing debate in the footage when it’s uploaded or get a flavour from the live blog.

Edit: Harry’s now also written up his reflections here and the video has been posted. Here it is:

My perspective

• In the past 5-6 years, I’ve spent a fair bit of time at the coal face trying to help ministers, policymakers and govt comms folk engage their internal and external audiences using digital tools; from launching the first cabinet minister blog for David Miliband in 2005 to writing that 20 page (~259 tweet) strategy for how to engage via Twitter.
• Digital engagement is (still) currently being driven primarily by teams like mine. We act as ambassadors for gov 2.0 and do stuff like setting up tools and supporting civil servants in using them (e.g. we help the Perm Sec at BIS run an intranet blog to inspire and consult staff; we helped the low carbon business opportunities team seek views on a vision document by running a commentable version online; and so on)

The vision

Digital engagement/consulting online should be part of everyone’s job, because:

• Conversations about government policy can’t be delegated. When opening up a dialogue with citizens it needs to be a genuine opportunity to influence decision makers. That means ministers, senior officials, not web teams.
• People are having useful discussions about issues of govt policy right now, and ignoring them is riskier to reputation than joining in. So PR folk, stakeholder managers and officials need to monitor and join in, not web teams.
• There’s just no excuse any more not to seek or check people’s views before making a decision that affects their lives. Digital tools now make it easy; people expect their views to be heard almost regardless of where they post them. Govt needs to wake up to this, and fast. That sort of change needs to come from everyone, not web teams.

The reality

• People have jobs already. Busy ministers and officials can be forgiven for thinking it’s my job and that of my team to communicate online for them. Challenge is to understand their world, the pressures they’re under, the things they want to achieve, and show how digital can help them do that quicker/better.
• Expectations need managing about the work involved and likely return. Evidence base is nascent, success is not a given, online is not a panacea to take the pain out of consulting. Build it and they might come, but only if you promote it. Quality and quantity of response varies. Vocal minority can flood a discussion and silent majority may never be heard. How do you filter the noise? How to you close the feedback loop?
• We are some considerable way off this being everyone’s job. Whitehall still runs on paper. Traditional consultation methods still work, still need doing, especially in context of digital inclusion. Online is additional, not alternative, and therefore seen as a luxury and comes at a cost.

The future

• If people don’t know it’s their job already they will soon – it’s not going away. Digital engagement roles/teams like the ones at BIS can be found in a handful of other central govt depts. The Director for Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, is driving this at high level from Cabinet Office. Pincer move of bottom up and top down forces driving a culture change.
• Demand is now loud and clear, and if govt doesn’t open up discussions others will force it upon them. The Writetoreply commentable remix of the Digital Britain interim report was one example of this. [Later in the conference, Tom Steinberg spoke about MySociety's Fix My Street, Write To Them, and Harry's Tell Them What You Think etc. which are the classic examples of this in action].
• But what we need to do is avoid the temptation just to evangelise at events like this and focus instead on how to integrate/embed into business of government. Need to ensure it’s authentic consultation, real engagement, with clear and focused objectives and clarity around what difference citizen participation is going to make.

- Ends -

Thanks to insightful questions from a savvy audience, the discussion which followed touched on all the issues the panel hoped it might, including:

• the need for root and branch culture change and the role internal collaboration can play in accelerating that
• the value and meaning of the word ‘consultation’ itself when it’s primarily govt asking all the the questions (this is what we think, do you agree? / thanks but we’ll do it anyway)
• what role technology might need to play in filtering and structuring mass conversations – which to me seems the bleeding edge for this stuff right now, and an area which is showing some promising innovation.

I got a great deal out of being part of this discussion, not to mention the rest of the event. Thanks again to Jeff, Harry and Steph for the opportunity.

Image credit: Slim Jim

But as others observed and the Twitter buzz testifies, today’s Government 2010 shindig was a best of breed conference about open government with a great line-up, packed agenda well orchestrated live stream and live blog for those who couldn’t be there.

I was part of Harry Metcalfe’s panel discussion, the subject of which was ‘Digital engagement is everyone’s job’. I’ll be posting my notes and reflections in full at the weekend, but in the meantime, just so you know, the gist is: yes, it is.

But recently Croydon Council sent round an enthusiastic man with terrible B.O. to do a home energy review, and kitted me out with a load of cool energy saving stuff I never knew existed.

So, for my contribution to Blog Action Day 09, I’m going to take you on a tour of my house. This is stuff you can stick in your house too, stuff which is cheap, easy to install and saves you money while doing a teensy little bit more than you’re already doing to save the world.

1. Water saving shower head

Here’s mine. They cost around a tenner, come in all shapes and sizes, have a powerful flow just as luxurious as your normal shower but save about 4 litres of water every minute. Haahoo optional.

2. Chimney balloons

If you have fireplaces, you have draughts. Chimney balloons are like double-glazing for disused fires, and – as a bonus – also stop dead things falling onto your carpet. You can buy them here or here for £20.

3. Wireless energy monitor

You’ve heard of these. They show how much energy you’re using and the cost per minute. The wirelessness means you can carry them around the house and see what happens when you switch things on or off. Here’s me, switching on the kettle (a YouTube sensation in the making):

Mine’s an OWL, which appears to have won plaudits from pundits, though others are available. From £25.

4. Radiator panels

These are bits of moulded, shiny plastic which you stick behind your radiators on any external walls to reflect the heat back in, and come in packs of 5 or more for about £20. They save 80kg of CO2 a year and cut heating costs by about £10, according to this. And they make your house look a bit more like a spaceship, which is what we’re all striving for after all.

5. Low energy halogen bulbs

My house is full of tacky Argos spotlights, and for the two years I’ve lived here (and not got around to swapping them) I’ve been buying evil 50w bulbs thinking there was no alternative. But wait…

Croydon Council to the rescue! (A phrase not often heard). You can get these energy efficient GU10s which suck up less than a sixth of the power and last ten times as long. Hard to find in shops but very easy to find online for around a fiver.

And that concludes our little tour.

If there is a serious point to make here, it’s this. Tackling climate change needs everyone to switch to a low carbon lifestyle, and that’s a gargantuan ask. Innovative products like these are therefore absolutely vital to stimulate consumer demand by making it easy, affordable and desirable to make the change. They’re a key part of the transition to a low carbon world which – to quote from the government strategy:

will transform our whole economy. It will change our industrial landscape, our supply chain, and the way in which we all work and consume. For as well as being an environmental and economic imperative, the shift to a low carbon economy is also an economic opportunity. Businesses and consumers can benefit from significant savings through energy and resource efficiency measures. And supplying the demands of the low carbon economy offers a significant potential contribution to economic growth and job creation in Britain, not only as part of the short term economic recovery, but also through sustainable growth over the decades to come.

You can follow and have your say about what the government’s doing to stimulate all this here, or for a load more stuff you personally can do about climate change, have a look at the Blog Action Day site and Directgov’s Act on CO2 pages.

• The wraps come off data.gov.uk! – Harry Metcalfe posted this exclusive preview of data.gov.uk – the UK government’s free open data store, currently in private beta.
• Teach us a Lesson – Crowdsourcing the directory of learning – BIS and Becta competition seeking ideas to create a user-friendly national index of informal adult learning opportunities. Best ideas stand a chance of winning a share of the £25,000 funding pot to take them forwards.
• Explaining social media to senior managers by Michele Ide-Smith – “People are having conversations about us online, but we are not part of those conversations” / “If we ignore conversations we may be risking more than if we get involved” …and other efficient phrases I wish I’d written.
• Online Database of Social Media Policies – Via a colleague at work, this is a great list of SM governance policies.
• ZX Spectrum Games – ZXSpectrum.net – retro gaming heaven.
• www.philipsvs.com – Interesting use of Twitter for a crowdsourced marketing campaign by Philips
• 15 iPhone Apps to Tame the Kids – When my son’s beyond the age of chucking precious objects against the wall, this might come in handy.
• Twitter is tomorrow’s email… technology adoption in organisations -Ross’s great post from a while ago about the stages of technology adoption.

Whitehall websites are built on shifting sands.

Reshuffles, changes to the machinery of government, and (until 2011) convergence projects mean that hundreds of pages of content could, at almost any time, suddenly have to be deleted from one government site and added (in suitably re-purposed form) to another.

With that in mind I’ve been thinking about different approaches to website information architecture (IA) lately, as my team and I plan a new BIS site for launch early next year. It’s my hope that, by planning for those kinds of change now, we can limit the risk to the site if or when they occur.

The typical IA design approach, the one I’m most familiar with, is to run card-sorting exercises with a cross-section of the site’s audience to drive out a magic number of top level thematic headings. The new Defra website does this well, with four over-arching policy themes displayed in tabs across the primary navigation. The FCO, DH, Cabinet Office and HMT sites do similar things. CLG, DCSF and the Home Office offer a slight variation with sub-sites for different communities of interest. The principle is the same across all these sites and millions like them and it looks something like this:

This strict hierarchy approach has many advantages. To list just a few:

• It’s audience-focused, giving different groups of people all the stuff that’s relevant to them in one place.
• It tells the story of how everything fits together. Strategy leads to programmes which lead to projects and the context is always clear.
• It’s devolution friendly, allowing for major sections to be maintained by separate parts of the organisation.

But, depending on execution, it can also have drawbacks:

• It can be a rabbit warren to navigate, with too many opportunities for wrong turns and dead ends.
• It can create ‘nomansland’ intro pages which nobody’s really responsible for, because card-sort results are (rightly) seldom a mirror image of management structures.
• It risks becoming Swiss cheese when, for whatever reason, content needs to be hived off to some other website or just plain deleted.

By adopting elements of a more multi-dimensional hierarchy approach, I think it might be possible to have all of the pros of a strict hierarchy and none of the cons. It would look more like this:

In this approach you would start by creating an almost entirely flat IA, so that each discrete area, initiative or campaign gets its own section or article listed at the same level within the site, without imposing any structural hierarchy. In other words any chunk of content that forms a coherent, stand-alone topic, big or small, would get its own entry in the list, its own landing page, and as many child pages as needed to tell the story.

Over the top of this pool of equally-weighted topics you could then overlay various ways of finding and filtering the information – potentially as many ways as users need. For instance:

1. By A-Z - driven by page titles and allowing for alternative or synonymous terms
2. By theme – driven by tagging each chunk with terms from a preset list of themes
3. By recently updated - populated from system metadata with an override for trivial edits

Using the themes data, you could also serve up the same list of topics:

1. By audience – separate lists of content for each segment of the site’s user base
2. By PSAs and DSOs – listing workstreams that underpin each strategic target or objective
3. By Minister – associating ministers with the specific policies they are responsible for

…and potentially more ways besides.

Compared to the strict hierarchy approach, it seems this model would continue to give users access to everything they need in one place via the themes filter; would be just as effective in providing the link between specific work areas and the grand strategy; and would be even more devolution-friendly with topics corresponding neatly to the teams responsible.

What’s more, it would reduce the number of clicks from homepage to policy detail, simplify navigation all round and make it much easier to port content into or out of the site without requiring a root and branch re-think of the IA.

So there it is – a more futureproof IA. What do you think? Have you tried this before and come across pitfalls – and ways to avoid them – that I should know about? I’d really appreciate any feedback you may have.

Image credits: Sandcastles by Fernando; IA diagrams by web design from Scratch.

The theme is:

Digital Engagement is Everyone’s Job: Formal and Informal Consultation on the Web.

I’ll be saying a bit about my experience and observations from the front line, setting up tools and supporting policy-makers in using them. Public appearances are pretty rare for me, so I’d welcome any speaking tips from the more seasoned presenters among you, as well as to know what issues in particular you think I should cover off in my short talk.

The rest of the day I’m expecting to hear to some inspiring stuff by the looks of the fantastic agenda. The event will be streamed live – register for free here.

Here’s organiser Jeff Peel’s introductory video:

Defra and BIS quietly rolled out new corporate sites today.

And they’re both vast improvements on the old ones – which were bland, text heavy and barely navigable in comparison as these ‘before’ screenshots show:

Although to be fair, that’s the Defra homepage from 2001 and the DTI homepage in 1997 and at the time I’m sure they were pretty cutting edge. Since then, both sites have evolved along with the medium itself and today’s relaunches are just the latest of many gradual improvements.

BIS interim site refresh

For BIS, today’s update moves us forward from the interim website we put up rapidly and at minimal cost straight after the merger of BERR and DIUS. The aim was to improve the design, add useful content about BIS’s mission, ministers and structure, make it easier for our audiences to find policy info, publications and priority programmes.

We also added some behind-the-scenes trickery, courtesy of Steph, to offer news and speeches in ways that make sure they are as readable as poss by humans and machines alike; and to capture any dodgy URLs constructed from old BERR and DIUS ones and redirect them to the right place. I’d best leave it to him to tell you about how that all works.

In summary, this refresh takes us one step closer towards the unified, user-focused website which we’re working on at full pelt to be completed by March 2010. (It had better be, having now announced the date on the site itself!)

But of course, that will be just another step in the evolutionary process. Time will tell which features will be fit enough to survive another ten years.

Defra site relaunch

For Defra, today saw a bigger relaunch. I can’t claim any access to the back story, but as a casual observer these things leapt out at me:

• It’s *much* cleaner and prettier – great use of colours, right down to greying out the partner site logos so they don’t distract the eye from the Defra content (without losing their prominence either – a clever bit of light touch design).
• The navigation has been simplified and streamlined, from a long list of options to just six primary tabs. This gives an instant overview of Defra’s remit and will no doubt help users see at a glance which bit of the site’s for them.
• Some of the more successful features of the old site have been preserved – the well-maintained A-Z is a case in point. It’s something we’ll be including in the final BIS site in March and we’re pretty excited about the way we’re going to do it. I’ll be writing more about that soon.
• The distinction between popular and recommended pages on the homepage is a neat way to balance the audience and organisation goals: the stuff they want to push, and the stuff people most frequently want to find.
• Tidy, information rich section landing pages with clearly labeled boxes to aid fast navigation.
• And from reading the launch announcement, it’s clear that this is all based firmly on user centred design principles.

So as I put this blog post to bed I hope the Defra team is still out enjoying a well earned drink.

If you’ve any thoughts on the BIS site in particular, the team and I would love to hear them. Or if you’re in the mood for looking at some more old homepages see this from the Telegraph: How twenty popular websites looked when they launched.

Update: Julia’s reflected on this too at http://juliac2.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/two-government-websites-get-a-refresh/