He was asking because I hadn’t blogged since Pixie Lott was number one, and he was disappointed because he found my blog had been one good way to keep up on digital in government.

I told him that it was simply that I now had additional responsibilities at home in the form of a bouncing baby boy. And, when Ben was taking a break from bouncing to finally go to sleep, blogging was really quite far from my thoughts.

Still, if I was going to take his flattery I also had to take his point and get posting – check – even if I’m slightly cheating by riffing on what I emailed back to him in the form of four recommendations for blogs that cover central government’s use of digital.

I picked my recommendations based on the fact that I like reading them and they have posted regularly through the year offering genuinely unique insights. So well done them.

1. Stephen Hale / Health Conversations

First up, Stephen Hale, who goes about his business in an understated manner that belies his creativity and industry. A seasoned blogger from his days at the FCO, Stephen’s using blogging at the Department of Health to account for his work there turning around that department’s digital fortunes. But as well as blogging about matters close to home, he’s also using his experience and contacts to spotlight and comment on important developments across his profession.

2. GDS / Government Digital Service

If you only read one blog about HMG on the web it should be the ‘boss blog’ from the Government Digital Service. Corporate blogs from the HQ can sometimes ring hollow but not this one. It’s mainly down to the cast which includes Mike Bracken (Executive Director of Digital), James Stewart (Tech lead at GDS) and Neil Williams (who’s been quiet on his own blog to blog here). What a line up. This is where you have go for the inside line on what HMG is thinking and doing in the digital space across engagement, service delivery and the single government domain.

3. Simon Dickson / Puffbox

A man who knows his gov webbie stuff and isn’t backward in commenting on yours, Simon Dickson can divide opinion but is fairly consistent in his own. He’s considered in his views and often first to break a development, he keeps the debate chugging along like only a critical friend can. Don’t get him started on WordPress, though; he can’t stand it.

4. Stefan Czerniawski / Public Strategist

Pubstrat we call him because Czerniawski is a bit more difficult. Stefan is the Clydesdale of the blogging workhorses paraded here for you today. He does the heavy hauling; he’s got the patience and the nerve to tackle the detail of digital service delivery. His blogs help step you into debates that you might have otherwise feared to tread on, and suggests super sharp angles from which to consider them.

Of course, if blogs aren’t your thing then there’s always Twitter. Either way there’s no excuse for not knowing what’s going down on the hot desks of Whitehall.

'Untitled #20' by Filip Dujardin

This is my favourite from a series called ‘Fictions’ by digital artist, Filip Dujardin.

His architectural creations are from a parallel dystopia. Unemcumbered by the laws of architecture, he has constructed completely original building dimensions and layouts, which are nonetheless distrurbingly familiar.

You can tour the rest of ‘Fictions’ at www.filipdujardin.be.

'A day in the life' by Dan Hipp

As a hooj fan of Indiana Jones and illustration this cartoon just makes me smile and smile.

Dan Hipp is an amazing talent who mashes up zombies with TinTin and Star Wars through to Super Mario Bros. and back again. Love it!

I put in on a #FF0080 background to bring out the colours.

'On the platform, reading' by moriza

People still read, right?

‘The Measured Life’ by Emily Singer in Technology Review

Whether it is to get fitter, better or just to have a go at hacking the human condition, people are beginning to turn ’big data’ technologies on their sleep, diets and productivity. Athletes and sufferers of certain medical conditions have been at it for years, but evidently the ‘quantified self’ is going mainstream and it’s bound to be big business.

‘BBC World Service Language Websites: user experience and typography’ by Kutlu Canlioglu on BBC Internet Blog

The FCO publishes in 50+ languages on our platform and in 20+ languages on the social web. We know a thing or two about multi-lingual publishing. But there is still an awful lot we can learn from the way the BBC Worldservice approaches publishing its non-English websites. What I find impressive is the way the Worldservice provides custom editorial in so many languages yet maintains consistency in user journeys and page layouts. This blog post is about how they do it.

‘British Attitudes Towards the UK’s International Priorities’ by Robin Niblett for Chatham House and YouGov

This is the second survey of British attitudes towards the UK’s international priorities that Chatham House has developed with YouGov. The survey examined the attitudes of two groups – the first a representative sample of GB adults, and the second a group of ‘opinion-formers’. The differences between the two are fascinating but what is truly revealing are the discontinuities in the public’s thinking about foreign policy. The ultimate conclusion, for me, is that there is a lot of communication and engagement that needs to get a lot better.

'La Tierra Prometida' by Paco Pomet

I can’t remember how, when or where I came across Pac0 Pomet. But when you see his surreal paintings you don’t forget them easily.

Although I have this Sunday jaunt to the Moon as my desktop at the moment, the first of Paco’s paintings to catch my eye was this one:

Genuis!

Government’s use of digital media is undergoing radical change. As digital media use has become more mainstream  and critical – first to communications, then policy-making through engagement and more recently for transactions – so too has government steadily rationalised its digital operations. That trend is now coming to a head with the establishment of the Government Digital Service, which will provide centralised services, a single domain and web platform for all government departments and [most of] their agencies to use.

That each department and agency will no longer have its own, separate domain, CMS, hosting arrangement, support contract, analytics account and maybe central web team is genuinely radical. But could the delivery of government digital services be more radical still?

Frances Maude’s speech at Civil Service Live 2011 made me think so. In that speech he floated the idea of giving public sector staff the right to form new mutuals and bid to take over the services they deliver. Could government digital services be a candidate for mutualisation? In this post I suggest that it could.

I don’t attempt to deal with the practicalities; at this stage, I am only interested in the principle. Do the government’s digital services, which are soon to become a service, qualify for mutualisation.

Nor do I say that government digital services should be spun off into a mutual; rather, at a time of opportunity while the exact scope and roadmap for GDS are being defined, I belive it warrants consideration as 1) a specific exploration of digital as service in government and 2) of the general debate about what public service mutuals are and could be.

Not knowing much about mutualisation, I have had to do some research. In that process I came across the very helpful Co-operative Business District, a guide produced by Co-operatives UK and Mutual Ventures, explaining four areas that need thorough consideration before embarking on a public sector mutual. The first of these is: what are public sector mutuals and are they for you? That ‘big idea’ is what I cover here by applying the criteria to the government digital function.

According to the guidance the UK Government intends these the ‘right to provide’ to be in scope for a very broad spectrum of services in areas such as education, health and social care but it could also extend to civil service functions. Like digital services. Perhaps. Certainly, the archetypal service values on which mutuals are based sound very much like those to which ‘gov webbies’ across departments aspire: user focus, choice, cost efficiency, flexibility, personalisation, community, creativity, continuous improvement and so forth. So the ‘mindset’ can be said to be in place.

Currently, each department’s digital team – to some extent or another –  provides account management, editorial, engagement, frontend development, analytics, standards compliance, user experience and skills training services to their department (with design, systems administration, hosting, applications management and design more often than not outsourced to commercial providers). Those services that departmental teams currently provide will be centralised into GDS and the departments will use that service in the same manner that they previously used their own in-house functions. So the business of a mutualised GDS would be to provide digital services to a customer base of government departments and agencies. In that sense the business model is already set.

Lastly, what form of mutual would a ‘mutualised GDS’ take? The conventional image of a cooperative is that it is employee-owned but they can also be consumer-owned or a mix of the two. A cooperative run by its departmental consumers might be best running as a community interest company, where the assets would be owned by the department and ‘profits’ or savings would be turned back into ‘public good’ such as community funding, innovation or research initiatives.

Regardless of whether or not it is desirable, it would seem that a mutualised GDS would fit the criteria introduced in the the Co-operative Business District. But naturally a limited exploration of this kind begets a host of questions…

• Would a mutualised GDS perform better than demutualised GDS? The idea behind unleashing the ‘right to provide’ is that mutuals can deliver with more energy and efficiency than the Civil Service incumbents, but the GDS has yet to get underway beyond the ‘scale model’ of Alphagov and the embryonic Betagov. So it is too early to say whether it would be ‘better’ in terms of quality or in terms of ‘fit’ with policy.
• Would it be subject to competition from the commercial sector, in the sense that it would have to go through procurment processes? Would it be competitive?
• Is the service mix right? Rather than replicating the current service offering, would a mutual have to bring in hosting and the other services currently outsourced to make an ‘end-to-end’ offer? In fact, is the idea of one mutual wrong; instead should groups of civil servants spin off more niche, discipline-specific services?  A mutual covering user experience services; another providing analytics monitoring and evaluation.
• Are civil servants in digital roles even interested in the concept? Do the potential providers consider themselves more civil servants than business managers?
• Are government’s digital communications, engagement and transactional services too important to spin off?

Questions like these and on even more important issues about the desirability and feasibility of public service mutuals are being posed in the Open Public Services White Paper. The ‘listening period’ is open between now and September, so as well as sharing any thoughts with me on the digital services side, if you are interested in the how modern public services hsould be delivered be sure to contribute to the  www.openpublicservices.cabinetoffice.gov.uk.

UPDATE

On Friday around the time this post was published, the Government Digital Service also posted on its new blog at http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/. The first post contains an excellent readout of the lessons learned from the Alphagov project.

'The Best Way to Read a Book' by pixelevangelist

A few good long reads that I think are well worth the time…

‘Don’t Be Evil’ by Evgeny Morozov in The New Republic

Evgeny Morozov uses a book review of two new studies of Google as a company to do an iconoclast job on the Silicon Valley behamoth. It’s cutting stuff. He calls Google ‘a for-profit American company that combines the simplistic worldview of George W. Bush with the cold rationality of Barack Obama’. Perhaps, the most painful accusation that Morozov makes is that Google is an not exceptional corporation and its inability to accept this is dangerous not just the company but for us all.

Morozov says ‘writing about Google presents an almost insurmountable challenge. To understand the company and its impact, one needs to have a handle on computer science, many branches of philosophy (from epistemology to ethics), information science, cyberlaw, media studies, sociology of knowledge, public policy, economics, and even complexity theory’; but in this article he gives it a good stab. May I suggest, as an apertif, Steven Levy’s Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social.

‘How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History’ by Kim Zetter in Wired

A proper whodunit? for the cyber age. Expertly written by Agatha Christie of the cybersecurity genre (just made that up). I shall say no more.

Have you tested your strategy lately? by Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit in McKinsey Quarterly

The Office invited Charles Roxburgh in – over our lunch break – to tell us how McKinsey & Company approach strategy. There were lots of good insights from a man who really knows his business strategy (and the American Civil War) and amongst these one of the most useful, I thought, was the 10-point test McKinsey applies to the strategies of its clients to determine whether they are good or bad examples. Lots of useful further reading pegged off the article itself.

'Misty Trees' by Hannah Skoonberg

I am trying to get better at identifying tree species. I am also trying to get better at photographing trees; I never seen to be able to catch their character.

An artist who I think does capture trees beautiful is the printmaker, Hannah Skoonberg. Her portfolio is at www.skoonberg.com.

The example I’ve drawn on here reminds me of the forests I used to walk in as a kid. I could stare into it for ages.

'Eden Project is 10' logo

When you think of the Eden Project you think of plants. So the book about ‘Eden‘ by it’s founder, Tim Smit, is going to be about plants.

In fact, there are hardly any plants in ‘Eden’. There’s no room for them because on every page there are portraits and portrayals of the people who worked to bring us the Eden Project. There really are loads of them and their story is fascinating.

Harnessing people to a dream

We think of the Eden Project as being built of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene but it is in fact made from people. The people in ‘Eden’ swarm like a bivouac of worker ants, linking up to nurture and protect something truly unique and valuable, and at the centre of it all – holding the concept – is Tim Smit.

The Eden Project is about plants but the reason is people. It was launched to be an educational and social enterprise that would demand public attention on a superb scale. But such ambition does not deliver itself easily. ‘Eden’ captures and emphasises the depth of enterprise, teamwork and leadership that went into the realisation of an attraction that over 10 million people have travelled to experience, and which to all intents and purposes had its genesis in a Cornish pub.

Tim Smit uses the opportunity of ‘Eden’ to reel off his thanks to as many of the characters as he can who mucked in along the way. He gives each the stage and tells us about what they did, how they did it in their own unique way and how none of the Eden Project would have been possible without them. But the book is not just an extended acknowledgements page; it is a great story with as many vivid twists and turns and suspenses and feel-good endings as any classic of fiction.

Many times it very nearly never came off; there were floods, funding shortages, fall outs and problems with access through farmer’s fields that all threatened to kill off the world’s largest conservatories. But they pulled together and they filled that pit in the earth with breathtaking architecture and the most wonderful collection of plants this side of the natural world.

When it finally opened in 2001 the public quickly took the Eden Project to their heart. So perfect is the visitor’s experience that few could appreciate the scale of the graft involved in getting the doors open and in keeping them that way.

I went to find out more about that hardwork not long after Eden’s opening when I was a summering reporter on a website for UK’s student masses. We had a regular series on interesting people doing interesting jobs, which was designed to prepare and excite our readership for the important next steps after uni. Believing Eden would be the prime for this purpose, I persuaded the editor to let me go to interview the people who worked there, she agreed and I had an amazing day. I met with a biologist, an educator and a communications manager each of whom did a different sort of job but was full of the same pride for the place; and that pride was being converted into passionate productivity for the benefit of the travelling masses. It was inspirational but I fear that my naive efforts to give their account fell short.

That is why Tim Smit’s book is so important. I was given a copy not long after I visited. It did what I and other reporters could never hope to do: he explains a dream as only the dreamer can. It’s a masterclass in maverick leadership and thanks be that he thought to share it with us.

Now the book has been reissued to mark the Eden Project’s 10th Anniversary and I highly recommend it to you (the 2001 edition at least, I haven’t had a chance to read the anniversary edition). I’d also urge you to visit if you haven’t done so already. I’m desperate to go back and take my wife and little boy along who have yet to experience it. I think a lot will have changed as those young gardens, crops and jungles will have matured into something completely new.

The Other P in the Eden Project

One final word on the Eden Project. It’s the other P in ‘Eden’ besides the people and the plants. It’s the P in the title: project.

The Eden Project was a huge undertaking. Built in less than 5 years on a budget of over £140 million, with a high profile and a significant amount of risk. In many ways a ‘nightmare’ project but it was also hugely successful.

In ‘Eden’ Tim Smit describes an enterprise that comes across as the ultimate in swashbuckling projects. All over the shop at times but kept on a irresistible course through the dedication of the project’s managers. Or should that be projects’ managers because there were after all many projects underway concurrently: conceptualisation, planning, construction, horticulture, education and marketing. Each of these is a project in its own right. In fact, we might be better to view each as a programme, itself assembled of a series of smaller projects.

For each of those projects there is an appropriate method for controlling it. Some will require the rigidity of ‘waterfall’ processes like PRINCE2, while in other cases the best approach is the fluid, iterative approach of something like Agile. Horses for courses and all that.

The reason I mention this is that when I started rereading ‘Eden’ there also blew up a flurry of argument over which project management methodology ought to be applied to government ICT. It all kicked off with an an article by corporate IT lawyer Alistair Maughan who argued strongly that Agile development is an evangelical fad ill-suited to government. In retaliation, Agile fans (like the precociously talented team at Rewired State) rose up in defence and in doing so trash-talked the likes of PRINCE2 as viable methodologies. Reading these statements while also consuming ‘Eden’, it was clear that in fact we need both, otherwise government platforms and networks or Eden Projects just don’t get done.

The point being missed in the debate is that it is the quality of the people in the project manager roles – their temperament, problem solving and resourcefulness – which matters more than the methodologies they eventually choose to apply.

It’s a point Tim Smit makes in ‘Eden’. Initially, he says, he found the project managers as needlessly bureaucratic but soon he realised he was being an idiot (that’s a quote by the way) and came to this conclusion:

It is the PM who liaises with constructors and keeps the job to programme, or if it is slipping tells the client why. In short, the project management team form the logistical and administrative hub of the client’s operation. If like we were, you are operating in partnership with many others, their job is crucial in keeping everyone truthfully informed. Fact: you cannot be successful with poor administration, because once you lose control of the order of events the reminder of the team cannot do their job. Alexander the Great needed a good project manager.

Well said, sir.

Happy Birthday Eden Project!

1. With China projected to overtake the United States in terms of economic output within the next ten years, many commentators are again speaking of a new ‘Asian century’ and the ‘decline of the West’. At Chatham House recently, Niall Ferguson drew on the last 600 years of world history to offer an insight into the changing global balance in terms not only of economics but also of geopolitics and ‘soft power’. Transcripts, video and audio are on http://chathamhouse.org.uk/events/view/-/id/1945/.

2. Adam Curtis consistently causes me think again about what I think I know. His new documentary series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is classic Curtis fare: sinsiter music + archive footage + dogma + elites perpetrating that dogma + scathing critique = licence fee well spent. But I am an even bigger fan of his blog, and this article on the ‘idea of humanitarian intervention‘ I found provocative against the backdrop of Mladic’s arrest, extradition and trial.

3. Consultation is a ‘set piece’ of government. Doing it better online is a coalition commitment. But how? As well as tackling search, usability and agile development on a centralised government website, an Alphagov sub-team also turned their attentions to consultation and policy engagement. What they came up with was a succint and persuasive proposal that deserves attention and further development, particularly what it has to say about ‘layering’. There’s an introduction from Neil Williams and a copy of the deck on the Alphagov project blog- http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/a-vision-for-online-consultation-and-policy-engagement.