The toolkit is based on a guide that a team led by Professor Patrick Dunleavy from the LSE and Professor Helen Margetts from the Oxford Interet Institute developed for the National Audit Office and that underwent a consultation process within government. However, what I want to draw your attention to are some of the technical details of the online toolkit as in this major effort it was my responsibility to set up an interactive version of this checklist. So if you are only interested in checking how easy or difficult your form is to answer go straight to the checklist. If you are more technically inclined read on.

The whole site operates on Perl but what makes the checklist tick is Javascript. I am still used to a time when Javascript was frowned upon but with Ajax its now routinely used to make web pages interactive. It is still a pain to code until I came across the jQuery Javascript library. It extends Javascript with a variety of methods that just make it so much easier to code and adds additional functionality. In combination with a dedicated CSS framework, called jQueryUI, you have instant access to slick and beautiful features such as calendars and progress bars. Have a look here to see some examples! The latter has been incredibly helpful as I am not much of a design guru myself but by relying on the standard themes you get a rather professional looking site.

The checklist itself is a kind of interactive questionnaire that you go through page by page. It automatically calculates the difficulty score for a form as well as its individual sections and allows comparison with the difficulty scores of other forms rated by other users.

Some of the features I would like to mention are:

• The whole content as well as the structure (ie. the different sections of the checklist) are imported from an Excel file. In this way it is easily customisable and it is just one script for the three different types of forms: paper, online and phone.
• A load & save functionality – before saving the form an Ajax call checks if the filename is still available. Restoring a previously saved checklist was also tricky for a number of reasons, e.g. because the script won’t know from the save name what type of form it is but will redirect you accordingly.
• At the end of the checklist we provide feedback about the difficulty scores of forms rated by other users, in this way allowing you to compare the difficulty of your form with other forms. It is more of a gimmick really as of course these comparison have its problems but it gives you an idea.
• The whole site is using short, clean, memorable & “talking” URLs such as /paper-form/ or /saved/.
• No cookies. All necessary parameters are submitted via a html form.

The whole site is still in somewhat advanced beta stage so any bugs and problems you encounter – please let me know!

“Submission of new petitions will be closed until 7th September while the Prime Minister is away from Number 10. You can still sign any petition during this time.”

It is the third time the website is closed for submission of new petitions after a similar summer break in 2008 and ten days over the Christmas period. While it is clear that these closures are only temporary they are objectionable still, first and foremost on the grounds that your right to petition has no “suspended during vacation periods” clause built in. At the same time you are still allowed to send your petitions by mail even though there should be no difference in how they are dealt with by the Prime Minister. So for once the offline channel is more responsive than the online one. This is not the level of accessibility for which governments have moved transactions online and which citizens can expect from online services.

Number 10 is not the only government site that is closed sometimes. There is still the famous example of Companies House, the official agency to (un)register your business. For a long time it would not allow to file a new company online between midnight and 7am in the morning although this now seems to be gradually removed.

In a time where business website strive to achieve an uptime of 99.999%, governments still like to take their time out. While this might make a lot of sense sometimes (e.g. if it would be taken to think and deliberate really thoroughly about an issue) it just does not make sense for government services that require no human interaction at the time of submission.

While it was very interesting to see parliamentary work, it is fair to say that the debate did not hold many surprises. The few interesting points worth mentioning are:

• The (usual) excuse for why government sites are just not as good as commercial sites: because governments are far more complex. While there is surely something different about governments and businesses (or so you would hope…), eBay, Amazon and Facebook are not exactly trivial as well and still reliably cater to millions of people in a simple and straight forward way.
• Alexis Cleveland, the Director General for Transformational Government (the ones that close down websites and move the rewritten content to Directgov) said that she would like to see more opportunities for citizens to give their views on sites and services which can only be welcomed. (As a side note, really a bit of a give-away for the government. Searching for “Transformational Government Cabinet Office” on Google brings as the number one hit an error page at the Cabinet Office website)
• There was a lot of discussion about how the move to more online channels will disadvantage those who are not capable of using the Internet who are often the ones who need public services the most. While it is surely a problem if attention (and hence money) is focused on online interactions on the expense of options for traditional face to face contacts, I was surprised that nobody mentioned the obvious benefit of the online strategy:
  1. most people do not want interpersonal communication (ie. queuing at inconvenient opening hours) but turn to the Web as hassle-free way to get things done quickly,
  2. which should in turn leave staff in offices with more time to deal with the people who really need and appreciate their help. Now one might argue that the whole point of government web services is to save money by getting rid of civil servants but you still have cost-savings by having people volunteer their information in electronic form (although I reckon it is probably printed out and then again keyed in by someone…)

You can listen to the full discussion here (should you REALLY wish so) but only for the next 28 days. You wonder why that is. Cannot be that difficult to keep the stuff. But it seems not uncommon these days for UK officials to get rid of important data …

There is only one drawback: The second search result on Google is already our report evaluating Directgov and other government websites for the third Government on the Internet report for the National Audit Office. For this report we let people search the Internet to find out the meaning of this tax code. Given our Google karma (or the lack of other relevant sites) I suppose we should have included the answer in our report

The report is the third in a series starting with Government on the Web I (1999) and Government on the Web II (2002) and which has been produced by the same team around Professor Patrick Dunleavy from the LSE Public Policy Group and our very own Professor Helen Margetts from the Oxford Internet Institute together with a handful of research staff including myself.

If you are interested in the report, have a look at www.governmentontheweb.org which details not only the current and previous reports but also offers a range of additional resources on (mostly UK) egovernment. There you can also download a summary of the main results.

What I would like to write about here is the exciting combination of different methods that we used in order to get a picture of progress in UK public services online. Below is an overview about the different ways in which we gathered data:

• A survey of central government organisations to collect information about the cost and usage of their online services;
• A census of central government websites to evaluate how informative and interactive they are;
• A web crawl of the government domain to find out how ‘connected’ government websites are;
• Experiments to explore users’ experience of government websites;
• Focus groups with citizens on how they use government services online;
• a national survey of citizens about their knowledge and use of government sites
• Comparison with governments from other countries, local government and the private sector.

While I think all of them merit elaboration I will focus on the two I have been working on but you can read about the others in our detailed research report.

user experiments with government websites

We invited 70 subjects to OXLab, our experimental computer lab, and asked them to find government information concerning everyday life such as school league tables, the national minimum wage and whether a person with Diabetes is eligible for free prescriptions. One half of the group would only be allowed to use the government portal Directgov while the other half could freely use the Internet.

While the government portal would do alright if people had to use it, we found that in our (admittedly not representative) sample it was rarely used if people had the choice. Instead, basically everybody used Google to find the necessary information. What is more, although we did only ask for government-provided information, in almost half of the cases our subjects would use non-governmental sites such as the BBC to answer a question.

web crawl of UK government websites

We did download the content and structure of all the main departmental websites and some agencies in order to be able to say something about their size as well as the internal navigability by computing measures such as the path length between pages. What is more, we also analysed where government websites are linking to and used Yahoo to analyse a sample of sites linking to UK government sites. Anyone with some experience in web crawling will appreciate that this is no easy endeavour, especially if the objective is to get a pretty accurate and complete snapshot of the site (including dynamically generated content and taking care of databases etc.)

We found for example that the majority of sites pointing to UK government are commercial while the departments themselves link quite often to other government sites. We can also say what are the most international departments (in terms of number of countries they link to)? Answer: The Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development which seems intuitive and supports the crawling data as a valid indicator.

As always, there is scope for improvement but as a package the report offers a comprehensive assessment of British government websites. All detailed findings are in the report.

I was already wondering whether one would have to put in a Freedom of Information request but eventually I found the list on the website of the Chief Information Officer council. It must have been published in the meantime but it’s not surprising I had difficulty in finding it: Even once found with Google I had trouble to locate the report on the website via the internal search function on the site – a fact that supports our findings from previous work on government websites.

On the report itself it seems like the Department for Education and Skills and the Department of Health have the biggest number of redundant websites. Just quickly browsing through the list makes one realise that the original strategy (if there ever was one) was in dire need of streamlining. Surely also a lot of people will be happy about domain names like the ones below being available to the public again:

• www.studentsupportdirect.co.uk
• www.apprenticeships.org.uk
• www.londonwest.org
• www.renewal.net
• www.constructionskills.net

UPDATE: Just realised that it would also make for a nice quiz: I give you a domain name and you guess what it was used for.

How about www.phfp.uk.com ? Yes, correct, the “Post-Harvest Fisheries Programme”

Here one of my favourites: www.glueserv.com/COI/IRV1649/ Anyone?? Surely you must have guessed its the HMRC’s websites for the “Self Assessment (tax is not taxing)” program.

I remember checking the site in December when this particular petition had still only around 50,000 supporters but it gained momentum with some news coverage early this year and when even the Sun finally stumpled upon the story it must have been become apparent to some people in government that they’ve got more than they’ve bargained for.

Apart from the official statement of Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander which Bill reports in his post, the Guardian alleges that there was also a less supportive response from Mr Alexander:

“Whoever came up with this idea must be a prat” (Guardian, 17.2.).

It highlights that there are more than enough people in the government that actually are not happy with having this way of getting direct feedback from the public – and I’m not talking here about the inevitable share of abuse (ie. bogus petitions) the site receives but about the hundreds of people who actually bother to voice their opinion and the millions of people signing it. Who did care about road pricing before the petition site? No one. This site now has given citizens an easy and convenient opportunity for raising their concerns and bringing them to the attention of the government. Whoever sees that as undesirable has in my mind some fundamental problems with his understanding of democracy. Or in the words of one commenter on the BBC site:

“It says it all about the Labour Party that they’ve finally found a channel for listening to what the people want, and branded it a “Public relations disaster!” (Steve Sutton, St. Albans, UK on the BBC website)

There is however the issue of what effect these publicly raised concerns have or indeed should have. In December last year we’ve hosted a workshop together with the Cabinet Office on “Engaging the ‘Google Generation’” (I guess the final report will be available soon) and some people who should know it admitted that there hasn’t been a fixed plan of how to deal with the public response (something like that would never have happened in Blair’s early days…) as the site was seen as an experiment (notice it’s still a beta version).

There is likely to be public over-expectation on the impact the petition (or indeed any petition) can have. After all, matters should be decided in parliament and for good reason. But now that the public ’s opinion is there measurable and for everybody to see, it is more difficult to dismiss the protesters. It is this that will have sparked the outrage of the Transport Secretary who now has to deal with this.

For the time being it was Tony Blair’s turn to respond to the petition which he did by sending out an email to all 1.8m petitioners. It is a noticeable design feature of this system that was developed by mysociety.org (by now a force to be reckoned with in British politics) that it only allows the email addresses of petitioners to be used twice before it will delete them – in this way preventing the government from using the site as a means to harvest email addresses for propaganda purposes.

It seems somehow ironic that something as old a tradition as petitioning government, simply transformed to take advantage of modern technology, is now the pinnacle of British e-government efforts – and even this comparatively simple tool already causes such an outcry among some politicians. Who can image what happens if some real Web 2.0 style web applications would be used, for example to discuss and rate politicians or NHS hospitals (more ideas welcome – feel free to comment!).

However, to end on a more optimistic note, maybe this shows how much potential there really is in leveraging the power of people and technology (call it Web 2.0 or whatever) to really revive the political process if this little can already make such a difference. On this we will have to thank the road-pricing opponents who in their fight to keep Britain’s roads congested made the site so popular in no time.

UPDATE: Hitwise (which I mentioned earlier here in that blog) have done some analyses on who actually used to access the e-petitions site (above average use from 55+ year old people) and where they come from (Daily Mail features 4th). Interestingly, according to their data, the petitions site currently is the most popular UK government site (in UK visits). thanks to Heather Yaxley who pointed me to this. ]]> http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2007/02/21/e-petitions-or-how-participatory-should-democracy-be/feed/ 2 http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2007/01/11/out-now-new-report-on-transformational-government-strategy/ http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2007/01/11/out-now-new-report-on-transformational-government-strategy/#comments Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:24:10 +0000 tobias.escher http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/?p=13 For those of you who are unaware of that, the UK government is currently in a six year reform of transforming its public services for the 21st century (read: the Internet and all the rest). The strategy itself reads:  

this strategy’s vision is about better using technology to deliver public services and policy outcomes

Unsurprisingly then it goes to great lengths to say how much money will be saved and how much more effective and efficient government will be once it has seized the opportunities of new technologies.

It’s 18 months into the programme and the Cabinet Office just released its first progress report. The two issues of interest here are:

1. The government plans to shut down at least 550 websites to reduce the overall number of websites (which nobody knew for sure, probably around 2.500). Unfortunately it seems like there is no list of those sites available yet.
2. The relevant content of the closed sites will move to direct.gov.uk which is part of a larger attempt to create a one-stop shop for citizens to interact with government. direct.gov.uk is going to become a super-site holding (allegedly reviewed) content previously held on departmental websites. The same thing with businesslink.gov.uk for businesses.

It is going to be interesting whether or not this strategy will really be beneficial to citizens. While streamlining governments online resources sounds good to my ears, it has yet to be proven whether a joint up (ie. direct.gov.uk) approach is really what citizens are looking for. So here a bit of self-advertisement: We are doing a bit of research that will come out in the first half of this year and which will shed light on some of these issues. Check out Government on the Web which will be updated soon! ]]> http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2007/01/11/out-now-new-report-on-transformational-government-strategy/feed/ 2 http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2006/10/22/us-gov-pays-google-adlinks-to-get-its-message-across-on-iraq/ http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/2006/10/22/us-gov-pays-google-adlinks-to-get-its-message-across-on-iraq/#comments Sun, 22 Oct 2006 17:36:54 +0000 tobias.escher http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/escher/?p=19 One would probably agree to the statement that the US government feels a certain need to promote its views on the war in Iraq in whatever way possible. One tends to think that should be easier with traditional media where governments have traditionally relied on a variety of tools in order to keep itself some influence over the message. On the Internet, however, where everybody can raise his or her voice to a potentially huge audience, we tend to think governments struggle to set the agenda of discussion and keep an influence on public opinion. And indeed, if for example you do a Google search on “war in iraq” you get a lot of results but in the top twenty (and what else matters) there are no government sources at all and the most results are either rather neutral or outright against the US strategy on Iraq.

However, as always the US government is ready to put some money to a “good cause” and found a rather imaginative solution to this problem: buying adlinks on Google. Try yourself or have a look at the screenshot, one of the adlinks for a “war in iraq” search points to “The official site of the Multi-National Force – Iraq” with loads of good news from the troops on the ground.

I am not sure what surprises me more: the very fact that the US government is actually spending money on Google adlinks at all or that they actually managed to figure out that there is a potential problem and addressed it rather smartly…