I’m honoured and delighted to have been asked to join the PM’s delegation for his visit to India next week, in order to participate in a hack day with Indian developers in Bangalore. This should be a great event — we’ll actually only have 4 hours for the hacking, but hopefully we’ll be able to take some of the lessons we’ve learned about civic hacking here at home and apply them to some Indian problems. Very exciting.

From my loose understanding, India certainly faces some interesting and unique challenges. But I don’t know what they are, or how best the web can solve them. I’m sure there’s a broad section of Indian society for whom web applications are not a very practical solution to any of the challenges they face. At least for the time being. So, what are the problems experienced by Indians who are digitally included? And how can we use the web to solve them?

Should we be focusing on applications for mobile phones? Or on low-cost devices like the curiously iPad-like $35 laptop?

Should we aim to produce a quasi-public-service like FixMyStreet, or tools for accountability and transparency, like Armchair Auditor?

What sort of public data is available in India, both officially and for scraping? And how might we be able to use it to influence Indian public policy for the better?

As always, the aim for the day is to have something tangible, useful and interesting that we can show to people. Even if it’s only a screenshot or a very raw prototype.

Very grateful for your ideas, thoughts and advice!

So, the Coalition is going to close lots of unnecessary government websites. Hurrah. The Web Rationalisation project has been going for quite some time and though it’s not without its problems, it’s broadly a good thing. The coalition seems to be taking it up with renewed vigour, which is great. But making websites is cheaper and easier now, so we need to be mindful about how we do it.

There are serious problems with the way Government procures, develops and manages websites, and unless we change that, closing down websites will only be a short-term solution. People working in departments will always want new websites to do useful, valuable things, and they’ll usually find ways to make them. To call these “vanity websites” isn’t really fair. And pushing all citizen-facing content onto Directgov, NHS Choices or BusinessLink isn’t really sensible. Such large platforms bring a necessary degree of inflexibility which isn’t helpful to people who are trying to innovate.

I think that, as with many of the difficulties facing Government, IT and the Web, the problems begin with procurement. Government’s traditional suppliers just aren’t very good at making websites. Government needs to make sure that the new breed of suppliers can get their collective feet in the door. We need procurement processes that make it practical for SMEs to bid for work, civil servants who are keen to try a new approach and project management that takes account of the fact that a lot of “best practice” just isn’t, anymore.

But I think the most important thing to bear in mind today is that this response from the Coalition is a reaction to the problems of the past. Lots of Government sites are genuinely bad, and totally useless. And some of them date back to an era where that’s more or less all we could expect: because the ideas, the theory, the business processes and technology weren’t there. Expensive websites were the only websites there were. Bad was the best we could do. It’s a bit like comparing an AMC Gremlin to a modern car and expecting it to stack up.

But that’s emphatically not the case anymore. Technology and software development processes have improved substantially over the last decade. It really is possible to produce exemplary websites at a fraction of the cost that would have been unavoidable 6 or 7 years ago. NGOs and the private sector have seized on these technologies and ideas to unleash a new wave of products and services that have transformed the way we communicate and think about what the web can do. All the Government has to do is start commissioning it.

I hope that that’s what we’ll see happening over the next couple of years — and I especially hope that the problems of the past decade won’t blind us to the extraordinary opportunities of the next.

With thanks to Rory Cellan-Jones for the title!

When I came across the Dextrous Web I was in a fix. My website needed migrating at the speed of light – and they saved my bacon. Throughout a hugely pressurised process, Dextrous Web remained constructive and good-humoured, offering sound advice and displaying reassuring mastery of their trade.

Peter Simmonds
Digital Project Manager
Department of Health

It’s taken us a long time to get around to it, but we’ve finally managed to get our new site done. It’s strange, but as a web agency, your own site often seems to be the lowest priority. We’ve been busy with client work and short deadlines, and finding time for our own stuff has been pretty hard. We can thank Purdah for giving us a few days to finish it off!

There’s lots I didn’t like about the old site. It was never meant to last for long, but lingered for ages. It didn’t really describe us very well: we’ve been thinking about how and where we should fit into the UK’s digital landscape, but the site hasn’t been keeping pace with the ideas. We were overdue for a change.

This site isn’t finished: there’s more we want to add about us, our plans, our team and our ideas about building the kind of web supplier that Government needs and wants. But it’s better than what was here before, and hopefully introduces us a bit more clearly.

As always — if you have thoughts or ideas about the site, or us, or anything else, we’d love to hear them. Please do let us know what you think.

Dextrous Web have the full skill set. They completely understand contemporary web applications, take their work very seriously and provide rapid common-sense service cheerfully. I’d definitely recommend them.

William Heath
Founder, Kable