This post isn’t about the GOV.UK stuff though (for a change!) instead it is about the recent changes to the website I have visited more than any other since the dawn of the world wide web and some of the lessons the BBC team has shared about their decision making and how I am learning from that.

BBC Sport is a site I have relied on for years. I have never switched my allegiance to Johnny come lately sites like Sky Sports News It is one of the pinned pages in my Chrome browser and I check in on it throughout the day – everyday.

It turns out it had been nine years since the Sports pages had been redesigned – and to be honest they were starting to show their age a bit. This became even more obvious when the News section went through its own redesign a while ago. The thing is that despite it looking a bit old school and having less than optimal navigation it was a site that many of us could use blindfolded so long had we used it and as such any changes were bound to attract comment.

On of my major personal netiquette rules is that I don’t rush to complain when sites redesign. This can be difficult with some companies [Facebook I'm looking at you] but in general I try and extend some semi-professional courtesy and give the sites a chance to grow on me.

So when the BBC announced they were planning on doing a major revamp of the Sport site I was prepared to bite my lip and bide my time.

When the site launched I had the initial bit of vertigo at the shock of the new but found myself with two contrasting opinions on the site. I found the actual content pages much improved. The layout and extra space give to the words really helps and the ‘related links’ are more obvious. That said I found (and find) the new homepage difficult and cluttered. There is just too much going on for me to cope with and I find myself avoiding this page now (which probably means I miss some stories I’d be interested in on more minority sports.)

Reading the series of posts that the Sports web team wrote though was very enlightening. It is clear that ‘live’ is very much the driving factor of the site and that is what their (considerable) user research has led them to. I think this is probably where I fall somewhat into the minority use case on perhaps that is why it doesn’t seem to work for me at the top level but improves when I drill down.

I have *very* little interest in getting live sports coverage from the BBC – I find all the ‘real time’ stuff distracting and a little irritating and nothing pisses me off more on the web than auto-playing video (though this has stopped thankfully!). I use the site to check results, occasionally read match reports, catch up on the big news but mainly to read the editorial comment pieces whether they be on the blogs or within the main structure. The Comment & Analysis section is still featured on the homepage but – to me at least – it seems a little buried and a particular victim of the ‘clutter’ I mentioned earlier.

So to resolve this I subscribed to the RSS of all my favourite BBC Sports bloggers for the first time and will in future just use the site for results, the occasional match report and whatever breaking news Twitter flags for me. Seems a decent compromise.

The main thing I was interested in from a work point of view was how they coped with the switch to horizontal navigation. This is something I am keen to do but as they acknowledge it does limit your options compared to the traditional left hand side vertical nav. They addressed this by making some tough choices;

“In order to make the navigation easy to use, we wanted to limit the number of items in the primary navigation to less than nine”

Given the amount of sports the BBC covers a list of nine (with one of them being ‘more Sports‘) was probably challenging but it does give me hope as that wouldn’t be a difficult list for us – however I would have been interested to read about how they decided to structure the navigation on the next level down.

That said the thought processes they have been through (and shared) about navigation and using ‘related links’ to promote content elsewhere in a Google driven world have been extremely helpful and their use of personas is going to force me to revisit that concept (although I remain unconvinced). Also the steps they took to validate the design are interesting with the levels of user involvement – plus I like the look of Axure very much so that is going into my next software shopping list!

So anyway I am very thankful to the Beeb for being so open – especially given the level of grief they get in the comments!

Then again – got to say I do hate the yellow!

While I have tended to agree with Cory Doctorow when it comes to dealing with ‘filter failure’ and ‘information overload’ one of the things I have always wished I was better at though is managing to keep a track of my bookmarking online.

I never clicked with Delicious or things like Magnolia really and my use of browser bookmarks has been pretty useless to say the least. I had some success with Google Reader for a while using the ‘sharing’ function but recent ‘improvements’ have pretty much ruined that service for me. Basically I have tended to get by due to a pretty good memory and a capacity to reproduce previously successful searches. It has started to become clear recently though that this isn’t a sustainable solution

So based on various things I have seen people trying via Twitter I am trying out a couple of things to see how it goes.

The cornerstone of my plan is Pinboard. I paid my six quid and set up an account based on multiple recommendations. One of the big selling points for me was how easy it was to sync my Twitter favourites which contained links with the service. I have found myself doing this more and more lately – especially as I have started using Twitter on my phone alot again.

I have also used IFTTT to suck my Google +1 feed in from Plus as [for my sins] I find myself using that more and more – especially with what is left of my Google Reader account [which maybe I should move elsewhere but broken as Reader is these days I still haven't found anything else that suits me.]

I have also synced my Gimmebar account – which is an amazing tool for grabbing screenshots/images from the web and one that I am just starting to use properly – to Pinboard.

So between all of that and a Chrome extension taking pride of place next to Ghostery I think I am pretty well set up – hopefully this time it will stick a little better than in the past

It had been going well though and we are looking to ramp up our social media activity across a couple of channels this year with a particular focus on Twitter (with an account name change and hopefully verified status upcoming) but the fly in the ointment with these plans is the upcoming closure of Cotweet to be replaced by SocialEngage – a product that is very more complex than we need and certainly considerably more expensive than we could justify.

This has led to a bit of a scramble to find a replacement product. I have no qualms about paying for a product – in fact I tend to think that is the only way of ensuring they stick around – but finding something at the right price point has proved challenging.

Our needs are pretty simple – a product that allows multiple team members to contribute a single Twitter account. We don’t need any significant social media analytics but some basic reporting is helpful.

Hootsuite is very much the leader in this space but its pricing structure is less than clear and when you do burrow down into its forums for some explanations it doesn’t make enjoyable reading. An additional $15 per team member per month is pretty excessive and it is clear that they are aiming for big corporates and shiny PR agencies who bill big. There is no way I can justify a $75 a month cost to manage our Twitter account so that is a loser straight away.

I looked at SproutSocial but while it is a very nice looking product it actually works out even more expensive than Hootsuite and like that product is packed with features of little utility to us. Again their goal is clearly to bring in the big agency accounts who can pass on the costs to their clients. The public sector is clearly not a priority!

The third product I checked out is MediaFunnel. This product is a long way from as slick looking as the previous two and has less features but in its favour it does have a relatively sensible pricing structure as well as a focus on team management of Twitter accounts rather than creating a ‘social media marketing dashboard’ which seems to be the goal of the other two. The $1 per month per team member pricing makes this the run away winner for the time being and I am going to trial it for the next month or so at least.

***Update***

@helloBRSTL pointed me to a list of Cotweet competitors on Quora where I discovered GroupTweet which looks like it might be perfect for our needs

If anyone comes across any other options please feel free to let me know.

I’m not going to write much here to today as better people than me have already covered the launch. The O’Reilly piece did a really nice job of setting it in the bigger picture and closer to home Steph wrote an insightful post. Also Dominic pretty much summed up the importance of the open source methodology with this one tweet;

So here is a quick list of 5 things I really admire about the site;

1. The focus on readability. None of the pages are cluttered. The font size is a little larger than usual and there is alot of white space.
2. The boldness of the site. It isn’t afraid to just give answers in plain English and clearly. I particularly like this page – https://www.gov.uk/when-do-the-clocks-change – try and find anywhere else online that clear.
3. The focus on search. Now there are still some bugs here and it is a bit unforgiving around typos and spelling mistakes but it is already very impressive and will, I’m sure, only get better.
4. The URLs. They are human readable, sensible and due to the flat nature of the site (I think) not burdened with trying to replicate some kind of file structure or navigation.
5. The use of Get Satisfaction for feedback. This isn’t really about the site but I think it is a really important step – continuing the theme of transparency that GDS have been sticking to since they were formed.

Plus as a kind of 5.1 I think it was hugely impressive that based on overnight feedback they released a new iteration of the site today fixing a number of issues users had raised. That is impressive and pretty inspirational stuff. While that sort of turnaround isn’t unexpected in start-ups its pretty amazing in the public sector. In fact this tweet pretty much sums the whole thing up;

It is not an unconference – though it does steal ideas liberally from the MailCamp event Steph Gray organised in 2011.

The event would run from 15.00 til 19.30 and will take place at the Bath University Innovation Centre (2 minutes from the train station.)

It has been lucky enough to receive some sponsorship from the main UKGovCamp fund (a % part of the money originally earmarked for the failed attempt to run Quangocamp) and also additional support from Eduserv and Bath and North East Somerset Council.

I’m hoping to get a full house at the Innovation Centre (around 50 people I think).

So far I am pretty confident I have speakers from all the following as well as trying to get someone from the Government Digital Service to come along and also, maybe, a Twitter-active councillor from Bristol.

JISC
Delib
Bath North East Somerset Council
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Eduserv
Devon County Council
Gallomanor Communications

The event will of course be free and tickets will be available soon so keep an eye on the #govwest tag on Twitter. I hope to see alot of you at the event.

Nonetheless I had a few Amazon vouchers left over at Christmas so decided to take a punt on ‘Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do’ by Euan Semple.

I’ve come across Mr Semple before, his work at the BBC is often held up as an early example of social media in practice and I even followed him in my early days on Twitter (before I radically changed the way I used it) so I was interested in what he had to say. Also it is fair to say I have been looking for inspiration recently – I’ve felt a strong need to reignite my passion for what I do.

This is a *very* optimistic book it has to be said. It talks about the opportunities and possibilities that social media offers and while it acknowledges the challenges it doesn’t dwell on them.

It is too long – like all of these books – and reads a little anachronistic at times (the regular mention of ‘forums’ feels strange – but I think it is used in a generic term to include all sorts of tools). That said the great saving grace with the format is the list of bullet point takeaways at the end of each chapter. That is a great idea and works especially well.

The book is best (IMHO) when it is talking about the cultural changes needed in organisations that are a) caused by this new culture and b) need to be embraced to make the most of these changes. I especially liked his thoughts on the new role a manager needs to take in this world (maybe as it mirrors my own thoughts!) and also the ideas around a kind of ‘corporate democracy’ powered by internal social tools.

When he writes about the culture of sharing and helping online and the way you can know people better you have only met online than those you sit with at work everyday it felt familiar to me. This is the social web I signed up for but had lost faith in somewhat. He also summed up one of my big bugbears when he talked about how marketing has subsumed an element of social media (to its detriment) but that is just one area and we shouldn’t cede it all.

I’ll be honest I didn’t feel like the book was saying very much new – but it did say it all very well. Would it help senior managers understand this world better? I don’t know – it feels a little like preaching to the converted at times – but it certainly gave me a boost and I can’t ask for more than that.

My favourite bit of the Tom Steinberg talk at #ukgc12 was when he talked about the need to get more digitally savvy people in senior posts. He was actually pretty pessimistic about it happening any time soon despite the progress with the GDS and unfortunately I think he is probably right but it is something I feel we have to strive for.

One of the key themes in Euan Semple‘s new book (which I will review later) is just how much this new digital landscape changes the way organisations should run. Relationships between managers and staff changes, internal communications are turned on their head and the implications for things like hardware and information security are radically changed. All of this requires real understanding and flexibility to implement with leadership from the highest level. If real change is going to happen it can’t continue to be a bottom-up revolution (at least in my opinion – I know alot of people who disagree.)

In the 12 years or so I have been running websites in the public sector (and one look at my CV will prove I have taken a reasonable sample!) my position in the organogram has never really changed (though to be fair my salary has!). In each and every job it broke down something like this;

The big boss
- a senior person with a large portfolio who sat on board or equivalent
- – the person who ran the Communications team (or occasionally IT team – both always this level)
- – - the web/digital manager (til 2002 this is where the chain ended)
- – - – the web/digital team who do the actual work! (post 2002 for the most part)

So in my long, if less than illustrious, career as a web manager I have never even worked directly for a manager who sat at a board equivalent (in fact I’ve never known a Comms or IT person to sit at that level at any of the places I’ve worked at..) let alone a digital person (which isn’t the same as IT or Comms as I’m sure anyone reading this knows but still needs explaining to many people!).

Some organisations have a ‘flat’ enough culture that you can make change from further down the ladder – and certainly at JISC there was a time I felt alot was possible – but I have come to learn that that isn’t the norm and even with very supportive managers (which I have been fortunate to have more often than not) it is very hard to make real cultural change and instead the focus becomes short-term wins.

Given how rare it is that even well established roles like Communications or IT have made it to a truly senior level I think it is going to require a serious step change for digital to make an impact at the level – but if we really are shifting to a ‘digital by default’ world then it has to happen at some point.

Whether this requires a C-level equivalent post for Digital (which is particularly popular in media companies increasingly not to mention New York City) I don’t know – maybe it just needs more digitally aware people in existing roles further up the ladder. More believers and fewer nay-sayers. Maybe.

One the things Steph and others were working on at day 2 of #ukgc12 was this idea of a “maturity model for digital in the public sector” and I think this is a helpful step in moving digital out of a bit of a geek ghetto in public sector organisations and into the mainstream but like @pubstrat tweeted yesterday;

Digital maturity is when you don’t need to say digital any more.

It is only when the possibilities and thinking is that embedded that we will have really got somewhere.

I made a major effort this year to attend more sessions (traditionally at unconferences I am the classic lobby based delegate – just bouncing from conversation to conversation regardless of the actual sessions) and for me the big theme that came shining through this year was ‘putting users first’ – though this might also be because I avoided any session that might mention open or linked data like the plague!

As always I missed the first round of talks – I was catching up with the latest generation of chaps from Delib. I was a pretty early client of the Bristol based company but most of the people I worked closely with have moved on so it was nice to reconnect.

I then attended a session on ‘Radical Government Websites’ which wasn’t quite what I expecting (though I’m not sure why) but was saved by a couple of interventions from Mark O’Neil and Tom Steinberg attempting to keep the session to some kind of focus.

Tom kept banging the drum for making the websites user focused even if that upset people internally and Mark pretty much summed up the state of the public sector web estate;

“Not sure I was radical enough there by accusing too many websites of being pointless, annoying & pants”

It was an interesting enough session but as someone mentioned it kept getting hijacked by conversations of process and change management whereas the aim of session was (I thought) to talk a little about the technical possibilities. Someone else was disappointed mobile wasn’t even mentioned. Though someone did mention Utah.gov – which remains one of my fave sites (though I preferred one version back!)

After a great lunch (thanks MS!) mainly catching up with Kate and Justin I attended a session that was an introduction to Ushashidi and Crisis Mapping. To be honest this isn’t something I know much about or have much involvement with but Heather, a friend I made via the Mozilla Festival, works for Ushashidi and Spike, another long term Twitter friend who I now know in ‘real-life’ is also a long term evangelist and volunteer so I wanted to check out a different view of the work.

Ben Proctor (@likeaword) gave a very good overview of the product and interesting examples of how and why it gets used. It sparked some interesting conversations with reps from DFID, Foreign Office, the Scottish Government, Consumer Focus and Alex from Delib all contributing. I think the session would have benefited from someone with a bit more knowledge of the technical platform & ongoing development roadmap to answer some of the queries but Ben did an admirable job from a power-user point of view.

I then went to the main room to listen to Tom Steinberg talk about what it takes to make an organisation digital native. I think this session lost its way a little bit as it went on with some of the discussions taking quite a defensive tone and people jumping in without really taking the time to listen to the context of the early discussions.

That said I felt Tom handled it all pretty well and I thought his list of nine-ish points for making change contained some gems – so here is my take on them (I forgot to write down number nine I’m afraid);

• User focus first and foremost
• Seriously user focus first and foremost
• Get talented people in at a senior level who understand digital
• Build everything with understanding that it could/should be reused
• The gap between IT and digital teams must be bridged
• Watch out for social media myopia
• Enterprise IT is an opportunity as so much money spent so badly you can save huge amounts of cash and still deliver great stuff
• Be open (standards, data, source)

I pretty much fundamentally believe all of these points and actually think the most important thing that the new Government Digital Service has done is hire genuinely digital savvy people in at properly senior positions. I think at the moment most if not all public sector organisations bury those with a real understanding of the change the web is bringing everyday too far down the organisation chart – and lets be honest these are not ‘flat’ organisations..

I’ve been guilty of social media myopia myself in the past and I like to think I have moved beyond that and I’ve been pretty clear over the years about my stance on open.

The user/User/USER thing is a constant battle as well – if nothing else trying to define who that is – but I like to think progress is being made and certainly that is always at the forefront of my plans for our sites.

The final talk was a Twitter announced guest appearance by the Director of the Government Digital Service Mike Bracken. Mike said some very nice words about how things like the Govcamps and the kind of people in the room had paved the way for GDS to exist and for him to get his flash new job

He gave a presentation that gave some interesting insights into the work the team are doing including some screen shots and some ideas about the principles they work towards. Again the focus was very much on ‘putting the user first’ and all in all I think it is going to be an impressive product that really shakes things up.

He is a strong presenter with a nice line in self-depreciation which always helps and he handled some quite tough questions in the Q and A honestly and with assurance. Was a pretty inspiring way to close out the day.

Sessions aside it is always the people who make these things and I was happy to chat to many old friends as well as meet some people I only really follow online (great to finally meet Stephen Hale from Dept of Health in particular given how many of many of his ideas I have recycled and also to chat with Daffydd in the pub after as well.)

None of this could happen without the stirling work of Steph and Dave – someone on Twitter said they were the Lennon and McCartney of our little world but after Daves performance yesterday I am going with Morecambe and Wise! – plus people like Hadley(social secretary) and Lloyd (facilitator supreme) who make sure it all goes smoothly.

So thanks again – a great day and if anyone from the mild, mild West fancies a reunion then come along to Gov:West in March!

This is a Gov-ish special edition as UKGovcamp is only one week away. There could obviously be many more than this four but I am writing this in my lunch break and timing is running out! Some other accounts worth looking at are @icerunner , @neillyneil , @tomskitomski , @canywaitogo (especially if you are a Spurs fan!) and @dominiccampbell.

@jkerrstevens – Justin is a dodgy mix of Aussie and Scot so rugby wise is as close as it gets to the devil for a England fan like myself! Once I forgave him for the disadvantages of his birth it turned out he was a top bloke

I first met Justin when he was at DIUS and I was working for HEFCE. We found ourselves sharing a common agenda in the early days of selling the ideas of the social web and things like unconferences into an environment not exactly accepting to them.

Justin is a genuine Government comms guy who understands the policy and campaign side of things (especially on the heath side) and just happens to also be an advocate of the digital side of things (unlike myself who ha slittle clue when the topic strays away from the latest shiny digital product!)

@lesteph – I first met Steph in person during my short-lived spell at Becta. He was Head of Digital at DIUS and in many ways was Justins successor. Since those early days he has been involved in an awful lot of the interesting innovations happening with the Government digital stuff and since he abandoned the civil service life for the excitement of his own company little has changed.

One of the dynamic duo who organise UKGovcamp (alongside dangerous Dave – who also deserves a follow) he is someone who has never failed to be helpful when I have hit Twitter with a question or a crisis – and at least once has fixed a tricky sys-admin problem for me!

@dafyddbach – I haven’t actually met Dafydd in person yet and have only really known him on Twitter for the last 9 months or so but he has quickly become a great contact that I look forward to eventually buying a pint of Brains SA for Dafydd was at Consumer Focus where he implemented a number of great web projects – including one of the first moves of a corporate NDPB site to Worpress. These days he is a part of the growing Government Digital Service at Aviation House in Holborn and is fast becoming a valuable voice for that team.

@nicepaul – I have only met Paul once, briefly at the original Alphagov preview, but we know people in common and it has been interesting following him over the 9 months or so. As friends like Stef can atest to I have no feel for the subtleties of design and user experience at all and so following Paul through this project has given me some real insight (amongst the rants about letting agents!). I think just the step of hiring someone like Paul so early on showed how different GDS was going to be from traditional Gov web work and it is reassuring to realise just how much effort is being taken on the UX side of things.

Trello aims to be a “super simple, web-based team coordination system” and while it certainly shares some DNA with tools like Pivotal Tracker (and even Basecamp) it is aiming for a wider audience than the usual agile software teams and is wonderfully easy to use for the most part. It is also free!

Essentially it allows you to create ‘cards’ for activities and assign them to team members. The ‘cards’ are moved from to-do, to doing, to done and can collect comments, deadlines and checklists along the way. The ‘board’ can be filtered by team members or labels (though I haven’t really used labels yet).

Discovering this came at an opportune time for me as it had become clear by the end of 2011 that I was doing a p*ss poor job articulating to my team the bigger picture I was trying to get us to work towards and was taking on too many tasks myself rather than delegating them – mainly because I was holding it all in my head and had never taken the time to plan it all out properly.

So I took the opportunity last week to brain dump everything out while it was just me in the office and over the last day or two I have taken that chaotic outpouring of ideas, plans, tasks and projects and turned them into cards which I have then assigned amongst the team. The initial feedback has been good. It certainly demonstrates just how much we have to do but also empowers the members of the team to prioritise their own work activity without having to ask me all the time (which I wasn’t managing well by Nov/Dec) and everyone was able to get to grips with Trello quickly and started adding cards and comments.

What we aren’t doing is using it in any kind of standard ‘agile’ way – for us it is basically a shared ‘to-do’ list and we will take our time to get a feel for what scale of activities we add and how we work out deadlines and timings (what I don’t want is an endless list of ‘doing’ cards with no outputs in ‘done’.)

It is clearly an experiment but I have my fingers crossed as I think it has already exceeded my expectations in getting everyone thinking about the year ahead and adding their own ideas to the mix.

So I’d like to thank that mysterious Twitter user for pointing me in this direction!