Welcome to Digigov, the new blog brought to you by the Digital Policy team at COI. The purpose of this blog is to share information and get feedback on digital policy across government and to stimulate debate around digital policy with other departments, agencies, web developers, bloggers and academics.
COI Digital Policy roles and responsibilities include:
- Developing guidelines for public sector websites
- Co-ordinating Departmental Website Reviews
- Approving or rejecting applications for new government websites
- Reporting on government website costs, quality and usage
- Advice and consultancy on all aspects of website management
We started blogging on CivilBlogs to share our work with other civil servants and foster greater collaboration. It was a good starting point and gave us the chance to experiment with the safety net of keeping communication internal to Government. Unfortunately, we only reached a limited audience and didn’t really get the volume of feedback hoped for. Steph Gray (Head of Digital Engagement at Business Innovation and Skills) commented that we should open up to the wider digital community by blogging publicly.
More recently we ran the Improving Government Online review. Several interesting issues were raised including:
- Evaluating the cost-benefit of Government’s digital engagement, not just websites
- Measuring re-use of government information
- Measuring use of content delivered through Flash and AJAX interfaces
We want to use this blog to continue those discussions and to start many others.
For further details of the review, see fellow COI blogger Ross Ferguson’s excellent evaluation.
Other subjects we want to discuss include:
- digital policy and strategy development
- website evaluation and measurement
- accessibility and usability
- semantic web and information re-use
- web analytics and auditing
- convergence, continuity and archiving
- URLs and the .gov.uk brand
- search and findability
- web performance management
- digital engagement
- training, toolkits and events
Please let me know if there is something specific you wish to debate on Digigov, either via the feedback form or emailing digigov@coi.gsi.gov.uk.
You can also follow us on twitter: @digigov.
Welcome, Adam – I think this is a great move, and I appreciate the thinking and planning involved.
Look forward to reading more from you and team here.
Steph Gray says:
September 1, 2009 at 5:26 pmThanks sweeties! I’m on your blogroll. Hugs all round
paul canning says:
September 1, 2009 at 5:35 pmAll this work is very commendable, well done, and its an easy site to navigate and comment on, which is also good.
My comment is just to make a point, which is…
How can people engage with you when half the country don’t have a good enough connection to the internet?
You must realise that the last thing people want to do is visit government sites when they finally get a limited connection, they do what they have to do before it drops out. I am bombarded with requests for help where I live. Most rural areas have NO access at all, and the ones that do find it very frustrating. Please bear this in mind when deciding on policy, and remember the information you get back will only be from the proportion of the population living near an exchange.
And please don’t believe that the current digitalbritain task force will make this situation any better, they are hamstrung by politics. The telco’s will never make it any better cos they are milking an obsolete copper network and won’t invest in a better one.
chris
cyberdoyle says:
September 1, 2009 at 5:38 pmA key element of digital engagement is responsiveness to blogs and other online influencers/commentators. There have been recent examples of government campaign where the PR agency responded (badly) to reasoned blog critique, simply causing two stories to run the blogsphere (the original critique of the campaign and the “being palmed off by soneone who clearly didn’t know the subject under discussion”). An official response to the blog took nearly a month! Contrast that with the almost immediate response time if a journalist had called the press office on the same topic.
Some new balances need to be struck between gate-keeping PR and engaging directly with policy staff and the threat vs the opportunity of social media policy. I hope discussion on blogs like this help us find that balance point
Tony Plant says:
September 1, 2009 at 7:50 pmAdam, thanks for the intro. I think this is going to be an excellent – and very useful – platform.
One thing I am keen to discuss with others is how best to tackle requests for new websites, where the audience is shared between 2-3 different government departments, funding is split and the content is not necessarily policy-driven?
At DH we are finding more examples of this and I wondered if there are any other case studies out there?
Tim Lloyd says:
September 2, 2009 at 8:39 amThis blog is extremely welcome, I look forward to the debate. It’s a nice looking blog as well, and thanks for including me in the blogroll
Slightly unsure about the need for Captcha on the comments though – Wordpress plugins do a pretty good job of catching spam without affecting the user experience.
I’m interested in all the topics you’ve listed, plus would like to see a discussion of what archival and continuity means in the context of off-platform social media tools – especially the more conversational/ephemeral end of the spectrum.
Neil Williams says:
September 2, 2009 at 8:57 amGood to see you out in the open
can i suggest that you deploy a pan .gov.uk search, akin to http://www.google.com/unclesam
a colleague recently pointed out to me the stark difference in results at the following
http://www.directionlessgov.com/results/?as_q=recycling+birmingham
cheers
w
william perrin says:
September 2, 2009 at 10:15 amGreat blog, and good work guys for getting it set up.
Will – does http://lgsearch.net/lgsearchgovuk.php do what you are after?
Dave Briggs says:
September 2, 2009 at 10:31 amThanks everyone for the feedback… and sorry for the delay in approving comments – we’re still quite new to this game. I can’t respond individually to all of the points raised but there’s plenty of fodder for future content. Keep the suggestions coming!
Adam Bailin says:
September 2, 2009 at 10:40 amGoos move Adam, much better to have this discussed in the open, but it could become a full time job! Looking forward to what you say on evaluation and strategy…
Neil Franklin says:
September 2, 2009 at 10:48 amdave – yes that’s very good.
the real tension is around the question ‘does directgov provide all the answers?’ when we know that it is very hard indeed to keep information up to date from several local government websites through localdirectgov.
the local example a colleague sent me illustrates this perfectly – google provides a far better result on a very basic, general and popular query about recycling than the directgov internal search.
the nature of google and many other search engines is such that good relevant info from directgov will rise to the top anyway.
as the world moves to more hyperlocal information services from both public, private and thrid sector it will become a bigger and bigger stretch for a central site to keep up with the precise location of recycling bins in highham ferrers. and thus the boundaries of large central sites will have to shift.
william perrin says:
September 2, 2009 at 11:51 amThis blog’s a great idea– I like it being open to all. I’d really like to see discussion about digital engagement, and particularly topics which acknowledge and engage other communications channels. I worry sometimes that the ‘digital community’ tends to talk amongst itself about the issue, and can end up a bit ‘we are the future’, which, as Chris notes above, does nothing to address those who don’t want to or can’t engage online.
As an aside, I share Neil W’s dislike of captcha for the inevitable accessibility reasons– maybe you could give a spam plugin a try for a time?
Simon Hogg says:
September 2, 2009 at 12:10 pmNeil, Simon – I’ve deactivated the captcha plugin. We have Akismet running as well so spam management shouldn’t be too bad. However, I reserve the right to reactivate if it becomes unwieldy
Adam Bailin says:
September 2, 2009 at 12:17 pmExcellent idea. As someone who works in digital PR I’ll be interested in any debate about the use of social media in public sector campaigns …
Helen Nowicka says:
September 2, 2009 at 2:46 pmWell done on the new blog. Great initiative. I’d very much like to feature it on http://g2010.co.uk – hopefully will have a post up about it before end of week.
Jeff Peel says:
September 2, 2009 at 6:28 pmGreat site Adam.
Some advice on hosting arrangements and asociated costs would be really helpful. I used to be based at an NDPB (now at COI Interactive Services) and it was always difficult to measure our needs against costs from agencies to ensure value for investment.
Any sharing of hosting costs and experience of service providers would be useful.
Paul Jenkins says:
September 2, 2009 at 7:35 pmJust subscribed and look forward to reading and contributing regularly.
Stuart Bruce says:
September 3, 2009 at 8:40 amWell done – a useful site and place to consider such stuff …and hopefully do something to help the endless wheel re-inventing that has gone on in digital / e gov
this will be increasingly important – as Will points out as the whole local local local perspective rises up the agenda
Ellie Stoneley says:
September 4, 2009 at 10:16 amLovely idea and it’s really good to see COI getting out there – it’d be interesting to see you share experiences and processes, I would certainly love to get some insight into the challenges you face, especially when it comes to cross-departmental work.
Sofia says:
September 4, 2009 at 11:32 pmI find the COI site and guidelines really useful in my job, which involves educating IT project managers and making sure they meet the standards. However, it would make my life so much easier if they were clearly related to Intranet too. I’m commonly told ‘it’s only for staff so it doesn’t matter’.
I’d also like to see them called Requirements, rather than Guidelines – be bold!!
Please?
)
Janie says:
November 26, 2009 at 5:20 pm