Posts Tagged ‘consultations’
Have your say on MPs' Expenses 7th Jan 10
Just before Christmas 2009, 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 was only five weeks long, and there was even less time to analyse the responses after it closed. With this in mind, we came up with a format that gave 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. Very few people contacted us with extra things they wanted to say, so it hopefully most people didn’t feel 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.
The site was implemented using WordPress. It’s a fantastic platform to work with. There’s no doubt that WordPress’s amazing flexibility is what made it possible to launch this quickly — and on time, and on budget. Everyone seemed pleased with the way it came out (including a real user) so we’re pretty pleased!
ConsultationXML is now Open Source 27th Feb 09
We’re terribly, fantastically pleased to announce that after a bit of wrangling, Steph Gray and I are able to release ConsultationXML as open source software under the GNU Affero license. The recent report on open source software in Government hinted that departments ought to try to release source code for the software they commission, and we’re delighted to be (we think!) the first to do so.
We’re not sure who will want to play with it yet. We hope that other departments will want to deploy and use the tool to improve their consultation offerings. It may be that people in the private sector will find some use for it. People have already used ConsultationXML for really neat things that we didn’t expect, so anything could happen: which is, of course, the point.
We ran this by the renowned geek-come-blogger-come-minister, Tom Watson, who had good things to say:
I think this is a great tool. We’ve just announced the Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use report on the use of open source software in government, an element of which was to encourage government to contribute to the world of open source software, and this is the first practical expression of that goal.
For more information about ConsultationXML, and to download it, head over here.
Comment on the Power of Information Taskforce's report 11th Feb 09
The Power of Information Taskforce have been figuring out how to liberate public sector information, how to facilitate better use of the modern, social web in government, and how to support the efforts of those outside government who are doing worthy things. All in all, they’re a great bunch of people, doing great work. They’ve just published their draft report. This is notable for two reasons.
First, the report has been published using Commentariat, a WordPress theme from the folks at DIUS that makes it easy to browse and comment on big documents. It is fantastic — it really works well — and you’d never know it was WordPress, unless you checked. It’s a great example of WordPress’s flexibility.
For me, this informal consultation exercise is characterised by its ease. I read the report online. When I had something to say, I could just fill out the comment box. I could read other people’s comments, which helped to clarify my own thoughts. The PoI team have been posting comments too: responding to people, thanking them for their feedback, letting us know when they’ve made changes. Brilliant. It’s a real conversation between people who genuinely want to seek out ideas. It stands in stark contrast to the process of formal consultation, which is stifled, slow, more or less one-way, and frequently happens after all the important decisions have already been made. This exercise couldn’t be more different: agile, easy, conversational and public. I have no doubt that the report will be better because of it.
Second, the report itself is great: it hits all the right boxes. Be active in other people’s networks. Make sure civil servants have decent ‘net access — it’s astonishing how many of them are so filtered that they’re almost useless. Support third sector developers. Invest in innovative new ideas, even if they’re high risk. Liberate geodata from burdensome licensing and fees. There are 25 recommendations in all, and they’re all great.
If you have some time, read the beta report and leave some comments. It’s a great document, and great opportunity to get your thoughts in front of people who will listen.
ConsultationXML: the mashups have landed 4th Feb 09
People have already started doing interesting things with ConsultationXML. I have to admit — I couldn’t be more pleased!
Richard Goodwin took PDF attachments from the London Gazette, uploaded them to ConsultationXML, got the HTML preview output and fed it into Wordle — and voila! A Wordle map of the London Gazette’s honours list was born.
Has anyone else done interesting things? Do let us know.
ConsultationXML: getting reusable data out of horrid PDFs 2nd Feb 09
Over the last few months, we’ve been working with Steph Gray of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills on making consultation documents easier to reuse.
DIUS are doing some fantastic things with consultations. Typically, a formal consultation is a pretty tedious process: a department will write up a big PDF document, print it, send it to some people, stick it on their website and wait for people to respond. The whole process is pretty dated: it doesn’t really take advantage of the web, and is pretty inaccessible to most people.
DIUS have started to make this process better. In July last year, they launched a consultation that tried a bit harder to involve people. They used a WordPress plugin, CommentPress, to allow people to comment on individual paragraphs in the consultation. They published a nice HTML version of the consultation document, with links and all. They even made a widget generator, so that people could embed questions from the consultation in their blogs.
Doing these things doubled the number of people who responded to the consultation, with very little extra marketing. Unfortunately, they were also pretty time consuming: turning a PDF into nice HTML is pretty labourious. They wanted to automate as much of this process as possible, to make it cheaper to deploy similar consultations in the future, and they asked us to help.
Creating all these consultation tools would be quite easy, if the data existed in a format that could easily be reused. Unfortunately, PDF is certainly not that format. It is is designed for print, and is difficult to repurpose. To make this easier, we wrote some tools to convert PDFs into very basic XML, and to allow people to extend that XML into something useful.
This human intervention is really important. It allows semantic information to be added to these documents: questions and their possible answers can be identified, and explanatory paragraphs can be linked to questions. It also allows formatting and images lost during conversion to be added back into the document, and extra formatting like links to be added.
So, with that in mind, we produced a web-based XML editor for staff in web publishing departments. The idea was to create an editor customised to the XML schema we’re using, so that people who are only just XML-literate can still use it. The editor automatically converts PDF documents to basic XML and then presents it for marking up, tweaking and generally-making-better. The result is awesome XML, usable by other tools to do neat things.
ConsultationXML is about to be deployed within DIUS, where it’ll be used by real people so we can get feedback and make it better. We’re hosting an installation here, so that you can play with it and give us your thoughts. We hope to make it better — it’s not quite finished yet — but it’s finished enough, so we’re getting it out there for people to try. It’ll be open source just as soon as the lawyers have done their thing.
Have a play with the beta ConsultationXML editor here.
Update: Steph has posted his writeup.
DFID's New Website 20th Dec 08
The Department for International Development have been working on their new website for a long time. The old one was certainly in need of attention, so it’s great that the new one has finally launched, and is a vast improvement.
The site is really nicely designed. It’s clean and uncluttered, and the navigation is nicely organised: we have a particular interest in consultations, so it’s nice to see a link right up front in the main menu for those. They’re often quite hard to find. More on that later!
The content in general is great — really descriptive of the work that DFID do. A few clicks took me right to a very informative page about Africa and China’s burgeoning trade relationship: useful information, in a sensible place, that was easy to find and digest. Breakout boxes for key facts combined with summaries of their work and links to download more detailed documents. Just right. The Fighting Poverty pages deserve a special mention, with Ajax used to great effect.
The site ties in reasonably well with other services, with links and embedded content on the front page for Flick, YouTube and Facebook. It’s always nice to see government making use of these: the Flickr link took me to this lovely shot of a junk stall in Nairobi… but I’ll save the photography appreciation for another time.
The front page also prominently features content from the excellent DFID bloggers, and has easy-to-spot links to RSS feeds for their news stories. Unfortunately, news and speeches seem to be the only RSS feeds that they offer, so they could certainly do more there: RSS for consultation documents and other publications would be useful, as would ones for job vacancies and imminent procurement exercises. Their RSS feeds aren’t included in their page’s meta information, either, so there’s no browser integration. That’s a pretty bad oversight, given that an icon in the browser’s address bar is how most people notice that an RSS feed is available.
Their consultations page also seems to have been neglected. The structure of the page is poor, and in the absence of any RSS for consultations, we probably still won’t be able to add their consultations to TellThemWhatYouThink. There are other good opportunities for public information reuse on the site as well, like structured access to data about who and what they’re funding, and to what amount. This seems to have been completely overlooked.
The new site is a fantastic improvement over the old one: but there’s certainly more that could be done. We were in touch with DFID earlier in 2008 about improving their consultation pages. Now that the new site has landed, we’ll have another go!