I meant to write about this earlier, and the blogosphere has punished me for my tardiness — Simon beat me to it.
In any event: DIUS have launched an online consultation exercise on the Science and Innovation paper that they published in March. It looks great, and much like MyLifeMyId, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of results it produces. It is inspired by the Open Rights Group’s platform for collaborating on consultation responses, which features similar paragraph-level commenting. Apparently, this functionality is available as a plugin.
I’m particularly interested in the outcome of this experiment because I’ve wondered, since seeing ORG’s version, how well paragraph level commenting works as a discussion medium. It’s extremely granular, which is fine if certain paragraphs attract a lot of attention and thus spawn discussion, but doesn’t work so well if the feedback is more diffuse.
It is rather similar to an example of bad practice in online fora: a new site seeking to develop a community will often deploy forum software. A classic mistake is to make umpteen fora, one for each topic that could possibly want to be discussed, or, more commonly, for each topic the administrators would like to be discussed. A new user, upon encountering pages of mostly empty fora, rapidly gains the impression that there is no activity, and no point in staying around. A rather better strategy in this situation is to make very few fora, to funnel new users into a smaller number of places and give the impression of greater activity. New fora can be added later, as demand dictates.
I don’t know whether this problem will apply to these kinds of exercises. It will be interesting to see.
The Home Office have launched a new website — MyLifeMyID — to solicit the views of young people on their ID cards scheme.
I make no secret of the fact that I think the ID cards scheme is an utterly inept folly, and neither, it would seem, do the participants on MyLifeMyID. There has been a flurry of activity since the site went live, almost all of it expressing the view that ID cards are bad, and that the respondents don’t want them.
This kind of open-ended consultation is great. It should be happening a lot more than it is. Its major benefit is its freeform nature: although the discussion may be seeded by the team running the consultation, the frame of the debate is (hopefully) not predefined — although there have been some complaints about over-zealous moderation.
There is, of course, a political problem for the Government in this kind of exercise. What will they do when their pet database is shot down in flames by informed people, whose views they have sought? And in a public medium, to boot? Undoubtedly they will spin a line about needing to educate the public, but really, anyone who decides to visit the website after the fact will see the real story for themselves. I wonder how long it will last, after the exercise is over. We shall see.
On a technical point, the site appears to be rather well put together. The design is clean and easy, the discussion is visible without registering, and you can get RSS feeds for all the posts on the forum. I’m not sure if it’s bespoke or based on some other software — does anyone know? In any event, it seems to be a bought-in solution. It’ll be interesting to see if this kind of process delivers useful results.
The Office of Public Sector Information has launched its Unlocking Service.
This is a site that allows you to submit a request for information held by a public authority to be made available for reuse by the public.
If you are aware of some public information that should be released to the baying throng, do go and post a request!
See here for the background — today, there are two more DRM’d PDFs from Defra, and another one from Ofgem. What’s going on?
TellThemWhatYouThink tries to get a list of documents for each consultation it finds. When it finds documents, it indexes them, so that they can also be checked when you perform a search, or when new consultations are matched up against email alerts.
These documents come in a variety of formats. One of those formats — PDF — allows its creator to set a “no-copy” bit. This prevents users from selecting and copying text from the document, and also prevents TellThemWhatYouThink’s indexing tool from converting the document into a form it can read. This is a crude form of Digital Rights Management.
I settled down this morning to figure out why all of the documents from one of Defra’s current consultations were unable to be indexed. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that all of them have the no-copy bit set. I can’t index them. You can’t copy & paste any of the text into your response as a quote. You can’t copy an excerpt to a discussion board.
This is all fantastically irritating, of course, but more to the point: what on earth is government doing copy-protecting its consultation documents?
I added comments to TellThemWhatYouThink over the weekend. As an anti-spam measure, I included a text box asking people to complete a simple sum to prove they were a person. This was for two reasons:
- It’s very quick to implement
- It’s more accessible than an image captcha — the sum will be read out by screen readers
Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t work. Be warned! Spam comments started appearing on the site within hours of the new functionality going live.
I’ve replaced that system with a reCAPTCHA test. It has an audio test for blind users — I hope it’s sufficient. We shall see how it fares!
Some splendid people in the US have released a paper recommending that Government should focus on releasing its data in reusable ways, rather than designing better user experience — their thesis being that third parties will do this for them if the data is available. Funnily enough, I find myself agreeing.
The paper is a little US-centric but the principles are sound and entirely applicable to the UK. Ed Felton has posted an excerpt if you don’t fancy reading the whole thing.
The paper hits all the right buttons: let innovative private bodies come up with the best ways to display government data and compete for each other’s audiences. Make structured data available first, and then produce a government site to display it, if required — the data should be a priority, not an afterthought. Make sure that such data feeds exist in known, permanent locations. Make government sites operate on the same data they provide to others — TellThemWhatYouThink is powered by its own API. We eat our own dogfood. I wonder how many government departments can say the same*?
I made a lot of these points when I spoke at Tower08 earlier in the year. It’s definitely true that there are people in Government who agree, but there’re still plenty that don’t — hence the unfortunate need for campaigns like Free Our Bills.
Hopefully, reports like these will continue to be written, good examples of the reuse of public data will continue to be found, and Government will eventually see the light.
1 Ok, that’s not quite true. I know the answer, as does all of sentient life.
I had a totally awesome time at the Barcamp over the weekend.
Matthew Somerville did two great talks — one on the new video feeds on TheyWorkForYou.com, and another on Bach Chorales. Stuart Langridge did a splendid talk on HTTP codes, which led to quite a bit of pleasant ferreting around in TellThemWhatYouThink’s logs and code to see if things could be improved (they can). The various Yahoo people demonstrated how to do their code reviews, and allowed us to “ask them anything”, which was excellent fun. I did a talk on TellThemWhatYouThink, predictably enough, and some great ideas came out of that — thanks to all who came. I had long conversations with Rob McKinnon, of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, who had some great ideas about how to involve people more with the site and each other.
In short, a splendid time was had all round — much thanking and hat-tipping due to Ross Brugies, who sorted the whole thing out — food, beer, swag, ideas and new people. Who could want more? I can’t wait for the next one.
TellThemWhatYouThink now supports comments. This is a very small first step towards the site supporting proper discussion.
Also among the new additions: I’ve added a tabbed interface at the bottom of each consultation page, so that more stuff can go there in the future without the pages getting really huge. Feedback welcome. At the moment, the other tabs are for incoming links — which now displays links from Bloglines, which seems to produce better results than Technorati — and “Spread the word” which has links to all the popular social bookmarking tools. I hope there’ll be more stuff there eventually, but I’m not sure what: what do you think?
Eventually, there’ll be options for keeping track of a consultation, being notified when one is published (or isn’t!) by email or rss, and widgets that you can put on your own site. Watch this space!
TellThemWhatYouThink.org now has an official twitter feed. Each government consultation discovered by the site is now posted to Twitter. Enjoy!
