APIs on GOV.UK: they do sound jolly clever

Government supersites exist in their own reality. The launch of the navigation-free, purely information-carrying GOV.UK site on 31 January was hailed as a bold step forward by blogs close to GDS. The project is still apparently under budget at £1.7 million although the man hours being spent by the organisations helping to create the content are likely to have pushed the real costs over this limit already.

Last week I blogged about how the GOV.UK (do we need to capitalise this in future?) project already seemed to be losing interest in our un-sexy old public services and starting to promoting government policies on its platform instead. Sadly, Tom Loosemore's revolutionary Warriors have rapidly picked up that bourgeois Directgov habit of sucking up to politicians. They really should drop in on one of our call centres these days.

To be fair though, if GOV.UK really is acting like a 'business start-up' in Martha Lane Fox's words, they need to keep their investors sweet. And one of the ways to do this is come up with some cutting-edge ideas. Killer apps. USPs.

Today I'll cover one of the current clever-sounding flat-earth ideas behind GOV.UK.

The sexy Application Program Interfaces of GOV.UK

Here's GDS bringing us up to date on that market for open APIs:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/07/where-are-those-apis/

All of the editorial content on GOV.UK is available in full via an API. It’s the same API we use to communicate between the editorial tools and the apps that produce the pages you see.

Kudos to GDS to sticking to their plan, as ill-advised as it is. They seem to be putting some distance between themselves and Directgov by managing to build anything at all (see Directgov dog and the magic comments box).

Here's an older GDS post about those APIs -

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2011/09/22/building-apis-building-on-apis/

Public APIs are a vital feature of the modern web. Whether you’re looking at the ecosystem of Twitter and Facebook apps, tools for managing auctions on ebay, or code for embedding Youtube videos in a blog post, clear ways of integrating services are key for building more captivating web experience, and for bringing solutions to users where they are. It’s that latter point that underpins the recommendation in Martha Lane Fox’s report that: “the content, functionality and features of the service should … be widely available and open for re-use via syndication/apps.”

Martha Lane Fox called for these in Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution:

This increase in focus on end users should include opening up government transactions so they can be easily delivered by commercial organisations and charities, and putting information wherever people are on the web by syndicating content.

There's a strong whiff of Big Society about 'commercial organisations and charities'; presumably the '£1.3 billion, rising to £2.2 billion' of hypothetical savings promised in Directgov 2010 and Beyond involves removing a large number of public sector jobs like mine and letting private finance and er charities step in.

The problem with APIs

Here's where I could end up looking incredibly short-sighted 12 months from now ...

I'm only going on the GDS blog itself here, but I don't see it crammed with comments from private sector companies demanding syndicated content. There is, presumably, no commercial value in a government API. You can quote government content or link to it. Why spend your own web development budget adding content you didn't write, or breaking your site's look and feel with a government widget?

So far I haven't seen APIs used anywhere on the internet for government content and widgets. OK there was that one widget one of the government departments produced in 2010. The downloads were in the low hundreds. I'm not aware of seeing it on any websites.

It's been 14 months since Martha Lane Fox's Directgov 2010 and beyond. Is anyone out there looking for APIs of car tax information? Swine flu widgets?

APIs certainly sound dead new and exciting if you're talking to a consultant working in Whitehall. But we're actually talking about boring government web content. Not eBay auctions or blogs. Why not provide links to individual websites tailored to government services? The public can still get a definitive answer to their questions on something called a 'website'. A widget won't provide information in any context, sadly.

And thus pops GDS' theoretical bubble.

I could be wrong, of course. I spend my time building and fixing things on behalf of people who phone government call centres. I still work in 'websites', for heaven's sake.

Remember 'cross-selling'?

Since 2004, Directgov used their eccentric notion of 'cross selling' to build an unusable website saddled with the Directgov problem. The 'cross selling' notion goes against one of the fundamental principles of web usability - that users ignore anything that isn't of relevance to their immediate task. In practice, 'Cross-selling' was easily refuted within five minutes of looking at Directgov's actual Speedtrap analytics. It's telling that GOV.UK, while retaining the notion that citizens need all their information on a single domain, has quietly abandoned the notion of 'cross-selling' altogether.

Time will tell if public sector APIs become a force or whether this was simply an excuse to centralise control of the public sector web in Whitehall - while promising billions in savings, of course.

Remember poor old Directgov Innovate? Last post 2010 -

From the New Labour rhetoric of 'Public services in one place' GDS are talking a more private-sector, free market language with APIs. Alas, the coalition's 'Big Society' idea shares its initials with 'Blue Sky'. Amongst other things.

Post script: Open standards

In contrast, the cabinet office is offering a consultation on Open Standards:

Information Technology across the government estate is expensive and the way that government departments previously purchased IT has resulted in hundreds of small, separate platforms operating across a landscape of disconnected, self-contained departments.


Our approach will enable the Government to work collectively together but effective open standards for software and systems are required to ensure interoperability between software systems, applications and data. Within the Government Digital Service we are already demonstrating how collaboration between departments, along with a clear focus on the user, delivers better public services for less. Open Standards are crucial for sharing information across government boundaries and to deliver a common platform and systems that more easily interconnect.

To offer you a morsel of optimism with Directgov Must Die's stodgy diet of cynicism, allowing GDS to create and enforce standards across the public sector web is a good thing.

Someone please ban GDS from creating more government supersites, and cut their remit back from 'everything'. If you do, we might start seeing some real savings and real improvements.