Directgov is dead part 2

Time for a one-last, one-last post as Directgov is migrated to gov.uk. My prediction that gov.uk would fail to replace it by August 2012 in Absolute control: why Betagov will fail sort of came true, although it's mid-October 2012 so that seems somewhat churlish. Today I'm enjoying the post The emperor's new clothes and am looking to pick up some other perspectives:

Perhaps the departments will rebel, or the sponsors will move on, or delivery will be undermined by some cockups, or the team will tire of bureaucracy once they move into the transaction domain.

Well put. When Martha Lane Fox's warriors leave the citadel, they'll discover the real public sector world of organisations like Gubbins: labrinthine regulations, dreary call centres, moving targets, absense of digital strategy and, yes, resistance from people who work in customer contact like me. Come to think of it, have I changed my own point of view since I started writing this?

Anyway, as the original orange monstrosity is now offline, I have to applaud GDS for following through. Try to find that £1 billion in savings now, won't you?

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.

gov.uk launch: a quick digression about all the nice things the government are doing

I had today's blog post all planned out in my mind. I was even going to review the other blogs covering the gov.uk launch like a grown-up sub-academic.

OK here goes -

Delib - 'Looks great! Hypothetical savings!'
Puffbox - 'Looks great! More search less navigation!'
Helpful technology - 'Looks great! More centralised control!'
Disambiguation - 'Why most UX is shite'

Haha I'm sure the timing of the last post was just an unfortunate coincidence. UX and web consultants don't like to knock the government supersite idea too much, although Puffbox's Simon Dickson is known for his healthy scepticism. Over the years Directgov must have provided a nice little earner for hired guns.

OMG a digression of a digression. No, what genuinely appalled me twenty minutes ago was the revelation that not only would gov.uk feature public services, it's going to feature extensive PR on the policies of the government of the day:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/03/government-policy-a-spotters-guide/

Later this month we will unveil another bit of our GOV.UK beta – the element that explains the work and workings of government. This is intended to replace the many separate sites run by government organisations, simplifying things for people who are personally or professionally interested in how government works and what it is doing.

So far so good. It always tickled me pink that the same organisations who forced Gubbins to converge to Directgov would have to find themselves going through content editors to get anything published on the web. Those editors will be sitting in separate buildings, if not separate cities hundreds of miles away. They could wait for years on end for a Project Austin to not show up as well.

Naturally GDS are putting hypothetical users first:

In developing this component we’ve found ourselves returning frequently to the question: “what is government policy?”

Not “what is government policy on issue X” (a separate problem which I will return to in a minute) but, more philosophically, what is and isn’t a government policy and how do you know when you’ve met one?

Apparently GDS need to comply with FOI as well so all this government openness and accountability would be a terribly good thing.

Here's where the stench of evil becomes overpowering:

Working definition

Our ambition in creating GOV.UK is radically to improve the user experience of government, and that includes explaining government policy in a clear and consistent way.

The current Government is on record as saying: “It is our ambition to make the UK the most transparent and accountable Government in the world”.

Being able to identify, aggregate and explain government policy is critical to our doing that.

The ICO study cited two workable definitions:

• a course or general plan of action to be adopted by government, party, person etc. (OED)
• the process by which governments translate their political vision into programmes and actions to deliver “outcomes”, desired changes in the real world. (Modernising Government White Paper, 1999)

We’d like to suggest a third, the one we’re working to in the beta of GOV.UK, which is:

• statements of the government’s position, intent or action

See the rhetorical metamorphosis there - from 'user experience' to 'identify, aggregate and explain' to 'statements of the government’s position'.

It's impossible to explain the government of the day's policies without advocating them.

Here's a quick reminder of how Alphagov looked:

Alphagov test site

Why, roughly half of it was devoted to promoting, sorry, explaining the workings, of the government of the day, wasn't it?

In the middle of the lower half there was a smiling, happy portrait of David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the garden of No 10 Downing Street. 












Presumably you need to see that smiling, optimistic picture of Dave Cameron and Nick Clegg in the Garden Of Future Promise when you're off to find out about public services.

They could have used a more neutral picture to express the somewhat dull idea of government structure and policy but I expect this was the photo the Coalition had lying around.

While charming politicians is one of the ten things Directgov actually does, to their credit, Directgov always remained politically neutral. Now GDS seem to be crossing a sinister line to appease their paymasters.

Oh dear, there I go with the rhetoric again. Here's more from GDS themselves - their italics:

Towards a language for describing policy

To fully answer the question “what is government policy on issue X”, though, we need not only to identify government policies reliably but also to find a naming convention and consistent language to explain them.

We’re trying out one possible approach to that in the beta, using a new ’policy definition’ format to apply a structured set of sub-headings on each policy, as below. The first two (‘the issue’ and ‘actions’) are mandatory headings, everything else will be optional – a flexible framework to describe policies of different flavours and at different life stages.

The issue – the problem or opportunity, and government’s aims
Actions – what government is doing/will do/has done to address the problem or seize the opportunity
Background – how the policy has developed to date, why the government has chosen this course and rejected other options, including the evidence
Engagement – who government has asked/is asking/will ask, when and how
Impact – who benefits or is otherwise affected
Bills and legislation – the legal framework in which this policy is operating, and how the policy might change that legislation
Partner organisations – what government and non-government organisations are involved, and in what capacity
Related news, speeches, publications and consultations - how the policy is evolving through announcements and publications (displayed automatically by creating associations in the publishing system)

The headings are experimental and might be wrong. The approach may, faced with the complex ebb and flow of a policy-making machine which lacks an “everyday need for a precise definition”, prove too simplistic.

But simplification is absolutely the point here. The goal is to produce a comprehensive, coherent, constantly updated list of everything government is saying it will do or is doing, and to allow people to dig into that information in ways that makes sense to them.

That's all right, then - they're on a mission to explain. And if the government of the day's policy happens to be an illegal war or a bank bailout, you'll find plenty of information which justifies their position; published by the same people who publish all other government content, on the only government domain left.

I remember from visiting Directgov there was an air of nervous excitement when a member of the cabinet office was in the building. They're a lot closer to people in power than they are to people answering the phone in stressful government call centres.

In What happened to that £400 million? Part 2 I wondered why the Tory like Francis Maude would support a government supersite in principle - "less individual responsibility, more 'government knows best'". Now it seems the politicians have a vested interest in supersites which go beyond hypothetical savings.

Apart from the fact that 72 hours after the gov.uk launch GDS already seem to be losing interest in the task at hand, this predicts the worst scenarios yet for new versions of Directgov.

Next time maybe I'll get back to gov.uk's shortcomings - if GDS let me.