In the highly unlikely event that you’re a subscriber to this blog and not to the Government Digital Service blog, here are three posts I recently wrote there and neglected to cross-post here:

• Government corporate websites in eye-popping 3D
• Why do people need government department websites?
• The vision for government corporate websites in the single domain (with product wireframes)

I’ve a half-baked notion I might blog here about some of the more personal learnings from my work at the mo’, such as:

• Making the transition from waterfall to scrum; and from senior user to product owner
• Coping with a 50/50 split role between two biggish jobs

Odds-on, I’ll probably remain way too busy with those things and the kids to find time to write anything much here until early 2012. But stick with me, if you’re grooming your RSS feeds. This blog isn’t dead.

From tomorrow, I’ll be joining Cabinet Office to help take the alpha.gov.uk prototype forward to its next incarnation as a more fully developed public beta. In the spirit of the tagline of this blog, I’ll be splitting my time straight down the middle between my (awesomely generous and forward-thinking) employer BIS and the very different world of Tom Loosemore’s multi-disciplinary, agile and intimidatingly good GovUK team.

I’ll be leading the part of the Betagov project that deals with what becomes of central government departments’ websites in the single domain, including how all that content will get published and maintained in the really real world of busy, politically complex Whitehall departments. More than that I can’t say – mostly because I don’t yet know – but I promise to be as transparent and consultative as the timetable lets me be.

Meanwhile, I’d be interested in any answers to these questions about government’s corporate websites:

1. What works well now which you most fear the single domain will break?
2. What’s broken now that you most hope the single domain will fix?

Of my fellow gov webbies, I will also be asking:

1. Who are your users and what do you now about why they come?
2. What types of content do you publish and what are your various business reasons for publishing?

Any documents you can share like search and usage data, survey results, corporate website propositions or strategies would be most welcome.

It’s going to be fun, difficult and I’m going to need to call in a lot of favours. I can’t wait.

Shout if you want to help out.

I've blogged for @alphagov on my, @lesteph and @simond's combined thoughts on improving govt digital engagement: http://t.co/Xj5kAb9

May 24, 2011 9:03 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@neillyneil

Neil Williams

Go there, read it.

Somewhere in my attic, buried under all the baby toys and junk, there’s a signed letter from David Miliband thanking me for building his blog. It was the first one by a Cabinet Minister, started on his own initiative at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, managed by me under the wing of Edward Venning. It felt like the start of something big and, to my delight, it followed Miliband’s career to Defra then FCO, leaving a trail of blog love (of varying duration) in his wake.

That was five and a half years ago, when the medium was already six years old. Corporate blogging has long since gone mainstream, including a growing list of official blogs on government domains.

So why has it taken me* until now to launch a blog for BIS?

Well, various reasons.

1. You can lead a horse to water

   But you can’t make it blog. Finding a minister who wants a blog is easy. Securing time in his or her diary to write, dictate or even approve posts less so. Getting them to commit to regular posts and engage in the comments is practically impossible. And if you do find one, you’ve then got to convince his or her private office to help too. After Miliband left ODPM/CLG, we flogged at least one such thirsty horse pointlessly to death and I’ve no intention of doing that again.

2. Corporate blogs can be deadly

   It’s hard to be interesting and manage reputation at the same time. Clearance can squeeze all that is good about a blog post dry. Arguably Ministers are the people least able to say something fresh, because anything in their name can and will be construed as policy no matter what disclaimers you wrap around it. That’s not to say it can’t work – just that the constraints make something already difficult, harder. Small wonder our focus has been on enabling specialist, topical conversations instead.

3. These things take time

   Truly, it is a massive timesink. Once that machine starts churning you’ve got to keep feeding it and feeding it with choice cuts of prime blog meat. People have quite reasonable doubts whether doing so will get the best return for their scarce time. If the audience is small, was all that effort worth it? If the audience is big, who is going to read and respond to all those comments? Not me, says everyone in unison.

4. It still feels – actually is – a bit risky

   You’d be amazed at just how much buy-in there isn’t to opening up discussions on all but the nichest of niche topics on a government department’s own website. The spectre of the diary story or front page PR own-goal is ever present, and very real; the frustration for authors of unanswered comments even presenter and realer.

5. It, and I, feel a bit older (possibly wiser)

   I don’t subscribe to any of that blogging is dead nonsense but it’s certainly true that the game has changed. Comments on posts (that once great measure of success and motivational aid to the blogger) are on the wane thanks to Twitter and Facebook, and the idea of trying to attract an audience to your site to engage with you feels archaic rather than talking to people on the blogs and sites where they already hang out.

With all that in mind, though, the benefits (I won’t regale you with those) of corporate blogging far outstrip the drawbacks and we found ourselves in something of a perfect storm of late.

Convergence towards a single BIS domain meant we needed to move some existing blogs around. Some thorny communications challenges galvanised interest in unmediated, owned channels. An appetite for raising the profile of Ministers with stakeholders gave us the opening to pitch the blog. And a supportive senior manager and some hard-to-keep-up-with Joneses helped seal the deal.

Plus we’re doing things differently. This isn’t a Vince Cable blog. This is a shared, BIS blog, where we aim to bring together many voices – ministers, guests, policymakers – to get feedback, explain how their work fits together and helps BIS deliver economic growth. That should go a long way to minimising dependency on busy Ministers, keeping it interesting, and spreading the support effort (and benefits and learning!) around different teams.

For now it’s a quiet launch. There are creases to iron out. We’ll give it our best shot and see how it goes.

And in case you are wondering, we might well follow Stephen and Jimmy’s lead in using this for official digital team blogging, which would pose interesting questions for me about what I write about here instead of there.

*It was barely me at all. I just said yes, sent some emails and made nit-picking comments. Credit belongs to Paul Melhuish and Rhys Stacker before him for warming up Ministers, press and private offices, and fighting for it to happen; Jenny Poole, Steph The Excellent and Paul Hosking for the tech, creative and ideas; plus a bunch of forward-thinking press officers, SpAds and senior communications colleagues for seeing the light.

We’re mere days away from the big reveal of Alphagov, the prototype ‘single domain’ website which will set a challenging vision of what a unified, user-focused front end to UK government could look like.

I’ve been relatively close to the project, from unofficial chats with project lead Tom Loosemore and others in dingy Lambeth North pubs before the thing had a name, to more formal advice lately on how Departments do their digital communications – and how Alphagov could help them do it better. (Though if I’m honest, an index card saying “F*** IE6” is the contribution I’m proudest of).

Without giving the game away too much, here’s a taste of what’s coming to a browser near you soon, and some speculation on the stir it will surely cause.

What can we expect?

• Beauty. You can be sure of beautiful pages full of lovely icons; elegant copy rendered in carefully chosen typefaces; and bold, intuitive layouts – bringing the look and feel of online govt bang up to date and saying instantly: this is not your traditional government website. Plenty of Alphagov loveliness has already been dribbled onto the web from lead designer Paul. But it’s words, tech and design in combination that will make the site instantly striking and enjoyable to use.
• Simplicity. With a relentless focus on use cases and top tasks, alphagov will demonstrate the potential of the web to distil multiple pages of complex information into simple, easy to use tools. And in doing so, it aims to shunt the notion of government online services on a bit – from producing text heavy pages towards crafting deceptively simple, user-centric apps and guides, served up by the state and made available for re-use wherever they are needed.
• Coherence. Above all else, the alpha site will show what is very hard to tell: namely, what Martha and Tom meant by a single domain for government. Expect to see the first ever coherent presentation of all UK government in any format – one which doesn’t require people to self-identify what mode of user they are, to know which bit of government does what, nor figure out how 820 different interfaces work. It will retain rather than obscure distinctions between government entities, while smoothing out inconsistencies in user experience. The principle I’ve heard Tom talk about here is: “learn once, use many times.” Simplification, consistency, but not homogenisation. (An approach I’m a fan of myself).
• Audacity. Make no mistake; the project sets a challenging vision. It’s unashamedly radical, unconstrained by the realities of how government creates and manages its digital information and services today. But it’s by no means a fantasy either, presenting an achievable vision as a basis for discussion and refinement. It is a given that to deliver and sustain it will take strong leadership and a skilled, multidisciplinary team with serious clout in the centre.
• Incompleteness. You can expect just a selection of stuff, not the whole shebang. The  small team has built a surprising amount in short order, but the alpha will have holes (like no content alerts), will have cut corners (like accessibility) and will have made some necessarily populist choices (like redundancy and lost passports). This from the Alphagov about page: “The alpha is not intended to be an instant replacement for dozens of gov.uk sites. Neither is it in the scope to improve the quality of government’s online transactions. What it does do is show a direction for future services.” (May as well read the whole thing here).
• Reaction (and conversation). Expect some press. The team is planning a quiet launch, but the project already has a fat clippings file and the reaction and debate will be plentiful and fascinating to watch, with likely international interest this time too. The team’s blog is up and running and you can expect a series of posts on ‘the making of’ to gather and respond to feedback from users, the digital community and government stakeholders. I’d be surprised if it’s not a bit lively in there.
• Iteration. It’s an Agile project, so you can also expect some changes pretty soon in response to user feedback. Again: not your traditional government website.

So what’s not to love?

From where I’m sitting: nothing. Both in a personal capacity and as head of a central government web team, I see many more positives than negatives in the move to a single domain, for the reasons I gave before. If you started today, you would never build what we’ve got. You would build Alphagov.

More objectively though, people will have concerns – I’ve heard some aired already along the lines of it being too big to work for all users of government services, too ambitious, too much change from the familiar, or too optimistic about  simplifying the long tail of government comms and customer relationships.

People might say: define government, define UK, define website. Some might ask: where’s the business case, what’s the publishing platform, what will it cost to scale up to full production? People inside government, myself included, will want to know what it means for their jobs.

All valid concerns, all questions that need answers – but let’s remember the point of the prototype is to drive out these issues, test the theory, show what’s possible, and be able to have a constructive and open discussion based on a common understanding of an actual thing rather than some ambiguous words and ideas.

Want to know more?

Visit:
The alphagov blog: http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/
The alphagov twitter account: @alphagov
The alphagov team on Twitter: http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/team
These choicey posts on team members’ personal blogs: one by Paul and another by Relly.

Guest post by Tony Plant, professional development manager at the Ministry of Justice, who has been leading work across Whitehall to update the digital  skills profile for government communicators. Cross-posted on Tony’s own blog at The Learning Crowd.

So what are the key specialist skills for digital communications in government? Can we define them in a way that easily supports skills development for individuals and teams? What digital/social media skills can be made “mainstream” and what really are specialist capabilities?

What’s in and what’s out of digital comms is notoriously difficult to define. One reason is mission creep. Where does digital comms stop and general business and leadership acumen start? It was hard enough when there was only a website to worry about. Now we also have the proliferation of digital channels, public and employee expectations about social media and an incessant demand to transform public service delivery.

A good example is website convergence (the Ministry of Justice is reducing about 160 sites to around 10). Digital teams find themselves dealing with more than just content management and rationalisation, complex as that is. They are also drawn into IT infrastructure, stakeholder management, service contract re-negotiation and much more. Convergence can also get caught up in branding, organisation independence and other issues needing deft diplomacy rather than digital technology.

This highlights another issue, disentangling the specific digital skill (e.g. writing for web usability/accessibility) from the “common to all communicators” skill (e.g. writing clearly in plain English). Also, skills need a foundation in knowledge and behaviour. Of course, web convergence needs good editing skills. It also needs specialist and general business knowledge. All supported by key behaviours such as building relationships with stakeholders in the organisations whose websites are being targeted.

So, where to start on defining digital skills?

There is an existing GCN Core Skills Framework for Professional Communicators. However, written for a different time and comms context, it only mentions digital skills a few times in areas such as “channels and technology”. There is also some notable external “prior art”.  Steph Gray proposed an overview of government digital disciplines, nicely visualised in a Venn diagram. The Society of IT Managers (SOCITM) also did some work last year on defining skills for web professionals. This was intended as an explicit extension of the well-known SFIA framework. Unfortunately, this still seems to be stuck at the draft proposal stage.

Combined with some digital skills audits this provided enough to get some discussions and workshops started, involving digital comms specialist from across government. That generated a lot of flipchart lists and Post-it mark-ups. It also showed some big differences in apparently similar roles and functions, prompting an explicit split between:

• Skills (what I need to do)
• Knowledge (what I need to know) and
• Behaviour (how I need to do it)

For five different levels of experience from entry level Information Officer (IO) up to Senior Civil Servant (SCS). Additionally, thinking about the current and future trends highlighted the following key themes:

• Managing excellent websites (SEO, user journey, hosting, site analytics, site design, IA, accessibility, branding, archiving etc.)
• Managing digital content (editing, writing, curating content across multiple sites, designing and commissioning interactive products etc.)
• Exploiting Data (open data, transparency, apps, APIs, data protection, copyright etc.)
• Engaging Digital Communities (social media, community management, e-consultations, live events etc.)
• Gaining insight through digital (user analytics, customer behaviours, web trends, reputation tracking, early warning etc.)
• Supporting communications through digital (digital component of campaigns, digital internal comms, digital media monitoring and response, online news etc.)
• Enabling the digital business (transactional services, driving digital default, collaboration tools, technology watch, internal social media, staff social media guidelines, etc.)

Taking these together provided a matrix of experience level against skills, knowledge and behaviour in each of the themes.

Filling out each matrix with lists from the workshops highlighted some key gaps. The majority of skills identified were in just three theme areas: managing websites, managing content and supporting communications. While they will remain important, it’s likely the future focus will be on the other areas. Exploiting data, engaging communities, gaining insight and digitally enabling government business will be key areas for individuals and digital teams to develop their skills, knowledge and behaviours. 

The next step is to get wider direct involvement from the digital community to both “fill in the blanks” in the matrices and check completeness/validity. The new Buddypress-powered GCN community site provides some useful collaboration and crowd-sourcing support for this.

Of course, the acid test will be how helpful this framework is for identifying development needs, creating specific role profiles, etc.

Watch this space.

Two more sites just began sharing the BIS web platform – the National Measurement Office and the newly christened UK Space Agency – bringing our tally of live sites on the platform up to eight, and moving us one step closer to a single domain for BIS.

With eight sites now sharing our platform and more set to join soon, things have started to get really interesting for me and my digital team. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that running a growing shared platform is fundamentally changing the nature of what we do.

Having pretty much nailed the process of getting organisations’ sites and web editors onto the platform as smoothly as possible to meet convergence deadlines, we are now shifting our focus to designing an equally smooth operation for supporting live customers.

This is new but exciting territory for a government digital team. We’re having to evolve our thinking and processes rapidly and on-the-hoof in order to run this thing – balancing an expanding workload against shrinking resources in our own team and those of our customers; making sure we share and recover costs fairly; and at all times striving to keep things fluid, paperless, agile, and most of all cheap for all users.

I’ve been reading up a bit (in what spare time I can find) about best practice and pitfalls of shared service design – any recommendations for further reading would be gratefully received. But nothing I’ve found so far has been especially practical nor as instructive as trial-and-error and first hand experience.

In that vein, in case it helps others, what follows is a list of the processy things we have found it necessary to put in place so far, and some stuff we’ve recently discovered we’re missing.

The stuff we’ve got nailed down already:

• Platform features documentation, background info, tips and guides. We used some well-produced slides and a mini website to keep this stuff easy to create, update and consume.
• CMS Training. We’ve worked with our suppliers to create a tailored 1-day training course which we supplement with in-house training to get website managers au fait with Sitecore and all the trimmings we have added.
• A memorandum of understanding between BIS and each partner, saying who does what and who is accountable in terms of the various service levels and standards; basically all your legal and financial small print be here.
• A service level agreement between BIS and the supplier, supported by the supplier’s existing systems for reporting issues and requesting changes, and with a standing invitation for shared service partners to observe the monthly review meetings.
• A detailed plan of who reports what in the annual return to COI on costs, quality and usage (by no means a straightforward thing to sort out).
• A change process and release cycle, including a dead simple method of apportioning the costs of changes based on trust and developing for the common good; and light touch consultation on proposed changes
• A seriously competitive pricing structure for recovering the cost of BIS people’s time spent in support of other organisations with separate payrolls. This shakes down as an up front charge for convergence activity, a mandatory annual contribution to cover service admin (like running change process, dip sampling for standards compliance) and long list of optional extras (like video production, SEO support, you name it).

The things we are now rapidly putting in place for live running:

• A ticketing system for queries and bug reports. The latter are mercifully few, but the former are showing surprising potential to drown us. We’re checking out options, with Zendesk leading the pack because its iOS apps will help our agility no end.
• An SLA between BIS and partners. I hope to avoid my digital team becoming treated like an IT helpdesk, but we can’t avoid setting out clear expectations of how quickly we will respond to different kinds of request.
• Time sheets and analytics to make sure we are managing the workload and recovering costs accurately.
• How To guides to minimise queries about advanced features of the CMS. We’re working on one pagers, video tutorials and a list of genuine FAQs to keep this as light touch as possible.

As you can see from this long and growing list, keeping a lid on the bubbling fondue pot of shared service bureaucracy is proving quite a challenge. Yet doing so feels like the most critical thing to get right.

I’m confident that so far there’s nothing on this list that is unnecessarily bureaucratic: it’s all essential stuff to avoid wasted time and keep our heads above water. We’ve kept the documentation as light as possible, used collaborative online tools rather than paper and email, and looked hard at any new bit of process to see if it will save more time than it takes up. Without this scrutiny, you would be looking at a much longer list.

Swapping stories and approaches among those of us who are managing or consuming shared services is going to become increasingly important across the public sector. So if that sounds like you, do you fancy a coffee?

(Cross-posted from The Funding Network website, with thanks).

I would be lying if I said I do a lot of work for charity. But by donating slivers of time to The Funding Network (TFN), which pairs worthwhile projects with pots of money at auction-style giving events (see video below), I can just about get away with saying I’ve done a tiny bit of work for a lot of charities. Of course, I don’t like to talk about it, but for the purposes of this blog post I shall just have to force myself.

I was introduced to TFN in July last year through Media Trust – an organisation which specialises in connecting media professionals with third sector groups to help them improve the way they communicate.

TFN were after some help with their digital communications strategy, while across town in Whitehall I was looking for opportunities to broaden my experience and do my bit for civil service volunteering. Media Trust put us in touch with each other and before long I found myself on my first date with TFN’s Adizah and Sonal (in the BIS canteen – I sure know how to treat the ladies).

Not that they needed much help, mind you. My first impression was of a lean, keen and digitally savvy communications operation, already well advanced in its use of social media channels (YouTube, Twitter and Facebook) with an enthusiastic digital native to run them. Better still, the team was looking to learn and do more, and to supplement their intuition with further professional knowledge.

Since then, I’ve been advising TFN on how best to use digital tools to promote and record their unique funding events, reach and engage new and existing members and givers, curate and amplify interesting content elsewhere on the web about social change, and to tell the story of TFN as clearly as possible via this new website.

In practical terms, that has meant giving the team tips about free tools they can use like Google Reader, Tweetdeck and Inbox Listening for monitoring relevant conversations online; sharing my own guidance documents with them to help refine their social media engagement; attending website project meetings and feeding back on draft designs; and explaining how adding blogs to the website might help them to showcase social change success stories and sustain a sense of community between events.

Which brings us right up to where we are now. I hope it turns out to be good advice and that these blogs really take off . Please subscribe to be notified when new posts are published, and do tell the team what you think by adding to the comments.

But before I sign off – what do I get out of all this exactly? Well, personal development and kudos from the boss. But also the warm fuzzy feeling that just by giving a bit of time and being available at the end of a phone (or tweet), I am helping in a small way to fund numerous sustainable social change projects.

I highly recommend volunteering through Media Trust to other comms professionals, and commend the work of TFN to anyone. It really is worth talking about, whatever Mike Smash and Dave Nice might say.

Today, we pressed the publish button on a new blog to support Simon Hughes’s engagement with young people and others in his role as Advocate for Access to Education.

It’s an independent, advisory role spanning DfE and BIS policy – hence the independent.gov.uk domain and HMG branding. More about the role from the site’s About page:

The appointment is for 6 months and in that time Simon will be visiting the different regions in England to discuss with students, parents, future students and teachers the new arrangements for financing higher education in England.

The blog aims to continue that engagement online, broaden his reach and share his progress openly. You might think it a bold move to open up a space for comments on this topic – something which should be applauded. The blog has a clear proposition, which will help the independent team moderate out anything off-topic without discouraging frank and honest conversation.

The build was done wholly in-house by team BIS – principally Jenny with help from Paul and John – and for relatively little technical effort. It’s a pretty rare thing that we get a commission for a straight, traditional blog. In fact, had it not been for some helpful free advice we might well have defaulted to hosting the site ourselves instead of using WordPress.com, which was the ideal fit for our needs in this case.

Using WP.com is a first for us, but we’re in good company. The distinct advantage over self-hosting, as well as being practically cost-free, is tapping the resilience of the mighty WordPress cloud. Which, given the subject matter, has helped our peace of mind.

Though mostly combining an out-of-the-box theme with a custom banner, there is one bit of cleverness behind the scenes. Simon and his team wanted to segment email subscribers by location to send tailored messages to the people he meets on his travels. Nothing in standard wp.com supports email subs, nor is there a way to embed a third party tool that will. So instead, we’re sending traffic off-site to a page that looks and feels like part of the blog, but isn’t. It’s a form page hooked up to our Campaign Monitor account, subscribing users to a single list and capturing their location as a free text field which can be filtered for targeted mail-outs. (The team toyed with pre-populating the list but the user experience was less good, and the list long and problematic).

So there you have it. I’m proud of what the team has done here and will be watching the blog with interest (and, if I’m honest, with my fingers slightly crossed).

Now I’d better hit publish before Simon beats me to the scoop…

Without noticing, it seems I haven’t published a list of my bookmarks here for nearly a year. That’ll be partly down to subconscious choice (I’m not overly keen on link dumps on other blogs) and partly through neglect (I prefer to manually edit rather than automate these kind of posts, and haven’t found the time).

This post ought to more than make up for it though! Below is a mammoth dump of my choicier Delicious* bookmarks from Feb 2010 to date, loosely categorised for your scanning pleasure.

I’m not sure whether to resurrect these kind of semi-automated bookmark posts in future or not, and would welcome feedback on whether you find them useful, irritating or neither.

[*With speculation rife that Delicious could disappear, I've recently switched to using Pinboard. You might want to do the same.]

Inspiration:

• 25 brilliant examples of Facebook brand pages
• Coolest Error 404 Pages In Web Design
• BBC sounds death-knell for left-hand nav
• BBC Online – putting quality first
• BBC tests new homepage
• New BBC site search
• FCO: Evaluating our blogs
• The National Autistic Society
• The 10 best museum websites
• Lincolnshire County Council
• Experimenting with the online presentation of a Bill
• A Trend of Multi Column Mega Drop-down Menus with 30 examples
• JISC Digital Media knowledge hub

Stats/analysis:

• An Exploration of Retweets and Replies
• How Much Big Brands Spend on Search Ads
• Social media stats for the UK
• The State Of The Internet
• OpenOffice is the new David Hasselhoff
• Gapminder.org – For a fact based world view
• The UK technology startup map: finding the clusters
• The Latest Global Social Media Trends May Surprise You

Interesting reads for digital professionals:

• 28 reasons why website management is brutal
• These are your users… read and be horrified
• Nobody Knows What You’re Talking About
• 5 Ways to Express Yourself More Clearly Online
• Why pay for Sitecore when you can get Umbraco for free?
• Why Boxed CMSs Can Suck
• The tyranny of content management systems
• Top 10 Most Usable Content Management Systems
• Stop letting people use your CMS
• HOW TO: Deal With Negative Feedback in Social Media
• 3 Places to Discover New and Relevant Content
• Engaging using LinkedIn
• Learning about content strategy

Think pieces:

• The innovation delusion
• The BBC’s misguided approach to social media
• Where next for digital engagement?
• Everything’s going to be alright

Tools, tips and other useful stuff:

• Loop11 – Usability & User Experience Testing Tool
• Usability testing with UK users. Affordable and fast – whatusersdo.com -
• The introvert’s guide to speaking
• Manage Who You Follow On Twitter Easily with ManageTwitter
• thumbalizr – thumb your webpages
• Real Time Search – Social Mention
• TALKI – The easiest way to embed a forum
• Jive – Enterprise Communication & Collaboration Software
• Follow live conversations from Twitter and Facebook on Tinker.com
• surchur – The Dashboard to Right Now
• Tool-up NGO-style – 20 web-based tools for daily working
• Bit.ly Pro Makes it Dead Simple to Create Your Own URL Shortener
• Delib’s Dialogue App
• Typekit web fonts
• Teamly • Get the right work done
• Pownum | there’s power in numbers
• Brand Visibility Metrics – HowSociable
• Pipl – People Search
• Brandwatch | Social Media Monitoring Company | Tracking & Management
• Boardreader – Forum Search Engine
• Forum Discussion Search with BoardTracker.com
• Check Username Availability at Multiple Social Networking Sites
• Fluther embeddable Q&A
• The Hello Bar | A little web toolbar that gets noticed
• Screencast.com, online video sharing
• Survs – Online Survey Tool, Collaborative Web Survey Software
• Make a Print Friendly Version of any WebPage, save Webpages as a PDF
• Screenr – Create screencasts and screen recordings the easy way
• Dimdim: Easy, Open and Affordable Web Conferencing and Webinars
• Newspaper Club | Helping people to make their own newspapers
• Check Browser Compatibility, Cross Platform Browser Test – Browsershots
• BridgeURL – Shorten multiple URLs into a single URL
• Generate a QR code for your website in seconds with bit.ly
• Heatmap visualization for clicks, scrolling, and the fold
• Flickr Slideshow – create flickr photo slideshows for your website or blog
• Keynote Wireframe Toolkit – Get your Keynote Kung-Fu on
• Tagxedo – Tag Cloud with Styles
• GROU.PS :: connects obsessively! Create your own social network
• SocialGO – Create Social Networks, Build Social Networking Sites
• Elgg – Open Source Social Networking Platform
• MindQuilt | Ask Tag Send Answer
• Moodle.org: open-source community-based tools for learning
• Quality Control—A WordPress Theme for issue logging/support ticketing

Gov-specific links:

• The Five Best Government Blogs and The Six Reasons Why They Work
• Delib – OpenGov: the movie
• Leadership 2.0
• Open Government Ideas Look All the Same: Are You Surprised?
• Speech on Building Britain’s Digital Future
• Political hacktivists turn to web attacks
• Fulfilment for Government Marketing Campaigns | Business Link
• A digital engagement framework adapted for local government
• UK launches data.gov.uk (and how Australia could top it)
• Whitehall reorganisation ‘cost £780m in four years’
• BBC – dot.Rory: The £105m website
• Bloggers to be granted lobby access
• Social Media Surgery Plus
• Apps.Gov
• Challenge.gov : The central platform for crowdsourcing US Government challenges
• The Central Marketplace for Challenges | ChallengePost – As used by challenge.gov
• Safe and effective social media use by government agencies
• My MP iPhone application

BIS digital in the news:

Image credit: Lego dumptruck by bucklava

‘Tis the season for facile lists and for trying not to think too much about work. And as I’m about to say bye-bye to full sleep for a few months with the arrival of baby #2 (due in early Jan), I thought I’d mark the occasion by blogging my top ten pieces of sleep propaganda for tiddlywinks.

I love kids’ books to bits – ones about bed and sleep even more so. They account for some of the best moments I’ve shared with my son in the past three years; and have been a lifeline of comfort during some of the worst. Below are some of his and my favourite. I’d love to hear about yours.

1. Goodnight Moon
This wonderful rhyme about a rabbit saying goodnight to everything in his bedroom is tremendous wind-down fodder and never gets dull, mainly due to the detail in the illustrations. I’m still spotting new things in this after three years. Best line: “Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush. And goodnight to the old lady whispering hush.”

2. Peepo
Beautifully illustrated poem recounting all the things a (WWII-era) toddler has seen in his busy day. Like Goodnight Moon, there are almost endless things to discover and discuss in the illustrations. Best line: “He sees his sisters searching for a jar or tin / To take to the park and catch fishes in.”

3. I Wish…
I like to think this one inspires happy dreams about the moon and sea, with its magical rhyming tale of a boy and his teddy flying through the night. It even glows in the dark. Best line: “Past galleons laden with gold we would glide / As a thousand bright fishes flashed by our side.”

4. Sleepy me
I can’t vouch for my son, but I get very sleepy reading this. The repetition of the word ‘sleepy’ alone is partly responsible, but it’s the pictures of half-asleep parents, pets and babies that make this utterly soporific. Best line: “Sleepy story, sleepy sighs / Sleepy mum will kiss my eyes.”

5. On our way home
I love this one mainly for its dad bias. A simple, mainly pictorial tale of a baby bear and his daddy walking home to bed after a busy day playing together. Best line: “On our way home, Daddy raced me. And I won!”

6. I’d rather go to Grandad’s
Could there be anywhere more snug and safe for a young cat to bed down than at the top of a lighthouse owned by his grandfather? I doubt it. Best line: “First we go on a big fast bus, then we go on a train. And I can hold the tickets for there and back again.”

7. Peace at last
A classic, and lots of fun. I mostly like this for introducing the notion that parents need sleep too – and also that bed is the best place for it.  Best line: “Well, you would not believe what noises there are in the garden at night.”

8. Goodnight, Lulu
It says it right there on the back of the book: “guaranteed to ensure a good night’s sleep”. And it does, by reassuring little ones that mummies and daddies can easily scare away any monsters that could attack in the night – and there are no such things. Best line: “Then I would stomp and yell and chase it all the way back to the icky, sticky swamp where it belongs!”

9. Can’t you sleep, little bear?
In which a baby bear learns to overcome his fear of dark by discovering the moon and stars are always there, lighting up the night. Admittedly he ends up with a huge lantern on all night too, as has my baby bear. Best line: “‘But I brought you a lantern!’said Big Bear. ‘Only a tiny-weeny one,’ said Little bear. ‘And there’s lots of dark!’”

10. Back to bed, Ed
Last but by no means least, this book has worked wonders in explaining why big brave boys and girls should go back to sleep in their own bed, not climb in bed with mum and dad, when scared or woken in the middle of the night. Best line: “Mum and Dad had had enough!”

What do you make of my list? Any you’d add?

I’m used to coming second. At school, I was deputy head boy. In my career, I’ve been second in command more often than I’ve been in charge. And recently, my team was nominated for an internal award for innovation – and were first runners up. But I can’t remember the last time I actually won something.

So I’m chuffed that last night we took home the top prize at Sitecore’s annual awards for the best websites which use their software. Team BIS walked* off with a gong in the government category and the overall winner’s title of UK Sitecore Site of the Year 2010. And that’s against some mighty competition from the likes of Total Jobs, NHS Direct and Birmingham Airport. I’m proud.

*strictly speaking, staggered.

This is just a short post, mainly to point you over here to Ross Ferguson’s generous review of a little something my team launched recently on the QT.

It’s a side-project we’re calling digital@bis – a place to share tips, policies and best practice with other web professionals (mainly those in BIS’s arms length organisations), and be that little bit more transparent about what we do. We threw it together quickly, driven by the deadline of an event we were running for our partner bodies, as somewhere to stick the slides and kick start a bit of knowledge sharing and collaboration. And as Ross says, this isn’t a vanity thing – it’s driven by the need to make cost savings and be more efficient

It’s shaping up nicely thanks to excellent work by Ian Azille and Paul Hosking, but there’s a lot more we want to do with it when there’s a quiet moment – like adding video tutorials, guidance on some of the advanced features of our platform (see slides), and monthly service reports on how the site is performing.

We’re not the first to do something like this. FCO got there first with their excellent digital diplomacy site, and MOD have this impressive publicly available social media hub too.

I agree with Ross that more public sector digital teams should get in on the act, opening up their guidance and policy documents – which, after all, were produced at the taxpayers’ expense and might have some value as free resource for wider use by the private and third sector. And I’m tempted to suggest that, given the way the wind is blowing, we might want to start thinking about ultimately pooling this sort of material in one place. But until then, more like this please! Even if I do say so myself.

A big day today in digital government. In case you missed it, the Martha Lane Fox review of Directgov and the wider government web estate went public  along with a response from Cabinet secretary Francis Maude, so ending a period of furtive speculation by those with a keen interest in the way UK government does digital.

Here is a quick link round-up:

• Cabinet Office press release, MLF review and Maude response (PDF)
• Guardian, Telegraph, BBC coverage
• Blogger reaction from Steph Gray, Simon Dickson and Mick Phythian
• A must-read comment from Tom Loosemore on Steph’s blog (contains some clarification about that all important word ‘commissioning’)
• Twitter reaction
• [Update 1] More blogger reaction from Matt Jukes and Tom Watson
• [Update 2] Public Strategist and Andrew Lewin
• [Update 3] Stephen Hale and Alan Mather

As an insider, I’ve known what’s in the MLF review for a while and so am watching the online reaction with interest, especially in regard to recommendation 3 which, if taken forward, will have a direct affect on my work.

And, as an insider, I won’t say too much more about it in case my words are taken to be anything other than my personal view by the mainstream press, especially while the review is still being considered by Ministers. (And at the risk even that last sentence is open to misinterpretation: anything I would say would in any case be positive and constructive. MLF FTW!)

So I will say just two slightly tangential things:

1. I joined the civil service in 2003, having previously led a small web development team building sites (actually, e-zines – remember them?) for the likes of BP, Shell, Glaxo and Pfizer at a corporate communications agency in the Docklands. More often than not, any product we built for those big corporate clients was based on strict brand and layout guidelines, enforcing a user experience and navigation in common with the parent site. As such, my first impressions of how government was using the web were coloured by that experience and, coming to it cold (I guess like Coalition ministers, Martha and many others besides) I wondered why there were quite so many different looking sites doing quite such similar things across the .gov.uk estate.  For me it has long felt like a question of when rather than if the government would become more BBC-esque in its online presence, and the work I’ve been leading at BIS (using consistent templates and a universal top bar to unify multiple sites on a shared CMS) has been a step in that direction.

2. It’s abundantly true that implementing MLF’s third recommendation will be “challenging”, as the Minister acknowledged in his response. Another phrase that has stuck in my mind today from an internal document is “profoundly non-trivial” – which I think I might start dropping into casual conversation whenever I can. Generally speaking though, projects that are the most challenging tend also to be the most worth doing. Complexity and risk are reasons to be careful rather than cautious – and some excellent careful thinking is already going on both inside and outside the machine about how to avoid the pitfalls and realise the opportunities in taking this bold ambition forward. (Although personally, while I’d like to be all strategic about it, it’s just about all I can do to stay my hand from working up wireframes for what a common look and feel across a single domain for government might look like.)

I’ve thought of a third thing, sorry:

3. One of the aspects I love most about digital is its tendency to lead the customer-centrification of organisations. We digital practitioners have been doing this on a micro level for yonks, persuading colleagues to structure intranet and website content based on what users want rather than organisational hierarchies; and reflecting customer feedback and insight back in. You can’t help but wonder where doing this on a macro level across all of government – not just with services à la Directgov of today but news, consultations and policy information – might one day take us.

As to what it means for us digital practitioners in government Departments and our jobs, it’s way too early to say. But – taken alongside the other announcements today about shifting more and better services online – there will surely be no immediate shortage of demand in Whitehall for people with practical digital expertise and the on-the-ground experience of getting things done in a public sector environment. It’ll take plenty of that to steer this thing home.

A couple of months ago I posted in praise of cheap-as-chips comment engines Echo and Disqus – then followed up pointing out some of the potential downsides. Chief among them was accessibility, and I promised to share the results of an audit commissioned by BIS. Those results are now in, available on Scribd, and are already the top ranked result on Google for ‘Disqus accessibility’ – so this ought to get their attention.

Here (and in full consciousness of the irony of using an embedded Scribd document) is the extract of a longer report produced by Nomensa for BIS, detailing all the issues identified with Disqus.

Accessibility of Disqus comments

You can also grab this as a straight Word doc if you’d rather.

The full audit of the BIS website found stuff wrong with both Echo and Disqus, but I’ve chosen to focus on the more prevalent of the two plugins here. (As well as being favoured by BIS, Disqus is now well ensconced into the blogs at the FCO and, more recently, cropped up on Stephen Hale’s blog at the Department of Health).

While it came as no surprise that there were issues, I confess to being a bit surprised by just how many. Clearly little or no consideration has been given to accessibility in Disqus’s design: it just wasn’t a priority for the developers compared to, say, usability and interoperability – on which counts it wins big.

So what does this mean for the use of Disqus by public sector web managers, whose sites have to be squeaky clean on accessibility?

In my view it means we can still use it, but with care, doing the following as an absolute minimum:

• limit its use, thinking carefully about when and where it is appropriate to use it, and for how long
• ‘fess up, with a clear note of non-conformance in the site’s accessibility statement and wherever the plugin is used
• provide accessible alternatives, both for reading comments from others and submitting your own

I still stand by the fact that the benefits of these kind of tools are considerable, and the drawbacks are worth living with compared to the alternative – about a teacher or nurse’s salary worth of development costs to implement the equivalent functionality on an enterprise CMS.

I’d welcome your thoughts, as ever.