Government Digital Inclusion Champion Martha Lane Fox was the Big Thinker at COI last week. She announced the launch of her campaign to Race Online for 2012, which aims to get more people online particularly from socially excluded groups.

Research by Price Waterhouse Coopers shows that 10 million adults in the UK have never used the Internet. 4 million of those are socially excluded, of which 38% are over 65 and 39% unemployed, and it is these that people that Fox is targeting. Her speech was inspiring. I particularly liked her ‘user-centred’ approach. She told three stories from around the country:

• A teacher at a computer literacy centre in Lambeth revealed that many of the students couldn’t read.
• A builder in Birmingham gets the majority of his work by looking online.
• Children on a rough estate in Bristol learned about growing vegetables from older residents, imparting computer knowledge in return.

Martha stressed that it isn’t about IT training, it’s about using computers for relevant purposes such as looking at photos of your grandchildren living abroad, saving money by shopping online or looking for jobs. People aren’t inherently interested in computers but may want to go online if they see that it can improve their quality of life.

Later in the week, I went to the BBC to hear about their new Accessibility Toolkit 2.0 (ATK 2.0) from Jonathan Hassel, Head of User Experience Design. His aim is to improve online experiences for disabled people.

There are 11 million adults in the UK with a long standing health problem or disability that affects their daily activities including their ability to work – and therefore covered by the Disability Discrimination Act. Of these, according to research from the Office for Disability Issues, 47% are over 65 and 43% are unemployed. Startlingly, 58% have never used the Internet.

Jonathan talked about the various barriers to disabled people getting online including lack of interest, lack of means and lack of confidence. These are the same reasons as for the population at large. BBC research into encouraging broadband adoption echoes the experiences of Martha Lane Fox. They focussed on the 21% of UK adults who do not have the Internet at home or use elsewhere. The figures are similar: 10.5 million aged 15+ with and average age of 61 (over half were 65+) and 67% are C2DE compared with 45% of the UK population.

The BBC’s research found low levels of interest (68%), low intention to acquire (82%) and low knowledge (81% knew little or nothing). The primary barriers were low perceived benefits versus cost and low confidence and skills. Secondary barriers include basic affordability, literacy and social exclusion. One participant claimed that:

“There’s nothing on there that you couldn’t get from Teletext.”

The challenge to get people online was acknowledged as being very difficult. Previous messages have failed because messages were not targeted and therefore not perceived as relevant or beneficial. Four broad areas were identified to aid adoption:

• Families and friends
• Media skills
• Easier home internet access
• Affordability and cost

Interviews with recent adopters revealed the power of friends and families, with one man saying:

“I wasn’t confident on the computer until (my son) started showing me bits on his computer.”

They also revealed that people were scared computer courses and the possibility of public humiliation in front of peers. It’s not enough simply to communicate the availability of courses.

The focus then returned to disabled audiences and Jonathan developed an interesting argument around web accessibility. The most common approach to date has been to focus on delivering inclusive websites. That is, to try to build websites that work for as wide an audience as possible. (Note on terminology here, this isn’t inclusion in the same sense as previously described, which is more about getting people online.) Jonathan’s argument is that this doesn’t work because people have such diverse needs that one design will never work. Websites do allow personalisation through operating system and browser settings but most people don’t know how these work. There’s also the AAA approach which places personalisation controls directly on to the web page. Most people don’t know what “AAA” means either. So the BBC have developed a prototype solution that brings personalisation controls into the browser but through an intuitive user interface.

The idea is that you have preferences for a website, accessible via a link at the top of the site. Clicking on this reveals a set of default options recommended by people with different health problems or disabilities. For example, you can set the colours, text size, font size and weight and so on. This isn’t revolutionary but what’s different is the user interface that the BBC have designed. It’s the first time it’s been done intuitively. And anything that helps create a positive user experience for people online is a good thing. After all, if we’ve worked hard to convince people of the benefits, the last thing we want is for them to switch off because of a usability or accessibility issue. Lets make sure it works for people when they arrive.

Read the full article (5 Comments)

This week has been one of conferences.  On Tuesday was the Public Sector Information annual conference .  It is amazing to think that it is just one year ago that, working with John Sheridan, I presented an overview of how data and structured information could be released using semantic web markup.  Since then London Gazette has been released in RDF/XML and people across government are busy implementing RDFa for consultations and in the public sector RDFa for jobs (for example Jobs Go Public’s local government jobs – LGJobs), the last two to be surfaced through Directgov.

More importantly, well underway is the Prime Minister’s drive for the release of data and creation of a single point of access (currently under development) through the appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt.   As the latter pointed out at the conference this is a single point of access not a single data base – the data will still sit in Departments, agencies and local government websites, but developers will be able to know what is available through some kind of searchable catalogue and get access to it.

He showed us a newspaper for a single postcode that had been demonstrated by some mash-up developers.  This included local data on crime, allotments, bus-stops and routes completely localised, along with lots of other useful information. We all liked it, because at present that data is something that each of us has to build up ourselves and we respond to it immediately as valuable.

The next day I spoke at the Public Sector Online annual conference organised by Kable.  The subject I was given was the cost of websites and I took the opportunity to remind all national and local government webbies that we need to be able to justify the expense of websites and demonstrate their value at this time of financial stringency.  In fact we have a great story to tell relative to many channels of communication, but I am guessing that the Finance Directors don’t yet always see that value and fund invest accordingly.

We’ve issued the standards on improving quality by measuring cost, usage and user satisfaction, following the Public Accounts Committee recommendations.  When these are reported people can start identifying lots of interesting aspects, answering the question, for example, of the value of the website channel to the nation.  Net value could be determined by the total online cost for satisfied minus unsatisfied users and subtracting the overall cost of provision. What we’d like to do is make the data available so that academics and economists can study this in more detail.

As a presenter it felt good to be getting email and comment from the audience floor which I was able to see shortly afterwards and makes a response.  The next conference on the Thursday was created to facilitate this – Government 2010.  Although I was invited to participate in person, I did so by logging in and watching the webstream. Lots of interesting thoughts, some of them inspired by Tom Steinberg’s contribution. 

It brought to mind a presentation from Martha Lane-Fox to COI on the Wednesday late afternoon, when she was asked the question about her experience in working in the public sector as the Champion for Digital Inclusion.  She responded that she had been really impressed by the calibre, intelligence and quality of the people she had met. 

It struck me that there are many talented expert e-communicators across government but hampered by the misperception that Web is IT.  There is an infrastructural element, but too often Web publishing is run as IT processes without the flexibility to change things day by day or initiate new trials or innovate.  We cannot even as I did in the old days, run two versions of a website in parallel and monitor what people do and continuously develop the more successful. 

It is like newspaper editors being unable to change the front page and only being able to stream new text into exactly the same shape of story, without being able to put in a major picture or give over the front page to a single story.  Newspapers and magazines would be very boring without that.  Likewise Web publishing should enable flexibility of all kinds of digital presentation and functionality.

Martha went on to say that public sector had many initiatives that needed joining up, not into a major programme, but under a banner that allowed lots to participate and encouraged a movement of activity adding up to more than the sum of the parts.  This would be a good description of what we want to do with the release of data and information for re-use.

A busy week of engagement that was encouraging as I and colleagues across government make the changes that support the directions sought.  What we do is often the road-building for the Ferraris (I wish!) and transport lorries that support trade to run upon, but without it they wouldn’t move.  So onto to improving quality of what we do in a measurable way, demonstrating its value to the nation, and structuring information for others to use and innovate. 

Read the full article (2 Comments)

Today the official accessibility guidance was updated to allow a choice of either WCAG 1.0 or WCAG 2.0 as the minimum standard for public sector websites:

Compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is acceptable at Level Double-A of version 1.0 or the equivalent level in version 2.0. Future policy and timetables for implementation will align with European Commission recommendations on the adoption of WCAG 2.0. Planned future updates to this guidance will include details of the specific conformance requirements for version 2.0.

- Paragraph 5, Delivering inclusive websites (TG102)

My last post on accessibility suggested it would be a good first step. The suggestion was generally supported, not least by Jack Pickard, who since his initial response has written a more detailed article. In this, he sets out what he thinks the appropriate level of WCAG 2.0 should be for public sector websites. It’s an excellent article and will certainly help COI to develop the accessibility guidance further and smooth the transition to version 2.0. If you have a view on this, I urge you to read Jack’s article and comment.

Read the full article (6 Comments)

It’s been a busy week.  I have often talked about the way users now behave on the Web, in response to organisations’ approaches to branding.  Mostly people use search, not only for finding things they don’t know about, but also locating the sites for things they do, but either cannot or don’t see the need to recall the URL.  Recognising this changes the way that we promote and advertise services. 

It’s not that Web search engines are the new government portals (see Persuasive Content’s nice comments on my keynote address to public sector IT Directors) but, because that is the way that the majority behave, they have become portals to all information.  What we are doing in government is working with people’s habits to make it easy for them to get to the public sector information and services they need and that we want to encourage them to use. 

There are implications for branding – and that has been the focus of most conversations this week.  Many still think of branding as the logo or, more generally, the visual image.  But that is a tiny aspect of branding.  Thinking of John Lewis or Waitrose or Morrisons, conjures up notions of quality, reliability and cost with associated personal and internalised reactions, such as ‘my kind of place’ or ‘good value for money’ – which their straplines reflect and differentiate from each other.

The key is what people know and think about the organisation and what you want them to know and think about you. That is done through language and positioning relative to other services – hence the importance of the Title and Description fields in the Web page metadata along with Search Engine Optimisation, and straplines that people use to describe the site.  The kinds of words we are working to have associated with many government digital services are authoritative, trustworthy, up to date, and comprehensive. 

Search engines are not the only routes; link text on other websites, blogs and tweets are also widely used word-based access points and create an aroma about your site.  What people say in the blogosphere is influential – hence the guidance to civil servants that moves beyond mere permission towards a positive encouragement to get involved and participate on the issues for which they are responsible (see Engaging using social media).  

Web presence is about building reputation and credibility for a particular audience through what is offered and their experience of interactions with the organisation.  A branded Web presence has to think through SEO, SEM, linking and social media strategies to do this.   It is what you and others say, and what you choose to use, that currently create brands on the Web rather than a logo.

Read the full article (2 Comments)

We’ve been helping Cabinet Office with the Prime Minister’s initiative on data release.  Called Making Public Data Public, the PM appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt in June to oversee the creation of a single online point of access for all public UK government datasets.

On 10 June in his statement to the House of Commons on Constitutional Renewal, the PM announced that ‘… I believe we should do more to spread the culture and practice of freedom of information…So that Government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee to lead who led the creation of the World Wide Web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming months.’

The intention is that a single online point of access becomes part of the routine operation of Departments with a live site running by the end of the year.   The Cabinet warmly endorsed all the actions the project is taking on the 15th September, after a presentation by Sir Tim.  I’ve helped by preparing a communication and engagement plan, David’s been supporting through his work on RDFa implementation across government and Adam drafting the guidance for Departments.

Colleagues in COI have been working on the site and there is an early preview of what the site could look like that was available yesterday for the developer community.  The project is appealing to open data developers to work with government to get this right. Developers can join in by signed up to the Google Group.

The developer community is full of bright ideas of how to use government data and what they need to develop public services – just look at some of the great initiatives started already: Show Us a Better Way, the Power of Information Taskforce, MySociety and Rewired State.  It’s work in progress, and there’s still a lot to do. You can follow progress on #opendata on Twitter.

Read the full article (7 Comments)