Tell Them What You Think

TTWYT’s development blog and related musings

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!