There is alot of like about the guide. The six principles (these GDS folks are a very principled lot!) are both ambitious and sensible;

Government should

• Communicate with citizens in the places they already are
• Use social media to consult and engage
• Use social media to be more transparent and accountable
• Be part of the conversation with all the benefits that brings
• Understand that government cannot do everything alone, or in isolation
• Expect civil servants to adhere to the Civil Service Code (online as well as offline)

Having forewords from both Francis Maude and Sir Bob Kerslake giving the document a massive stamp of approval from the powers that be is a huge plus. To be honest just having people that senior supporting this kind of work is an amazing victory.

I do find the publication a little odd beyond that though if I am honest. It seems a slightly weird mix of vision, policy and how-to guide. Alot of space seems to be taken stating the wider case for embracing social media and presenting options and examples of how to do that. All good stuff but I wonder if it ends up with one publication trying to be all things to all people?

Section 7 about how social media and the Civil Service code interact is very good but seems a little lost in the wider document when I (and it might just be me) would think this is the most important information for the majority of people using, or considering using, social media (certainly in a semi-personal capacity).

I also find the second section (from the Home Office this time) Guidance on overcoming the technical barriers to accessing the Internet and social media really strange for a public document – I can’t imagine there are many decision makers working in IT in Government who don’t know how to fix the issues they simply haven’t been a priority til now. A single email from Sir Bob to all the CIOs would have fixed that I would have thought?

This sounds a bit more negative than it should as I think just the existence of this guidance is hugely important and demonstrates a real change in attitude from leaders within the civil service. This is bound to filter through to the rest of us in the public sector over time and this can only be good news for those of us who advocate embracing more social communications.

Given my preoccupations at the moment I was/am particularly interested in the feedback [PDF] around the custom CMS they built.

[aside: in the post Ross discusses the fact it is *two* products - a CMS and a front-end website. This is obviously correct but in my own projects we are constantly conflating the two and I need to work harder to make sure everyone understands the dividing lines.]

The task completion comparisons they have done against existing CMS are particularly interesting and I like the way they have stripped things down to a very straightforward task driven interface. I especially like the idea of this if/when there is a more distributed publishing model – something I think alot of organisations are revisiting at the moment.

I still don’t believe that using Markdown is an appropriate solution for when a product like this spreads beyond early adopters (and judging by the comments on the post I am not alone) and I wonder if a whole new CMS needed to be built or whether this kind of editing UI could have been built into a more common open source CMS so it could be more widely shared? That said I haven’t used it and given the people involved I have confidence that decisions were made for the right reasons so I’m not really concerned.

The fact that users felt that the Departments themselves needed to be more visible and were key navigation aids was interesting to me given some of the early thinking going on at the moment around the relationships between my organisations website and its sibling sites. It backs up our own findings nicely I think.

Also the fact that the design itself was well received is nice to hear as we are planning to be heavily ‘inspired’ by that design when we ‘refresh’ in early 2013

All in all lots to think about again – and particularly timely as my own projects start to ramp up over the summer so thanks again guys!

What the abstract fails to actually get across though is..well everything.

I’m not planning on talking about open source, content, data really. What I want to talk about is the kind of extreme openness/transparency/sharing demonstrated by a number of development teams these days but particularly that demonstrated by the recent GOVUK project.

The idea of blogging as ‘open practice’ is reasonably well established (I think?) and in HE there are some teams who do a brilliant job of this (I am regularly in debt to posts from the Edge Hill and Bath web teams) and the more of this that happens the better for everyone [I think]. The GOVUK team have taken this much further though – blogging pretty much all their thinking even at early stages, using Github to share code (and more), even having an open to the public Pivotal Tracker project backlog (pretty much completed now..) and speaking at all sorts of events big and small (including GovWest!).

I have found myself genuinely inspired by the web again, after a spell of coasting if I am honest, as I saw people taking chances and really embracing modern techniques, tools & culture I guess in an environment (the civil service!) hardly known for risk taking. If this level of change can be achieved there (albeit with massive financial and political backing) then on a smaller scale maybe we can all achieve more and with the extreme level of transparency they have provided a map for us all to follow. Maybe

That is my premise anyway. I’ll be looking for additional examples (from both sides of the argument!) and trying to give some thought to the question of whether in an environment where ‘competition is king’ this sort of thing is going to be acceptable to the powers that be.

I admit I have felt that the term ‘content strategy’ is over-hyped and to some extent that its alot of disciplines that have been core to the web since the beginning being dressed up in a way that makes them more marketable. The actual bits that make up ‘CS’ are pretty much all things I believe in and listening to Relly and Rich really went a long way to making me put my issues aside and embrace as much as I can.

The evening was a great mix of learning about new ideas and hearing things that reinforced my belief in things I was already doing. Just a few of the things I loved in Rellys talk were;

- the idea of micro-copy being the conversation you are having with your users

- orphaning the occasional page from the navigation and see if anyone actually notices!

- limit talking about ‘CONTENT’ and talk about ‘pages’,'videos’, ‘pictures’ instead

- doing this stuff is not a one person job – it takes alot of people, with various skills and backgrounds to make it work

- I particularly liked the idea of ‘page tables’ [templates] – outlining the message, method, call to action of the page – its something I’ve been thinking about a while but failed to articulate

- produce propositions for everything! WHY do you need this page?

- if your content is going to help towards improving the organisation goals you need make the goals include improving user experience!

and a special mention to this idea

- everyone in content strategy making it up as they go along – some just making up a little less than others

[Relly is running an online course in content strategy - I think it is likely 99 quid well spent!]

Rich spoke about his experience trying to implement ‘content strategy’ type change as Ballmouth and Bath Unis. I particularly liked his idea of using the ideas around ‘content strategy’ as a way of framing the conversation with stakeholders and his acknowledgement he needed to get buy-in from senior staff as well as the people doing the work on the ground floor. This is something I’ve become more and more aware of – the ‘ask for forgiveness not permission’ technique inevitably stalls – at least in .ac.uk land!

Also when he spoke about the new site not just being an opportunity to copy and paste the old content into a new system I could have cheered (see my last post!)

Also a light-bulb moment for me was the idea that the staff who moan about the site the most are probably the most passionate so if you can win them over you have powerful allies. I actually started to actively plan this into some work I am doing over the summer today.

The big take home in Richs talk though was to ensure good content you need to ensure organisational change – get people from the top to bottom to think in a different way and to take what they publish online seriously.

The one thing I didn’t agree with was the take Rich had on content management systems – much to Mikes disgust though I decided not to enter the fray! Safe to say I don’t think ‘in-context’, WYSIWYG, distributed authoring is the best way forward these days

It was a brilliant, though-provoking evening that had we immediately revisiting my own plans and set my brain buzzing with new ideas. Can’t ask for much more than that. Plus the noodles were lovely as well!

The technical side of the new site will clearly be driven by the CMS and the visual design is likely to be driven by outside forces to some extent as well so I am not worrying *too* much about that yet.

The two things that are starting to preoccupy me though are the information architecture (which continues to vex me as it has for months but I think we are closing in on a schema which will be tested this summer) and also the content.

In particular something I am wondering about the existing content. We don’t have a huge site – Google only registers about 9k URLs including all the ‘vanity URLs’, redirects and documents – I reckon we only have 1500 HTML pages and a similar amount of PDFs etc if truth be told. The nature of a large amount of our content also is that it is very time sensitive (funding calls have a time window as do news stories) and traffic drops off a cliff pretty sharpish for certain pages.

I was re-reading this piece by Gerry McGovern recently – Web content migration: disastrous strategy – and it got me to thinking about whether our planned ‘lift and shift’ strategy was really the best course of action.

What I would like to do is start anew on the new site – select the most sought after content, freshen it up (alot in some cases), rethink the format of some content from the ground up, fill in some of the gaps we know we have and basically launch the new site with content that really has a use focus. This all sounds a little like a ‘content strategy’ I guess – just as well I am going to Bathcamp on Wednesday

For now I am more interested though in what to do with all the pages that wouldn’t be migrated. I am writing a proposal based on the following idea but am hoping someone who reads this will point out if it is stupid in advance of me sending it to anyone important

The idea is to use software like Heritrix (if I can ever get my head around it) or perhaps a company like Hanzo (if funds permit) to create a web archive snapshot of the website prior to the launch of the new site.

This ‘archive’ would be hosted at a domain like www.archive.mrc.ac.uk (for instance) and all existing pages that are not reproduced on the new site would be 301 redirected to there. A pop-up (or modal dialogue!) in the style of Gov.UK warnings would warm users that it was an archived page and no longer updated but the Google juice would not be lost and we would maintain persistence around our URLs.

Does this sound sensible? If content needed to be un-archived as it were then I can imagine it could get a bit tangled and that needs more thought.

That term is HiPPO – highest paid persons opinion – and it is apparently a Googler term for when decisions are made by a senior member of staff based on their opinions rather than making data driven decisions. I really do like this term and it certainly chimes true but over the years my biggest problem has actually been the design by committee/groupthink kind of thing. The desire to be ‘collegiate’ in some of the places I have earned my crust has been crippling at times. Once or twice I could have benefited by some HiPPO action

The core of the article is around the extensive use of A/B testing by the major online companies and how their decision making is now based increasingly on the results they get from these tests. The anecdote about the Obabma campaign homepage was particularly interesting – especially the fact that the expert assumptions were so often proved wrong when the A/B testing was initiated and also just how considerably wrong they turned out to be;

Had the team listened to instinct—if it had kept “Sign Up” as the button text and swapped out the photo for the video—the sign-up rate would have slipped to 70 percent of the baseline.

As someone starting to seriously think about a major website overhaul and working primarily with people for whom data is golden I have to say I am fascinated with the possibilities – even for a small site like ours. The question is going to be just what is possible financially and time wise but I do think this sort of activity coupled with the analytics data already collected could make a powerful case for change. I am also interested to find out how far my assumptions are incorrect – I certainly have my opinions on how elements of the site could be improved but perhaps the data will prove me as out of touch as those Obama staffers!

[as an aside I wonder if the Cookies law is going to torpedo all of this anyway?]

When it comes to web content management success, it’s not just about the technology.

I know I am particularly guilty at times of getting blinded by the search for the ‘right’ technology – and then inevitably feeling let down by it soon after implementation. This is despite the fact I know full well that the CMS itself is just one piece of the wider puzzle. The term ‘content strategy’ is bandied about alot these days and I tend to be a bit dismissive sometimes as I worry the hype is outweighing the usefulness but, and it is big William Perry sized but, the reality is that it is often the kinds of things covered in these strategies (people, processes, planning..) that make or break a CMS project.

The post that drew me to the blog is particularly pertinent to me at the moment; titled The CMS selection myth: Stop the insanity and focus on what really matters. It includes this nice term ‘CMS Readiness’ and an interesting checklist

• Vision: Where does the organization want to be in 3-5 years and what’s the overall vision for how digital will drive the business forward?
• Customers: How will your customer interact with you across their entire journey and what is the role of digital (web, mobile, e-mail, etc.) in enabling these experiences?
• Content: How are you approaching the overall content strategy and how will it support the experiences you hope to deliver?
• Team & Culture: How will you support the digital channel and CMS and do you have the proper roles and team members in place?
• Measurement: How will success be defined and how can analytics and optimization be used to drive ongoing value?

Even for a non-commercial organisation like mine these are valid questions – and not ones to which I/we have all the answers so that is something to have a hard think about in the months to come. Anyway the blog seems to have a decent % of useful, practical posts so it has made its way unto my reading list going forward.

As you can see from the pic below it was a pretty massive turnout and as such slightly different than I expected but Jane O’Loughlin did a great job of facilitating and managing the crowd and even without a mic and some rather funky background music it was easy enough for me to catch 95% of the discussion.

The topic of the day was social media guidelines though at times it drifted to wider implications of social media. To be honest I try to stay out of these discussions these days – not being a direct civil servant and being outside of London I don’t feel the scrutiny (or paranoia) that many people worry about and from a personal point of view I have clearly been pretty(!) open about my life on Twitter since day one and have never really felt a need to separate my personal and work personas (maybe because I don’t really have a separation point?).

I also have quite old fashioned (if anything to do with social media can be old!) ideas about where the strengths in social media lay and continue to find organisational/corporate attempts to interact on this level a bit jarring – though professionally I do continue to try myself as well.

Both Tim Lloyd and Steph Gray brought up the need for case studies and examples of best practice being what we need now more than anything and I wholeheartedly agree – the Digital Engagement Guide that Steph has launched is clearly a good step in the right direction for this but more is needed – particularly of engagement by and with [very] senior coleagues.

I have now written ‘social media guidelines’ for three different organisations in the last five years but I think the best quote of the day came from Nick Keane from the National Policing Improvement Agency (I paraphrase);

People who read social media guidelines don’t use social media, people who use social media don’t read the guidelines.

Never truer words spoken.

So a bit part of the point of yesterdays meetup was to help the Digital Engagement team at GDS with producing their social media guidance – which will almost certainly end up effecting all sorts of other departments and organisations all over the public sector.

For what it is worth I think the best thing GDS can do in this case is lead by example. A set of high level principles akin to their Design Principles wouldn’t go amiss and beyond that just keep doing what they are doing – especially getting seriously senior civil servants to take social media seriously (and I do think it is the civil servants who need convincing not the Ministers) – getting Sir Bob Kerslake to really use Twitter is the best ammunition for the use of social media I have had for years. For my corner of the world if Sir Adrian Smith suddenly was on board with social media then I’d be having *very* different conversations.

To celebrate this they have organised a little programme of fun events during May to ‘introduce’ themselves to the local developer & open web communities.

The events are all on the Mozilla London page on Lanyrd - I’ll be heading along to the ‘open day’ as I’ll be in London anyway and I’m hoping to get along to the bowling as well.

As I tend to tell anyone who will listen Mozilla is *much* more than Firefox (not that there is anything wrong with FF) and the Foundation has some amazing plans for a campaign around getting people to learn to be a ‘Webmaker’ this summer that I think will appeal to a lot of people I know.

Despite having to step away from my official ‘Mozilla Rep’ role due to time constraints and also having real doubts about the whole ‘Open Badges’ thing I still think Mozilla do amazing work and the tools people like Jess, Atul and Laura are working on to support the campaign really are amazing.

So if you are in or near London in May and fancy some geeky fun I really do recommend you try to pop along to at least one of these events.

It can be summed up with its introductory statement;

Q:
How to build great software?
A:
Build a great team, and have them build it for you.

It basically talks about the fact that getting talented, motivated people is the key to success and not the process you use. I remain a big fan of ‘agile’ development but increasingly worry that ‘Agile’ development has become a victim of trying to become mainstream. Look at the price of the courses, the reams of words written about it, the software springing up to support it and the ever growing lists of ‘rules’.

When it works well ‘agile’ is very powerful but I wonder if that is because on those occasions it attracted great teams who could have delivered amazing stuff no matter what the ‘management fad‘*?

GOVUK, to use my standard example, have recruited a small army of very talented, resourceful and dedicated people who would probably deliver brilliant work no matter what framework they were working within – though I do wonder if part of the reason (though maybe a small one) they signed up was the allure of working with agile so it becomes a bit of a chicken and egg kind of thing?

*Bobs phrase not mine