Public Sector Blogs

The Greens and Genetically Modified crops

2012-05-27T22:29:27Z

Summary

Why it’s more complicated than the headlines show.

Well…everything is, isn’t it?

Over 10 years ago while exploring all things alternative during my student days, I took part in a picket organised by Greenpeace outside a branch of Sainsbury’s on the issue of Monsanto & it’s work on all things GM. At the time, the issues for me were about health and safety of the surrounding environment regarding the research, and the role of a profit-making multinational and the incentives around it. I soon found out I wasn’t cut out for picketing in cold weather on a noisy traffic-jammed street. Ditto with being part of groups that bore similar traits of top-down organisations: i.e. decision taken from up on high with the foot soldiers expected to fall in line.

The scare story that we were all briefed about was that these multinationals were creating new forms of crops that we did not know what impact they would have on the environment, while at the same time being made into a form where farmers from poor countries would not be able to replant using seeds from their produce, but be dependent on going back to the multinationals because GM would stop such plants from reproducing in the natural manner. This was around the time that Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” book (& the issues around) was high in activists minds.

I didn’t go back to Greenpeace following that picket – I think it was a mixture of feeling really uncomfortable at that picket combined with not really feeling any connection with the people in the group. That along with generally being a foaming ball of ‘angry’ that was spiralling downwards with depression, I was probably not the nicest person to be around with in those days.

The following year I sort of took the decision to take a step back from following all of the bad stuff that was happening in developing countries – on the grounds that it was messing me up because I took the burdens of the world on my shoulders emotionally. You know those really intense people who complain about absolutely everything because someone somewhere happens to be worse off than you are, and that by doing X, Y and Z you are somehow contributing to their condition? That was me back in 2001. It sucks the life and soul out of a person. Basically I had forgotten how to have fun in life. Hence why in 2002 I thought the best thing to do with all of this was to take a big step back from it all. Hence why I took little interest in the GM debate (along with a whole host of stuff that otherwise underpinned my degree) since 2002.

Fast-forward 12 years and Puffles’ timeline explodes with a spat between the Green Party and the science lobby. The confrontation came in a field near Harpenden. Anti-GM protesters wanted to trash a field full of GM wheat while pro-science people wanted to demonstrate against them. Trashing GM crops is not a new form of direct action. Greenpeace’s Lord Melchett in 1999 was arrested for doing just that. I guess what’s changed now is the science lobby have started to get their act together regarding political lobbying. The Green Party ended up getting involved in this following London Mayoral Candidate Jenny Jones blogging here.

There are three issues raised by this confrontation for me. The first is for the anti-GM protesters.

Are they protesting against the science, or its application?

As one person on Twitter said, it’s difficult to say we must take action against global warming because of the science, but then be against GM research because of the science. What makes climate change science more ‘acceptable’ compared to GM science?

The second one is for science communicators.

Don’t your complaints that people have misunderstood the science behind GM reflect more badly on you as science communicators than demonstrators protesting about what is a very complex subject, that they happen to have misunderstood?

Or is it a reflection of the sort of society we currently live in where money, fame, glamour and celebrity are everything? (Thus anyone trying to communicate anything else gets drowned out).

The final one is for everyone.

Who’s driving this flying umbrella?

What I mean is who are the vested interests that control the direction of scientific research? I come back to my concerns about the multinationals – and it applies not just to the GM industry but to things like medicine and renewables too. What might be good for the bottom line of a multinational may not be good for wider society. There’s also the risk of research going down blind alleys because the financial incentive for what might otherwise lie at the end is such.

Take mental health. As someone who has been on medication since 2006, I can’t help but feel the financial incentive for big firms looking for treatments for mental health is one that involves taking medicine regularly for a period of time. The financial incentive isn’t there to look at things like the lives that we are leading, the food that we are eating or for things like counselling and other therapies. Does the private/corporate financial interests skew research funding towards one and away from another? If so, by how much and why?

It’s one of the reasons too why I’d like to see more transparency about charities raising money for other illnesses. Lots of people have been, and continue to raise money in good faith for these causes – and I admire them for it.

My fear though is that the money they all raise risks being used to subsidise the future profits of a large pharmaceutical firm who, having benefited from all of the money raised in helping fund its research, finds a cure but then charges a hefty price for said cure having patented the cure that millions and millions of people contributed towards discovering.

The issue for me therefore is not the science, but the institutions behind the scientists: Who is in control and what are the levels of transparency? This for me is where campaigners on both sides may be best advised to sit down and talk to (and listen to) each other. That way the science can be subjected to greater scrutiny – and who knows, that scrutiny may just uncover some goings on in some of the large organisations behind some of the science. Because if transparency is good for the public sector, isn’t it good for the private sector too? Especially if it involves science.

Six stage digital engagement

2012-05-27T08:51:59Z

Thanks to GovTech for pointing me to CivicPlus’s attempt to sell web services to government by telling them there are six stages to engagement. It’s actually a US company so the questionnaire involved is focused on the needs of US citizens but even so is quite amusing by its assumptions. I thought I’d complete it as a citizen (one of the choices), and after a few minutes had done it! If only life were that easy…

CivicPlus label the six stages – static, emerging, active, receptive, participatory and fully-engaged and I state again, if only matters we that simple…

Filed under: citizen, customer satisfaction, e-government, engagement, Metrics, transformational change Tagged: CivicPlus, GovTech

Cookies climb down?

2012-05-26T11:20:36Z

It seems that the ICO, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that the constant barrage of complaints from just about everyone involved in the web industry about the new Cookie law might well contain a kernel of truth. As such less than 48 hours before the law was/is due to be enforced they have made a pretty radical alteration to the wording of the regulations.

These changes mean that ‘implied consent‘ is now valid – which pretty much makes the whole issue the users responsibility (same as it ever was?). This removes the potential flood of permissions pop-ups all over the web.

To be honest it seems pretty sensible and the fear of the new law had certainly made a lot of people think about how and why they use cookies on their sites – I don’t agree the recent little burst of publicity has done much to make users aware of the issues but it certainly has got website owners thinking at least.

The timing of the change is remarkable though – it comes just days after sites like the BBC & the FT implemented their solutions (at no small cost I would imagine) and with many smaller businesses and organisations scrambling to implement solutions that are no longer needed.

Makes me glad we took a more ‘measured’ approach and followed the advice from GDS which nicely chimed with some recent words from Boagworld.

I still don’t think this whole saga is finished and will be watching to see what happens next!

In defence of…ex-special adviser Adam Smith?!?

2012-05-26T11:07:18Z

Summary

Some thoughts about special advisers

Guardian leader writer, former special adviser and dragon-fairy-watcher Tom Clark commented that “Adam Smith was too special an adviser to overstep the mark”. Smith’s testimony and body language spoke volumes – as did the testimony from Jonathan Stephens, the Permanent Secretary at the DCMS who gave evidence straight after. Lord Justice Leveson’s comments and questions at the end were also interesting.

Robert Jay QC was in his element at the hearing, coldly, carefully dissecting his victim layer by layer – playing the ‘long game’ and using the huge library of emails and texts to allow viewers to draw their own conclusions. Was Smith covering up? Was he incompetent? Was Jay forcing Smith into positions where he ended up having to defend or admit the indefensible or the quite frankly absurd? It was painful viewing.

I couldn’t help but think: “Rabbit + headlights” with the way all of this was going. It was as if Stephens and Leveson agreed, when they discussed how such a seemingly bright and intelligent young man could have ended up in such a situation. They then got into a discussion about examining the relationship between special advisers and other actors in the Whitehall and Westminster jungle – ministers, civil servants, lobbyists etc. I imagine it can be a very lonely world for a young special adviser when faced with people who are much older, more experienced and wiser in the dark arts. Particularly so when you don’t have the option or ability to ‘refer things up the line’ as I often did when things got too tough for me. My view was that there were some situations that I was not paid to deal with – and that others above me were. (There were other situations on the other hand that I felt very much I was paid to deal with and take the flak for). I should add here that the Cabinet Secretary said in evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee that line management support for special advisers is something the Cabinet Office is looking at.

I wonder how many current and former special advisers are saying “There but for the grace of God go I” with Adam Smith’s testimony to Leveson? Andy Burnham, Ed Balls, David and Ed Miliband…all former special advisers on Labour’s side. If Labour had won the election, would it have been their protege’s who had found themselves in Smith’s shoes?

I’m not going to get into the business of defending Smith’s actions or his politics. I’m interested in the public administration issues and how he was managed and supported or otherwise. The first thing that strikes me is that he ended up in the position of being the go-between for the department and News International. Jonathan Stephens and Jeremy Hunt should never have allowed that to happen. Irrespective of the issue of having a political appointee to the civil service carrying out that role in what was a quasi-judicial process, the prospect of having someone so young and inexperienced going head-to-head with an experienced lobbyist from one of the most powerful multinationals in the world strikes me as…”misguided” more than anything else. It should have been an experienced senior official. But then with the scale of the cuts at DCMS meant that there were far fewer experienced hands to handle something like this than a couple of years ago.

The second issue is that of line management. As Leveson said, cabinet ministers are very busy people – it’s not as if they are sitting across the desk from their line managers having regular conversations with them. So who else is there to turn to when the going gets tough as it inevitably does? As a permanent civil servant you have a huge network to turn to for advice – as I inevitably did during tough times. To be able to turn to someone who, for example had spent time in Downing Street as a senior private secretary during Tony Blair’s era or who had faced life at the sharp end of public service delivery was a huge benefit to have. That’s not to say Smith didn’t have such a network – I’m sure that he did. But his would more likely have been a party-political one than a professional one bound by a set of rules such as the civil service management code.

This then brings into sharp focus the sorts of people who end up as special advisers: “Politicians in training” as one tweeter put it. A number of Smith’s defenders pointed out that Smith and Hunt had worked together for several years and as a result the former was particularly tuned into the thinking of the latter – which for a civil servant is what you want from a special adviser. A question they are asked more often than not is “What will the minister think of X?”

This then got me thinking: One of my former colleagues Nader Khalifa (now Secretary of Cambridge Labour Party) told me years ago of the ‘routes to becoming a minister’ – one that some of you will be familiar with. All of those routes involved spending time as a special adviser to a minister or senior politician. Yet there doesn’t seem to be anything in any of the routes he described that looked at running large organisations. There also didn’t seem to be anything around wider skills development during the time a special adviser was in place. You could say that there’s hardly any time for such things anyway – you’re flying by the seat of your pants in such a role. But if being a special adviser is acknowledged by political parties as part of the route to becoming a minister, shouldn’t political parties give a little bit more thought to the training, development and support they give to those bright young things that aspire for political office?

The other issue for me is separating the ‘political’ roles from the ‘this person is being brought in as a special adviser because they are experienced and expert in this policy area’ role. The nature of the former inevitably leads to short-term thinking around how things will play out tactically. Will X play out well with the press and with our key stakeholders? The latter in my (albeit limited experience) tends to focus on more longer term goals – though again I’ve found this depends on the age, experience, competency and aptitude of the individuals appointed. Wise owls are far less easily flustered – in part perhaps because they feel they have got less to prove than their younger counterparts.

As for Smith, as I’ve mentioned above, I’m not looking to defend Smith’s conduct or his testimony. Others will go through that in detail, picking up the shortcomings and contradictions. All I can do is adapt a quotation from Churchill on Nicholas II.

“A dark hand, gloved at first in folly, now intervenes. Exit Smith. Deliver him and all he loved to wounds and the political wilderness. Belittle his efforts, asperse his conduct, insult his memory; but pause then to tell us which other young special adviser would have been found capable.”

As for Hunt, the focus now turns onto him next week. How much did Hunt really know of what Smith was doing? Why did he or Stephens deem it appropriate to send a young special adviser to go head-to-head with an experienced lobbyist? Why were there significant differences in the approaches to dealing with News International between BIS and DCMS? Didn’t Hunt feel compromised already given his pre-existing views on the company concerned in the same way that Cable was? If so, did he raise these with the Prime Minister before accepting the appointment?

Let’s see what next week reveals.

Will the carrot or the stick help get social housing tenants online?

2012-05-25T13:51:00Z

I’ve blogged before about the importance of getting social housing tenants online, and it’s at the front of my mind at the moment as I’ve been working with a lot of providers to help them get their digital strategies in place.

This week, I was asked by one of the senior management team at Bracknell Forest Homes whether the stick or the carrot was the best approach, which is nicely illustrated by Solihull Community Housing entering tenants into a draw to win £10,000 if they pay their rent by direct debit - you can have a look at the competitor here.

In all honesty, I don’t think there’s an easy answer. Lots of people see the introduction of Universal Credit as a stick to coax people online, but I think it’s also a carrot for many people - if you’re claiming you can claim your benefits more quickly, get them paid to you all at once and have more control over your own money, which is a pretty big selling point. Universal Credit mimics the way you would get paid if (or when) you’re in work.

I was foolish enough to offer a free day of my time to any Social Housing Provider who wanted my help. I’ve now run about 15 sessions with the senior management teams of different housing providers, and let’s just say I’ve learned a lot.
Obviously I’ve been preaching to the converted somewhat in these 15 sessions, as they’ve all actually wanted my help and asked me along, but it’s been amazing to see how a relatively short session can have such an impact. Before the session organisations don’t know if they want a digital strategy, and one or two hours later it’s unanimous that they do. Or they don’t know where the digital strategy should sit within the organisation, and suddenly they know it’s cross-departmental and everyone should be involved. Even those who have felt really confused about how to get going have worked out the place to start, which is often all it takes.
Universal Credit, and the direct payment of rent to tenants rather than providers, is a pretty big incentive for social housing providers to get a digital strategy. There’s a burning platform if ever I’ve seen one! But that doesn’t mean there won’t be some providers who will ignore the benefits going digital can provide to both them and the lives of their tenants. It’s been great to work with organisations who are taking steps, however small, to embrace the digital world and to share it with their tenants. For me, sticks and carrots aside, this is the most important thing.
The sun in shining so I won’t go on any longer, but in the next couple of weeks I’ll share my ideas of what should be in a digital strategy - as it feels pretty consistent across the 15 organisations I’ve helped so far. And if there are any housing providers out there that want to chat more, please do get in touch.

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The superstructure cannot determine the base

2012-05-25T17:34:30Z

An integrated organisation can deliver an integrated service. But an integrated service is unlikely to be able to deliver an integrated organisation.

That though is a distinction which is easily missed, not least in thinking about joining up government services, where the hoped for magic of an integrated web platform leading to seamless information and service delivery has unaccountably failed to happen for ten years or more. That’s not from lack of ambition or intention: part of the founding myth, first of UK Online and then of Directgov, was that seamless citizen-centred services would spring into being. But they didn’t. There are several important reasons for that. Some of them are to do with the maturity of technology, some to do with maturity of understanding of the place of web services as a dimension of overall service provision, but some are to do with a lack of alignment of roles, perceptions, and goals of the different organisations involved.

The founding myth had some substance. I remember the excitement of a workshop designing the ‘having a baby’ life episode (as they were then known) for UK Online, with people responsible for different parts of the overall service meeting each other for the very first time and seeing opportunities for more effective service design as a result. But for all their many virtues, neither UK Online nor Directgov ever did transcend the underlying structure of government on which they were built and even now it is all too easy to see departmental boundaries not far below the surface.

The difference with gov.uk is not that it’s a better website, though it is. The difference is not even that its first design principle makes an unambiguous commitment to start with real user needs, though the clarity and prominence of that principle is a wholly good thing. The difference is all of that put together with a level of focused determination and leadership direction which we have not seen before.

The question is whether that is enough. I am not sure that it is. Everything GDS does reinforces my confidence that we will have a more integrated digital platform leading to more seamless information and service delivery. There will be far greater homogeneity of how government appears to the outside world: the visual symbolism will carry a very strong message that all are parts of a very coherent and integrated whole. Government will look and feel like one thing rather than many. The circumstances in which it is important to understand which bit of government does what will be fewer. But underneath, different things will continue to happen in different ways, as a consequence of the underlying structures.

GDS is creating a representation of government and what it does. What it can’t do (and can’t be expected to do) is make the substance of government align with that representation. That matters for reasons which in effect are a slightly different version of Conway’s law: the perceived difference between a service and an interface is very strongly driven by organisational boundaries. That means that the experience of meeting needs is unlikely to be anywhere close to being as integrated as the experience of discovering information about how those needs can be met. At a more detailed level, it means that information held by or provided to different government service providers is unlikely to be managed (or manageable) in a way which supports the aggregation and integration of services.

Does any of that matter? I think it does, for two reasons. The first is to avoid the trap of assuming that because visual identity and information are much better integrated that the problem of joined up government has either been solved or gone away. The second is that if we do aspire to organising public service delivery around people and their needs, we need to get down to those deeper layers to make it happen.

To give one minor and largely inconsequential example from another sector, the smooth integration of Amazon’s website is second to none, especially bearing in mind that it is both its own shop window and a channel for the thousands of smaller providers in the Amazon market place. I can search and buy without particularly caring how Amazon – or anybody else – is organised, and without any notion of where the stuff I am buying actually is. But behind the scenes, the consequences of my order may well require activity to be fragmented and duplicated – and the effect on me may be that several parcels arrive on several vans at several times over several days. That’s no more than minor inconvenience and inefficiency. But if the supply side fragmentation covers tax and benefits, health and education, the consequences can be much more significant.

Of course, just integrating everything into a single monolith isn’t likely to be a good response to that problem. It would be nice to get a single parcel on a single day, but that would require the existence either of a single warehouse with absolutely everything in it, or some kind of aggregation hub where orders could be assembled. The drawbacks of either would be pretty substantial.

Back in the world of government, I feel no pressing need to renew my driving licence at my local hospital, and have no expectation that teachers should be able to process benefit claims. Here too, not everything which can be integrated should be. But the lessons of the having a baby life episode still apply: if we want people’s experience of a service to have a parallel level of integration to information about that service, we are going to have to look to the base as well as the superstructure.

Bendable; posable; flexible

2012-05-25T17:22:00Z

How many times do you see 'flexible working' in a job description and wonder what it actually means? As a term it could cover a multitude without clarification - does it mean flexi-time, or only if you've got children to pick up from school? Does it mean you can occasionally work from home, or again only if you have ill children or parents or someone else to care for? Does it mean a flexible dress code or simply dress down Fridays?

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about why it's awesome to work at GDS. There's the obvious, of course, which I'm sure I don't need to explain. But I've been thinking about the little things, the often taken for granted things, which mean my working life suddenly seems to be a seamless transition between work and home instead of feeling like I need to wear two hears all the time - work head and home head.

Now, I acknowledge freely that not everyone finds head swapping painful. For some, having a home and work persona and keeping them very separate is necessary, fulfilling, and sometimes confidence boosting too. But for some of us it can result in feeling a little like this:

Image: Harry Potter Wiki

But without the drooling. Obviously. The point remains however, that I think that sometimes especially for geeks, the artifice that it's felt is needed to create and maintain two personas is frustrating, irritating and actually really quite tiring.

So where does GDS come into this?

Image: Great British Souvenirs

It's interesting. I didn't get a piece of paper listing all the 'flexible' ways GDS would make my life easier. It doesn't even say in my job description that flexibility will be offered anywhere in any context. Yet I can wear Converse to work. I don't, I find them horrid uncomfortable but irritatingly attractive, but I could. I've worn trainers, t-shirts and jeans but I've also been seen in a suit and will spend most of next week in one by the looks of it. I dress, in other words, appropriately for the places where I will be working, and the people with whom I will be doing business in those places. And I'm allowed to. No, actually, I'm trusted to.

And trust is probably the keyword when talking about flexible working. You have to trust your staff to not take advantage of the flexibility you're offering them. From acknowledging that speaking at an event until 10pm the previous evening might mean a 9am start would be a little painful, to occasionally being able to work from home if it's appropriate, not going to cause any issues and you don't have any meetings, to being able to choose whether a meeting needs to happen face to face 50 miles away or if Skype would suffice - one of the biggest things I appreciate about working with GDS is the amount of trust placed in me to know when it is appropriate to do something and when it is not.

As a result of that trust, I no longer have the weirdness of having an in work and out of work persona. I no longer feel that my Twitter account needs to grow up and I don't feel like being a geek is a barrier or complication. Instead, it's just an easy blending and meshing of who I am at any given moment in time, observing, thinking, snapping photos, questioning, asking for help and generally just being 'me'.

So I guess I need to acknowledge I am being spoilt right now. But I also think there is an important lesson here for lots of other people, in lots of other industries, not just government. If you trust your staff, and if you create relaxed and happy employees by trusting them and allowing them to either maintain personas or abandon them, you end up with productive people who can stop thinking about the complications of whether it's okay to tweet about the X Factor on their Twitter account where they identify as a Civil Servant and move on to trying to add value to conversations during the week and being themselves at the weekend - on the same account. Or, if preferred, have two separate accounts, each clearly delineated.

But in a world where less and less people are making the distinction and where Twitter, because of its openness allows the seamless switch between personal and professional, it is something that employers are going to need to think about, even if not right now - because as social media contracts and expands once again and new tools appear, the way we behave socially and professionally online will inevitably bleed into the way we behave offline too. Both in the expectations of ourselves, but also the expectations that others have of us, in our willingness to be openness, to be comfortable with who we are everywhere and our ability to communicate effectively and reflectively, depending on who we are speaking to and the situation we find ourselves in.

G-Cloud quickly provided a low cost and effective way to securely collaborate

2012-05-25T17:07:58Z

As promised in a previous blog, it gives me great pleasure to preview another sale where G-Cloud has enabled the use of a solution which is giving great business benefit. NHS Central Southern Commissioning Support Services (CSS) have bought INOVEM Collaborate software as a service via the G-Cloud framework to improve team communications and collaborative working amongst NHS clusters and clinical commissioning groups spread across 5 counties.

The Central Southern CSS needed a solution to enable shared working across groups in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Gloucestershire and Swindon, with the ability to consult more widely with members of the public in future. As the number of users is expected to grow coupled with the flexibility offered by a pay-as-you-go solution, meant the decision to use Software-as-a-Service from G-Cloud was an easy one.

The availability of solutions and the ease with which they could be evaluated and procured, alongside a perfect oportunity to exploit cloud services, was what made G-Cloud really appealing in this case. Central Southern CSS and Inovem have been surprised and refreshed at the simplicity of G-Cloud, and the flexibility it offers in pricing, enabled a very low cost trial before spreading the cloud based collaboration solution to a wider user base.

Its a great approach that Andrew Fenton and his team at Central Southern CSS have taken, and I look forward to hearing great things from them in the future; equally, the feedback in relation to Inovem, a UK SME, has also been positive.

Function without form

2012-05-25T15:25:23Z

After two days spent wrestling with the problem of how to distinguish the essential from the desirable from the urgent to ensure that a programme really is focused on driving the highest value first, I realised that a perfect encapsulation of one element of the problem was to be found just down the corridor from the meeting room.

Here is a space to wash your hands. It contains basins, each with taps, soap dispensers and hand dryers. Everything is there to complete the hand washing task successfully. And it all works: there is water in the taps, soap in the dispensers and air in the dryers.

But it all works just a little oddly.

The soap dispenser is automatic: it spits out a froth of soap when you put your hand underneath. The tap works on a plunger: water spurts out when you press the plunger down. It gushes so fiercely and the soap is so frothy that it instantly washes the soap away before it can do anything useful. And then it stops with a disconcerting clanking noise from somewhere round the back, with a delay so short that it took me three bursts of water, even once the soap was under control. The hand dryers are automatic too, sensitive to hands being placed underneath them – so sensitive that they stop if your hands move from a sensor area which seems to be a few millimetres square.

It all works, my hands were clean by the end. The functional requirement had been delivered.

But that’s why functional completeness should never be confused with experience adequacy.

thinkpublic shortlisted for two Design Week Awards

2012-05-25T16:02:18Z

We are excited to announce that two of our service design projects have been shortlisted for this years Design Week awards. You can view all the different people shortlisted here. Fingers crossed and watch this space.

‘I Didn’t Want That’

2012-05-25T10:34:31Z

Identity Assurance gets closer to market

2012-05-25T09:58:14Z

As more and more government services are being provided online, it is becoming increasingly important to have a simple and user-friendly way for users to assert their identity in order to access these services. This access should be consistent across government, secure and able to preserve users’ privacy. A cross-Government approach to identity assurance took a major step towards market this week with the issue of an Invitation to Tender for one of the Government’s key digital services.

The Identity Assurance Programme within Government Digital Service (GDS) is working to optimise the way users can assert their identities to access government services. Government recognises that it is not necessarily best placed to design every detail of the ID assurance process, and will use the services of private sector ID providers (IDPs) to ensure that there is a simple, user-friendly and effective way for the users of government services to assert their identities.

Identity Assurance for Universal Credit

With support from the GDS Identity Assurance team, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is procuring a framework of suppliers from which to appoint the services of private sector IDPs. This is building on the high level service description developed by the Cabinet Office in open consultation with the private sector and on the intensive development work carried out by DWP for Universal Credit. Universal Credit is the Government’s major benefits reform programme designed to make the benefit system simpler and clearer for recipients, and to make work pay.

Universal Credit-21st Century Welfare

DWP and Cabinet Office have been working closely for several months now, determining the specific requirements from prospective IDPs that will meet the needs of Universal Credit and other government services. The contract notice for this procurement was published on 1st March 2012 and Good Practice Guides were published earlier this month. A selection of potential suppliers has passed the Pre-Qualification Questionnaire stage of the procurement and they were issued yesterday with the Invitation to Tender (ITT) documents.

The tendering process will run for several weeks and is expected to report successful bidders in September 2012.

Issuing the ITT is a major step forward as it is the first time that the initial requirements for a cross-government approach to ID assurance have been set out in a departmental procurement for multiple suppliers. It is a clear indication to prospective suppliers that government has a real proposition for developing a market of IDPs. It will also provide a working platform for further refinement of the ID provider service, based on real user experience of a flagship government service.

Filed under: GDS, ID Assurance

Behind the scenes of Open Space South West #OpenSSW

2012-05-25T07:55:38Z

With the Open Space South West website going live earlier this week, I thought I’d share some thoughts about how Open Space South West came about, who is involved, as well as share some personal thoughts about what I’d like to see happen and what I hope will be achieved (managing my own expectations).

The first thing to say is that Open Space South West is a real collaborative effort between Public-i and Devon County Council - helped by the multiple other organisations and people who are contributing time and money. In fact all CityCamp, GovCamp and similar events are collaborative efforts and that in itself is a great testament to people’s individual passion as well the passion and commitment of private sector organisations to help support the public sector around innovation and service design.

I’d like to acknowledge the work being done by Public-i colleagues (primarily Tanya Harris) in helping to organise the event as I’m not really a detail person and Tanya has had experience of this through helping to organise the first City Camp Brighton Event as well as various other events and activities. As well as my team in Devon who built the website as I don’t have those types of skills

You can read more about the event and the programme on the website www.openspacesouthwest.info.

What are you personal expectations?

At basic level I simply hope that the event is a success, in that people come, participate, feel inspired, are challenged and go away thinking about new opportunities and a new network of people who can help or share their learning. Not much to ask I know

I’m actually nervous about the event and I feel anxious about it. I’ve organised a couple of internal social media forums and they went well, so I don’t really know why I feel that way…I guess it might be because this is bigger, has a wider audience, is more public and will be compared in some ways to other similar events…But I need not fear as there is the added bonus of actually working with Public-i who have experience with these kinds of events

What is it like collaborating with Public-i?

To be honest this is the easy part, It does help that I’m actually employed by them for 2 days a week, but even without that advantage it would be the same. I’ve known the folks at Public-i for quite a while and I really like the way they work, how they think and most of all they are all great people. So working with them collaboratively has been easy.

How do you manage working for both private and public sector organisations?

I’m not sure I do to be perfectly honest, I’m actually pretty hard on myself, so I actually currently believe that I’m not doing very well for either public-i or the council (i know that it isn’t actually true) but i do push myself to do better all the time.

Actually it is managing my time that I find the hardest, as it requires me to be far more organised than I’m used to as well as comfortable with if I’m honest. But that also involves my voluntary work as well as my family, both of which have suffered a little and my outlook is that i work to live, not live to work.

The contract was only for six months and there will be decisions to be made about what happens next (but that is another blog post for another day).

What does Public-i gain from you working with them?

Catherine Howe would be best to answer that, but from my point of view I’d like to think it was the way I look and think about things. I wouldn’t say I was especially different in skill sets, I mean probably worse off – I’m not that creative, I can’t code, I’m not a designer, I’m not especially good at sales, I’m not really an expert in any area – but it is in the “general” and the “overview” where i think my value comes from…connecting ideas, having ideas, pushing ideas forward, working with people to make things happen…I’m sure other people have various views on my skills and you are welcome to share them openly here if you wish…nothing like 360 feedback or as Carrie Bishop called it 3D feedback

@carlhaggerty @MartinHowitt @tonyparker64 Or maybe like 3D appraisals since 360 implies a flat circle...
—
Carrie Bishop (@carriebish) April 26, 2012

Personally my view on myself is that I’m not a cog in a wheel, or a critical member of the team, but when I’m around different ideas are considered, perhaps new ideas, people feel challenged, maybe even inspired…I do believe however I can sell an idea.

What does Devon gain from you working with Public-i?

In a number of ways and this also makes me think that actually this whole opportunity should be more widely available to other public sector folk…what i mean from this is that I think people and organisations on both sides would benefit if those people who wished to seek new challenges and experiences were allowed to temporarily take development opportunities with a private sector organisations. You see and read all too often now that there is a massive brain drain happening within the sector and all the best people are leaving…yes some great people are leaving, but lets not forget and lets not underestimate the huge amount of latent talent that remains, waiting to be unlocked and let free…this is where events like open space south west come in for me, opening up new connections and opportunities for new people to be the leaders.

In my situation, I believe the council gains from my personal learning and development as well as from the new experiences and different ways of working. It financial gains of course for a short period of time from my reduction in hours and lets not kid ourselves that these are really good motivations for allowing this in the current climate.

It also benefits because it allows me personally to experience new opportunities, new challenges that I’d perhaps not get access to in my organisation. It can also benefit from my experience of new projects in advance of when the council may choose to move forward, so the organisational learning is reduced. This was and still is the motivation behind my voluntary work and involvement, however voluntary work can be limited in terms of quite in-depth experience in some places.

There are a wide range of benefits all round and if more people in the sector were given these short-term opportunities and then welcomed back into their councils, then local government would be better off for it. After all the sector as a whole needs to think differently about how we manage people, how we retain quality people and inspire a new generation of local government and public sector workers.

What are you looking forward to most?

Listening to the speakers and being inspired, meeting new people and making new connections – after all It is people who really make the difference.

Filed under: Local Government Tagged: #OpenSSW, devon county council, Local Government, Open Space South West, public-i

That was the local government week that was

2012-05-25T05:32:25Z

Back by something less than popular demand

‘Woohoo!’ I hear you say, can it really be that after a one week hiatus the WLLG round-up is back?

Well, yes, by popular demand (err, well not exactly but humour us) we’ve scoured the world of local government to bring you our favourite bits of the week. Well, that and the pieces we thought we could comment on.

We have been watching the changes to the relationship between the NHS and local government with a lot of interest and this week the LGIU published one of their excellent briefings accompanied by this post entitled ’Health and Wellbeing Boards: system leaders or talking shops?’. The blog correctly identifies some issues that have yet to be resolved by this boards and particulr flagged the following:

An important issue which is not yet being addressed head-on is the relationship between the council and the HWB as a council committee. This is will be particularly important in relation to NHS provider reconfigurations which so often prove politically challenging. The Kings Fund describes the situation regarding contested reconfiguration as follows:

‘Even where there is a compelling case for change on the grounds of clinical safety or outcomes, the local authority will come under pressure to reflect local opinion and preserve valued services…In these circumstances the local health and wellbeing boards will be in the eye of the storm and the current wave of generalised goodwill on which they have been riding will quickly dissipate.’

The Tax Payers Alliance (TPA) 2020 tax report was largely ignored by the political classes, due in part to the fact that it advocated a huge tax cut for the wealthy and described people who opposed that point of view as suffering from sexual jealousy. However the report did make mention of local government and on that point we sort of find ourselves agreeing with them. As the Conservative Home blog points out:

Part of the mix they propose would see more tax at a local level, with councils less dependent on central government handouts. For localism to be a reality it must include the management of money. Otherwise councils are the paid agents of Whitehall. The report argues that half the net spending of a council should be paid for from locally raised tax – rather than 17% at present.

The politics of their plan would be greatly helped by the context of tax going down overall. But the power to impose a Sales Tax would come on top of retaining VAT. They would also allow a Local Income Tax.

Perhaps a bit too radical for some but a point definitely worth making and exploring further.

What a headline the Guardian Local Government Network managed to drum up this week: ‘Local government has become ‘bureaucratic to the point of myopia’. The article was perhaps less strident but definitely worth a read:

Local authorities are our only large local institutions that embody the democratic ideal: run by, with and on behalf of the people. Lose the jaded mindset and you will see that councils really are exciting places trying to change the world. You will witness many heated debates about the pros and cons of shared services and strategic commissioning. You will come across knots of enthralled people gripped by the twists and turns of proposed restructurings, as if they were an episode from the latest soap.

……

What these exchanges have in common is that they often miss the big picture. Councils are constantly reviewing the way that they are organised. The aim is laudable, but the organisational focus can be process-bound and bureaucratic to the point of myopia.

We are big fans of the Comms2point0 blog and Dan Slee so when there is a combination of both in a particular post it is well worth a read. And when that post is about how we better use e-mail in communications it is worth a read. I particularly enjoyed the following fact:

People spend on average 51 seconds reading an email.

Meanwhile on Dan’s own blog he features a piece that was part of the ‘who cares Walsall blog’ from a comms officer who works with social workers to explain what they’re up to as part of this project:

This time round we’re tweeting from the home of a lady who cares for her husband with dementia to try and convey the relentless demands and challenges that this role brings and to try and make us all a bit more aware of dementia and mental health issues. We’re tweeting from a carers’ consultation session too and featuring the partnership work being done in our communities to offer people of all ages, something to do and somewhere to go.

And we’re looking at people with learning and physical disabilities who were sent out of the borough for care many years ago, away from their families and communities, who are being supported to come back.

If we can achieve this in social care with all of its perceived “barriers” we can achieve it anywhere.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from all this it’s “Don’t assume people won’t want to speak about their experiences.” In our experience they have no problem with speaking up – it’s getting people to listen that’s the key.

Meanwhile, kudos to the Helpgov blog which has reached it’s 20,000th hit and celebrated by providing some links back to previous popular posts; always worth a look.

Welovelocalgovernment is a blog written by UK local government officers. If you have a piece you’d like to submit or any comments you’d like to make please drop us a line at: welovelocalgovernment@gmail.com

Government consultations: Quiz show or Review show?

2012-05-25T00:26:20Z

Or is it Mastermind? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How should Government consult? There is – obviously – a long piece of guidance on the matter – owned, bizarrely, by the business and skills bit of government, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The Code of Practice on Consultation is pretty strict – twelve weeks to respond, don’t do it during an election period, set out a “consultation stage impact assessment”, and so on. It even reminds officials not to use consultation when what they really mean to say is “here’s the policy, it won’t change” – which still happens more than it should.

Yet despite the guidance, the real experience of being consulted is pretty dispiriting. In most cases, there is a list of questions that you are invited to answer, either by ranking items or filling in freeform text. It’s like a really dull opinion poll, or perhaps the sort of quiz show you quickly switch over from. There aren’t opportunities to stand up and say, “but you’re assuming…” or “but why aren’t you asking about…”.

The Government’s consultation rules aren’t wrong per se, they work pretty well for situations where you are asking a group of reasonably knowledgable people with an opinion to give their comments on a technical proposal. However, that’s only a small part of the interaction that Government needs to do around policy, and on many of the other occasions standard consultations produce doubly-negative reactions: the citizen gets frustrated trying to fit what he wants to say in to a narrow question-and-answer format, and the policy officers get frustrated reading all these stupid responses that JUST AREN’T ANSWERING THE BLOODY QUESTION.

It’s no wonder that lobby groups, who know exactly what they want and employ people to answer consultations effectively, seem like such allies when you’re a policy official – they can give you answers you can use, and they understand the constraints of the process.

Government could do consultation much better, and I hope that with the work on engagement being done in the GDS, there’s a better chance of improvement than there was a few years ago. We can’t just digitise the existing narrow process, and we should aim for consultation throughout the development of a policy, not just right at the end.

Representative democracy means that Ministers have the right to set the framework for decisions – but policy makers and politcians could get more out of the public, and develop better policies, by engaging in different ways, appropriate to different situations. They should think more about the audience, the expectations framework within which they are setting up the discussion, and what data they really want to get out at the end.

If we can get it right, Government at national level can support and model better democratic conversations around issues – and provide an infrastructure that local-level public services can use as well.

What sort of situations should we consider? As a start, I’ve come up with five broad types of consultation, different enough to need different tools, but all usable in developing a single policy.

Type one: Mastermind – a list of questions on a particular topic, looking for a set of simple answers. This is most like the traditional model. Government is looking for discussion on the detail, and the audience is potentially general, but realistically restricted to people who are interested either because of personal involvement or political belief. The expectations framework ought to be what the underlying policy and boundaries are (such as EU law), and it should be clear that this is a chance to comment on the detail. Preparatory information can assume a reasonable level of interest in and knowledge of the issue. At the end of it, the civil servant gets a set of answers to inform the final decisions on detail. Most of the answers are probably fairly sensible, or at least predictable, and a few will be ~~completely barking~~ independent-minded. It’s not a representative sample, but it’s probably got good coverage of those who take a personal or professional interest in the issue.

Type two: Crystal Maze – running people through a simulation of something and seeing what decisions they make. This is pretty common at local level in the form of council budget simulators, and some are quite game-like. Government is trying to entice people who are probably not interested in a dry policy area, and take them through some structured choices and options in an entertaining way, so they can see where people end up. Expectations framework: we’ve written the game with a set of rules that reflect reality and the policy framework, that’s how it’s going to have to be played. Preparatory information: ideally none, but the game has to start from an expectation of zero knowledge. What you get: a set of outcomes and the pathways that people took through the game, with (if you’ve asked) basic demographic information on who has said what. A lot of data that you can fiddle with in spreadsheets, but not information provided on the basis of much deliberation.

Type three: X Factor – lots of people saying or suggesting something on an issue, not considering the comments of others. This is the “crowdsourcing” model of Your Freedom – and also the “fire and forget” model of much online commenting. I didn’t love Your Freedom when it was out, but there’s a time for gathering in random ideas or comments from the public – you just have to be credible and honest about how you’re going to follow through. Expectations framework: what Government is asking for, and credible promises on how it will be openly used. Preparatory information: depends on the issue, but ideally a lot more than Your Freedom provided, and not so much that no-one gets past the second page of the website. What you get: the aggregated jerking of knees – but a lot of knees. You won’t get comments on detail of policy, you won’t even be sure that the policy is what people are reacting to, but you will have a huge sample to wade through and analyse.

Type four: Open University – deeply technical requests to deeply technical people. Lots of Government consultations are like this, and they are so different in nature and purpose from everything else in this list that they really need a different term. What you get: seven really, really detailed comments on aspects of the policy you’d never thought of before.

Type five: Review Show – throwing out some creative things and getting interesting people to talk about them. This is where the most interesting potential lies, and it’s a model that’s farthest away from the traditional approach. It’s not quite deliberative democracy on the Fishkin model, and it’s not quite the networking community activists that we are working on in our We Live Here project, but it’s the potential for connection between the two – a sort of conversation-in-the-network or (to steal Patrizia Nanz‘s phrase) an Internet of Citizens. The expectations framework is simply that you’re participating in a conversation that will be listened to, and that contributions that are evidenced and take account of others’ views will be listened to most readily. The preparatory information needs to be both a good introduction to the topic, and something that anticipates (and responds to) questions or possibilities raised during the discussion. In this model, Government can’t stand at the back of the room with its arms folded, as it does with traditional consultations, it has to respond live – not necessarily pitching into the discussion, but presenting useful information and data that’s informed by what people are talking about. In return, there is the potential for rich information not just about preferences and discussions during this debate, but also where people are coming from (networks and places) with those opinions, and how opinions are changing when people are exposed to new data and information.

There is also perhaps a sixth type, not really feasible at the moment, and not even really a consultation, that you could call “reality TV”. By that I mean consultation on the model of “smart cities” – watching the aggregate of action or interaction as people in a place go about their lives, without trying to influence them, just connecting that lived reality into the policy-making process.

I’m sure these categorisations are wrong, or incomplete, and any comments are welcome below, but I would suggest GDS start with this sort of broad view of interaction between state and citizen when thinking about how they handle consultation in new ways.

Casserole is live in Beta!

2012-05-24T13:57:34Z

Editor’s note: this is an early version one of the site so we’re looking for feedback on how we can make Casserole the best darn social cooking site going. So please drop our project lead Murtz a line with any thoughts. Thanks!

Home-cooked food made by neighbours for neighbours.

Donate a dinner or charge a little – the choice is yours!

Guess what? Casserole is in Beta! As of yesterday afternoon, our new site – www.casseroleclub.com - is alive and kicking, awaiting new members to share and order food with others in their community. The Casserole Crew have been working around the clock to get it up and running, and we are keen to have people using the site and service as soon as possible!

This new site is our Beta site, meaning it’s version one of the service – it is laying the groundwork for how we build and develop Casserole and is only our starting point. We hope to add new features, improve what’s already there and hone the service based on how things go with this first step. This first iteration is the most basic version of the service, but we have to start somewhere right?

Some of the features on the new site include:

~ personal member profiles
~ a postcode search to find other members in your area
~ the ability to upload meals to share
~ the ability to order meals from those nearby

Alongside features, we’re also testing some new aspects of the service:

~ the option to put a price on your meal as reimbursement for ingredients
~ a much more open platform that allows anyone to order and cook meals

Image: Casserole homepage

The reasons for these changes and developments have come from many conversations and observations, and are based on the grounds that we are trying to create a service that is sustainable, able to strengthen local communities and support those who are most in need of the service. For instance, people without access to the web are still able to use Casserole as before, through our phone and texting service, only now we have a much easier way to find and connect them with cooks in their area.

During our piloting stage, we were focused solely on the town of Redhill, Surrey and its immediate surroundings. With our launch into Beta, we’re expanding this focus to all of Reigate and Banstead, expanding out to all of Surrey (and beyond!) in the near future. This means we will be mainly working to establish a strong Casserole community within Reigate and Banstead, before venturing further afield. With this said, the new Casserole site is technically open for anyone from anywhere in the UK to use. So if you live outside of Reigate and Banstead, but want to get involved, that’s brilliant; you will help direct us to where there is a desire and interest in Casserole, which will influence how we map out where to go next!

If you are the first, or one of the first in your area to sign up, you can help lead the home-cooked revolution and ask us to send you a campaign pack to help kick start Casserole in your neighbourhood. The pack contains a few posters, some flyers and some tricks of the trade on how to get your community involved. While we work to get Reigate and Banstead up and running, your initiative to get things started in your own area will help us to grow and build a thriving Casserole service and community.

Throughout this journey, so many people have contributed their thoughts, experience, and resources to Casserole’s development. Our partners, Surrey County Council and Reigate and Banstead Borough Council have helped us navigate the rough waters of food hygiene and safety measures, and have helped promote and connect us with community organisations.We have also been very lucky to have the funding and support of the Design Council and Technology Strategy Board through the Independence Matters- Home and Away programme, which has allowed us to pilot, research and build Casserole.

On a local level, we’ve had so much support from businesses like Chalk Hills Bakery and The Art of Living, and organisations like Live at Home and NCT (and so many more!!) who have helped give us some credentials and support from trusted members of the community.

We are constantly looking for feedback, comments and suggestions on how to improve the site and the service, so please get in touch if you have something to say!

(and just a handy reminder that the first 50 people to register on the site will receive a £5 Sainsbury’s voucher and be entered to win a bespoke cookery hamper as a special thank you for trying out the new site.)

Review: The Return of the Public by Dan Hind (@danhind)

2012-05-24T11:54:20Z

I encourage anyone interested in the debate on media standards in and around Leveson to read Dan Hind’s The Return of the Public, now released in paperback by Verso. First published in 2010, it antedates the current furore but throws considerable light on it. Hind explores the interplay between conceptions of the political state and the idea of the public from the eighteenth century to the present day. His analysis shows the extent to which political and communications elites have deployed power, money and intellectual self-rationalisation to control the information flows on which critical understandings of reality depend, thereby ensuring a near accord between their interests and an inherently restricted “public opinion”. Hind unpacks the controlling dynamics and contradictions of both market-orientated and public-service conceptions of a legitimate public information exchange and debate, and argues persuasively that while the prevailing orthodoxy in publicly permissible economic thinking has been exploded by recent financial catastrophes and exposed as both the begetter of those catastrophes and a wholly inadequate discourse for understanding and tackling them, its grip persists, while alternative perspectives struggle to secure a hearing.

Hind shows how the modalities, interests, behaviours and ownership models of print and other media are central to these restrictions on public discourse. Whatever one thinks of his proposed remedies for these problems, Hind is surely right to argue that we must mount a serious challenge the dominance of limited interests over public debate. To increase our capacity to self-imagine as citizens and question, check and transform the opinion-forming elites whose captives we currently are, information sources must first to be diversified and distributed, and then reconfigured in new power bases of information which reflect an emergent public opinion that is genuinely self-generated, not controlled and imposed.

And if like me you have a prejudice in favour of books that quote Bakunin, explode overrated sages like Isaiah Berlin, and make elegant use of Kant, then The Return of the Public will repay your attention in many ways.

Using Umbraco

2012-05-24T12:03:46Z

When the decision was made to use Umbraco for new.shropshire.gov.uk it was at an interesting point in the lifecycle of the CMS. The current version at that time (and the one we had based our initial investigations on) was 4.7.1, but a newer, more refined version (Umbraco 5) was in beta, and would be released well within the timescales of our project.

Being the adventurous types (and the fact that the majority of us had just completed ASP.NET 4 and C# training making it an easier learning curve for us), we opted to develop the prototype site using Umbraco 5. The main draw of this version was the advantage of having a more refined behind-the-scenes architecture and a streamlined templating process (using ASP.NET MVC 3 and Razor), and meant that what we were learning & building now wouldn’t have to be relearned & rebuilt a year or so down the road if we upgraded.

Unfortunately, opting for a new and untried system set us up with a few stumbling blocks…

As Umbraco 5 was still in beta, there was a distinct lack of information and official documentation available to us, although users of the Umbraco community website (our.umbraco.org) were ready and willing to assist with a number of questions and concerns we or others had raised.

Quite often, those questions and concerns were answered by members of the core team behind Umbraco – a reassuring sight that they were fully invested in the new version, listening to the people who would eventually be using it rather than hiding away and developing the system in isolation.

Admittedly, a large proportion of our own problems stemmed from our own inexperience with ASP.NET MVC 3, but, like others, we were also hamstrung by the lack of documentation on the revised functionality in Umbraco 5. A number of learning resources were available for 4.7.x, but were not applicable to Umbraco 5, which, as a consequence meant that some of the features we were expecting to have out of the box were unavailable (being open source, some components of Umbraco were community-developed and, as of yet, those components had not been recreated for the new version).

Despite these issues, we did find the development side to be fairly quick, turning out new templates and document types pretty easily, and managing to find work-arounds where some of our desired functionality could not be built as we had originally intended. Being able to review the source code of the existing features of Umbraco was the biggest help in such situations.

Once the main development was either in hand or complete, our main concern was with the performance of the website, as some pages were taking anywhere between 3 seconds to 1 minute to load. Through trial & error, and monitoring the dedicated Umbraco 5 discussion forum on our.umbraco.org, it became apparent that the problem lay with the new architecture, and it wouldn’t be a quick fix.

Over the weeks, the core Umbraco team developed patches and released version updates, and during that time the community came up with a number of additional tweaks and techniques to shave valuable seconds of the load time.

On the whole, the version updates showed marked improvement, and we ended up going live on a Release Candidate of Umbraco 5.1. The full version was made live shortly after, but after upgrading our site we found it brought with it another performance hit and were forced to roll back.

The feedback on the poor performance of Umbraco 5 was getting quite heated, although regular updates from the core Umbraco team (in particular Niels Hartvig – the founder of Umbraco) on the plan to resolve the problem have managed to turn the rants into constructive discussions. My own tweets (from my own personal Twitter account) about our experiences with Umbraco 5 (good and bad) resulted in a response from the Twitter account of another member of the Umbraco team, Alex Norcliffe, who was interested in seeing our own setup to see why the upgrade turned out the way it did.

Sadly for us, the timescales mapped out for the next couple of updates for Umbraco 5 aren’t in our favour, and our next service to be included on new.shropshire.gov.uk will have to be developed in Umbraco 4.7.2.

We haven’t ruled out using Umbraco 5 again in the future, in fact the Umbraco team’s willingness to engage with the community across a number of different channels goes a long way, in both terms of improving public perception of Umbraco 5 as a product, and towards speeding up the identification and resolution of the issues with this version. We may find that the next update resolves all the main bugbears we have, allowing us to continue using and developing Umbraco 5.

In short – we like Umbraco, and, even though it is currently hampered by a few issues, Umbraco 5 is shaping up to be a pretty good CMS.

Gii – The next procurement round

2012-05-24T10:15:11Z

We’re pleased to announce that we’re opening up the next round of procurement for the G-Cloud (Gii) today so if you missed out last time or have a new service you want to sell through the CloudStore please apply here.

Why are we doing another procurement?
Our last procurement was hugely successful gaining nearly 260 suppliers and around 1700 services but, we want to ensure that we have as big a range of services available as possible and that the content of the CloudStore is kept fresh and up to date to ensure that governments use of technology can keep pace with the constantly evolving boundaries and new innovations that are happening all the time. The whole purpose of G-Cloud is to create a dynamic type of procurement to facilitate this. So, to keep the constant flow of new services and suppliers flowing on to the CloudStore our plan is to undertake regular frameworks every few months. This procurement round is the second in an ongoing programme of continuous iterative procurements.

We have tried to make the process as simple as possible. In particular, it will be a simpler for services already on a G-Cloud framework to be included as long as there are no material changes from the original service description.

As with other areas of the programme, we are constantly listening to feedback from buyers, suppliers and other interested parties, and are developing our approach in an iterative manner. Some of the changes we are making this time round as as follows:

the framework will run for 12 months not 6
although the limit of the contracts is still 12 months in exceptional circumstances contracts can run up to 24 months
the value of the total procurement possible through G-Cloud has been increased to £100m from £60m
A number of changes have been made to improve the terms and conditions including removing the data protection element in the Framework as it did not apply between supplier and GPS (where it applies it remains in the call-off contract).

If you’d like more information then please have a look at the Supplier Zone or just ask us: enquiries@gcloud.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

Implementation, implementation, implementation

2012-05-24T07:44:17Z

Last week I participated in a panel at a Green Alliance event on the Green Deal. Someone from Chiswick complained that he had asked some local builders for quotes to renovate his newly acquired house – they had all offered to install solar panels – but none had offered him ‘Green Deal’ improvements. That was fine responded Climate Change Minister, Greg Barker. The Green Deal didn’t launch until the autumn – and was a 20 year programme – so it would grow and change over time. So it was wrong to expect builders to know about it now. The Green Deal is an immensely complex proposition as shown by the delivery map the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) below. It requires multiple different actors to make decisions to happen. But the bad news for DECC is that the prime minister is already on their case – as the Telegraph stated earlier in the week: “He cited several programmes where he is pushing for better or faster progress. He said: “Is the Green Deal delivering on time? Are our welfare reforms working? Is the free schools programme going fast enough? Are the changes to the immigration system coming in? [...]