Phew! It’s launched, and it works. And it all went surprisingly smoothly.

Just before Christmas, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority approached us to see if we’d be interested in producing the online part of their first consultation on MPs’ Expenses. This was exciting, to put it mildly — so we leapt in with both feet.

As is often the case with this kind of work, the deadlines were short and the team rushed. The consultation is only five weeks long, and there’s even less time to analyse the responses after it closes. With this in mind, we did our best to come up with a format that gives respondents a meaningful way to respond, while also making the responses as easy as possible to analyse.

Most of the questions have yes/no answers, and a few have options you can choose between. Each page has a box for free text responses, instead of each question — and the box is limited to 500 characters. We were a bit nervous about limiting input in this way, but hopefully it’s a good compromise. No one’s submitted anything nearly that long yet, so it hopefully people aren’t feeling constrained.

Given the number of questions, the length of the text and the constraints of the form, it was really important to make the site as intuitive as possible. The text boxes make it very obvious if you put too much in them. The final form at the end confirms that you really are finished, and the buttons are subtly differentiated using icons and colour. You’ll also find that using the sidebar menu to jump around is safe — even if you’re in the middle of writing a response. We’re using javascript to make sure the form gets submitted. And everything’s unobtrusive, accessible and standards-compliant. We even managed to squeeze in some RDFa.

The site is, of course, implemented using Wordpress. It’s a fantastic platform to work with. There’s no doubt that Wordpress’s general awesomeness is what made it possible to launch this quickly — and on time, and on budget. Everyone seems pleased with the way it’s come out (including a real user) so we’re pretty pleased!

Questions? Thoughts? Did it work well for you? Do leave a comment, and let us know what you think.

I had a fantastic day at myPublicServices on Thursday. It was a real success. For the first time in a long time (perhaps ever!) I was truly conflicted after lunch: all the sessions looked great, and I could only go to one. Annoying!

I spent most of the morning in Ivo Gormley’s ThinkPublic session. We tried out some of the techniques they use when they’re helping clients to improve service delivery. We had talks from the operators of three sites, and then tried to apply the lessons learned from those sites to our own example scenarios — in our case, an old persons’ home. We took on various personas and tried to apply the good practices from the talks to our own problems. It was a great way to think about things with a new perspective.

One of the sites from that session was particularly interesting: HorsesMouth.co.uk is an online coaching and mentoring site which has established a pretty impressive community of mentors and help-seekers. They take great pains to ensure to preserve their members’ anonymity and to make the site a safe environment to ask sensitive questions. Rather like StackOverflow, but for personal problems. Really good to see. They deserve much more attention than they’re getting.

In the afternoon, I went along to Paul Clarke and Mark O’Neil’s session on bringing together official and unofficial services. I have to say: they were a marvellous double-act. Though I did get appropriated as the representative of all developers everywhere (quite an honour!). They had several Socratic debates followed by discussions covering reliability, incentives, sustainability, ecosystems for innovation — the whole gamut, really. I wish there was video of it. This was immediately followed by another session run by James Munro on “The elephants in the room: the questions people are avoiding”, which addressed lots of the same questions.

It was a really good day, with interesting and inspiring talks and a great mix of people. Mostly, though, there was just a wonderful energy about the place. Enthusiastic, passionate people all talking about practical ways to improve public services. A grass-roots conference, organised by people on the front lines of health services, attended by people who care.

Congratulations to Patient Opinion for their spectacular success. I hope there’s another one next year!

I should probably introduce myself first: I’m Tom, Dextrous Web employee #1.

We do quite a bit of work with WordPress, and one of the problems we’ve found is that it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of automated testing that we do with the rest of our projects. The code for themes easily gets pretty cluttered, and it’s hard to know what the consequences of installing a WordPress upgrade or new plugin might be.

One of the tools that we use for our Ruby on Rails projects is Cucumber, a Behaviour Driven Development tool that makes front-end testing of Rails applications really easy. There’s an example below, but in brief: it lets you write human-readable tests and then run them on your application to make sure it’s working properly. Because Cucumber tests the front-ends of web applications, it’s not tied to any one technology — so we thought, why not use it to test WordPress?

So I spent some time writing a little bit of configuration magicks and step definitions, and here it is: cucumber-wordpress.

To get started you’ll want to install the gem:

gem install cucumber-wordpress --source http://gemcutter.org

Then copy the example features directory from the gem into the root of a WordPress installation:

cp -R /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/cucumber-wordpress-1.0/examples/features .

Configure your test database, and where the site is being served from:

vim features/support/config.yml

And test:

cucumber

Here’s a sample:

  Background:
    Given WordPress is installed

  Scenario: Submitting a post
    Given I am logged in as "admin"
    And I am on admin dashboard
    When I follow "Add New" within "#menu-posts"
    And I fill in "title" with "I <3 cucumber"
    ...

I’ve been testing a plugin with this for a week now, and it’s been very smooth.

Here at The Dextrous Web we’re committed to backporting the Rails culture to WordPress.

Last Thursday, G2010 — a conference on Government 2.0 — finally arrived. As others have said, it was a fantastic day, with many interesting people in attendance and on Twitter.

At the beginning of the year, Jeffrey Peel asked us to organise a panel for the day on digital engagement. It’s an area we have some experience of — we made TellThemWhatYouThink.org and ConsultationXML, and are helping the COI to deploy RDFa to describe consultations documents on central government websites. We had a lively panel and discussion about consultation and how to do it, which you can now watch:

And here are my feelings on the subject — in a bit more detail than we could fit in on the day.

Consultation is an area in which there is intense activity. Departments consult on almost everything they do, local government has a statutory obligation to consult residents on a wide variety of issues, and the rise of social media in government has brought into sharp focus the things that the Web makes possible. But despite all this activity — very much including innumerable panels at conferences — we’re not achieving the mass participation in policymaking that is, for many, the goal of digital engagement. So what’s wrong?

I think that some very big assumptions have been made about digital engagement, its potential, and the right way to do it. Everyone’s been excited by the possibilities, myself included, but I think we’ve failed to really look at the people we’re trying to engage, their level of interest, motivation and available time.

The reality is that formal consultation is simultaneously necessary (in that a deliberative, evidence-based policymaking process is valuable) and expensive in terms of the investment of time and energy that people must make to participate. We have conflicting goals: to reduce the barriers to participation — make it quicker and easier — while also maintaining an informed policymaking process. Formal consultation is far from perfect and we should work to make it better, but it’s not obsolete.

The solution we’ve adopted so far is to try and make it easier to dip one’s toes into a formal consultation. This has been valuable, and we’ve learned a lot from it, but I don’t think it’s workable.

Such approaches can substantially increase the number of responses that consultations receive, but they’re usually not the right kind of responses. A formal consultation doesn’t much benefit from large volumes of anecdotal correspondence about personal experiences. That kind of input is extremely valuable, but by the time a policy has reached formal consultation, it’s too late to use it. That kind of engagement has to happen earlier.

It also has to happen more often. It’s simply no good to pick a time — essentially arbitrarily — to ask people about their experience of, for example, public services. A consultation on the NHS probably wouldn’t be of much interest to me 5 years after my operation, but if I’m asked straight away, I’d be much more likely to respond. The issues would be fresh and immediate, and I wouldn’t have moved on with my life.

Those experiences happen all the time. They constitute the raw reality of our society and the value, or lack of it, that Government succeeds in generating for people. They are innumerable, chaotic, disorganised, neverending and personal: just the unstructured, unrepresentative things that you don’t want in a formal consultation, but that have the potential to create real, valuable change in the way ministers, Parliamentarians, policymakers, civil servants and front-line staff do their jobs.

We need to pick apart these strands. First, we must take formal consultation on to the web, away from paper and PDFs, and engage those people who are interested in investing their time and effort in the process. Second, we must embed into government a culture of engagement, so that those who have stories to tell can tell them to the right people at the right time. Engagement is not the exclusive province of web, press and comms teams. It’s everyone’s job, and everyone must make time for it.

After all, “engagement” is just another word for “talking to people and finding out what on earth’s going on”.

Who couldn’t get behind that?

The UK’s version of data.gov, ably put together by the Cabinet Office, has just launched in private beta. We got to have a sneak peak, and it’s great!

The site is a blend of the US’s equivalent, data.gov, and Directgov | Innovate. It’s got a listing of available data packages, powered by the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, and user-generated lists of apps and new ideas. This is just right: the data you need, combined with a way to promote the things you make and a place to get ideas if you’ve got itchy typing fingers but lack inspiration.

It’s not perfect. Conspicuously missing is an organised way to browse data sets: but that’s coming, along with some other tweaks and twiddlings that’ll improve the site’s usability.

The site is powered by Drupal, with packages catalogued and hosted by CKAN. Meanwhile, data.gov.uk hosts a data store powered by Talis that can scale to 100 billion triples and is hosted on Amazon EC2. The system is federated, so departments can add and control their own data, lots of which is available as RDF, with the remainder downloadable in spreadsheet form.

Speaking of spreadsheets, they’ve even written an app that departments can deploy in-house to convert spreadsheets into RDF (kudos to John Sheridan!) which makes it much easier for departments to produce structured, linked data.

This is all working now, and was put together by the team at the Cabinet Office in the last three months. This is a massive achievement, and it sounds like it’s just the beginning: they have big plans. User submissions for new datasets. Metadata to describe provenance. More data sets on the site. More data as RDF. Organised browsing for packages. Source code releases. The list goes on.

This is such an encouraging thing to see. No expensive procurement exercises for clunky, bespoke sites: instead, we have the right tools for the job, joined together. Simple things that do one job well, combined to form a more complex whole. It’s the Unix philosophy in action.

This is how all Government IT should work.

Our hearty congratulations go out to the team at the Cabinet office, with special thanks to Richard Stirling for spilling some of the beans. I had lots of questions and nitpicks, and every single one of them was answered reassuringly.

They’ve got a plan, and it’s a good one.

Just discovered (via Twitter) that NHS Choices have released a new tool for users to rate hospitals. Fantastic. Government should embrace user generated content more often than it does, and feedback on Hospitals is a great application for it — but their implementation could do with a bit of tweaking.

First: the tool has been implemented as a new feature within the existing NHS choices website. Its design is clean, but very text heavy. This is not helped by the use of very long titles in the sidebar boxes that contain statistics — including the user-generated stuff — about the hospital you’re viewing. I suspect that they are this long because of a desire to make it ultra-clear which content is drawn from official statistics, and which is user-generated.

That’s a reasonable concern, but the site as it stands smacks of paranoia. I think that most people can tell which bits are official and which aren’t, even if the bits are in the same box. The distinction between “75% of people would recommend this hospital to a friend” and “1.33 MRSA infections for ever 10,000 bed stays” is obvious. There’s also a very strange chart in the user-generated sidebar: it appears in the middle of a sentence. I’d call myself a fairly seasoned web user, but even I found that confusing. It just looks broken.

Second: the comments aren’t prominent enough. They’re too far down the page, and relegated to a sidebar. They’re one of the most useful parts of the page — personal stories will always speak louder than dry statistics — so I’d give them a bit more importance, and put them in the main content area, beneath the hospital’s description. As well as being more prominent, it’s more consistent with how comments are usually presented.

If you click through to read all the comments, you find that they are presented in exactly this way on the next page, which is excellent: it displays all the comments in a way that makes it easy to absorb the ratings at a glance, summarises them right at the top of the page and has a prominent call to action for people who want to post feedback. Even more important than that, it has replies from the hospitals, which is fantastic. Government forays into the social web rarely ever result in real two-way communication. To see it being done is  encouraging.

In short — despite being a bit rough around the edges — this is a nice bit of work, and definitely a big step in the right direction.

James Darling and I met up for a chat about some data-related stuffs this afternoon, and came across this data on average fuel prices via the Office of National Statistics. This struck us both as being very useful (any hauliers out there who want to make some a nice visualisations?) so we threw together a script to convert it into (much) more useful formats.

Check out Weekly Fuel Prices, in more formats than you can shake a stick at, here.

mySociety have added a data dump to ScenicOrNot, the site we built for them a couple of months ago. It’s got the photos and all the votes for each of the 181,300 places that have received 3 or more votes since the site launched.

If you’re one of the many people who had something to say about the voting system that ScenicOrNot uses, we hope you might have some fun playing with the raw data! If you do make something, let us know how you get on…

The Dextrous Web is a young start-up, making its first hire. We’re looking for a PHP/Ruby developer to join the team – which is currently one full-timer and a collection of freelance designers and programmers.

The Dextrous Web was founded with a specific mission in mind. We want to make useful things on the web that solve interesting and difficult problems. We think that agile, social, programmable websites are the best thing since sliced bread, and we’re constantly amazed at the things the web makes possible.

Most of our clients are in the public sector, and that’s where our hearts lie: we want to show the Government how it ought to be doing things on the web! There’s so much that could be done, and the possibilities are exciting.

We think this is a great job for the right person. If that might be you, please do read some more and consider applying.

Isn’t secret anymore!

MySociety have just taken the wraps off Mapumental, which is a terribly clever mapping application to help you figure out where you want to live if you have a commute (and probable more besides that). We and MySociety teamed up to build ScenicOrNot, which has produced the dataset that Mapumental consults when you move the scenicness slider.

They’ve produced a video to show the site, currently in private beta, in action:

Mapumental is really quite impressive — a significant technical accomplishment as well as very useful — so significant kudos are due to mySociety. Nicely done!