Twenty years ago, before regular people had the web, I was a 13 year old discovering a hybrid database/scripting application called HyperCard. One of my early projects was a random number generator for the newly-launched National Lottery, which incredibly, made it onto the cover floppy disk (’3MB of great software!’) one of the early editions of Macformat magazine. I was smart: I didn’t put my home address on it, but I did put my school address in the Read Me. So for several weeks after, they came: little letters in the class register with exotic postmarks, from Scotland, Cyprus, Germany, Australia. They contained patient advice on how to improve my randomisation algorithm (it sometimes generated the same number twice). Versions ported to Pascal, or with a nicer UI, or ideas for new features. Some even included the odd financial donation too. My 13 year old friends were in equal parts bemused and impressed.

I never stopped fiddling with code, though I never properly trained in it either. Fast forward ten years, and I was releasing an open source DIY survey package I’d built because I was annoyed with SurveyMonkey – and the feature requests, support queries and very occasional donations came too, this time by email. Four years ago, I was blogging here, and releasing WordPress themes for consultations, as a salaried civil servant. Still the emails and ideas came: lovely, exotic, motivating, time-consuming, rewarding, emails.

Now I run a micro business and coding is for food as well as for fun. Even more than ten years ago, we depend on open source projects and the altruism of others in forums and blog posts, troubleshooting and extending them for us – making our lives easier and helping us make a profit from their work through the services we offer our clients. So when people have understandably asked if we’ll be releasing the code behind our work for DCMS on the intranet, the memory of twenty years of lovely, exotic, time-consuming emails coming flooding back before I feel ready to say: yes. Yes, of course.

To do otherwise would be hypocritical, and counterproductive. And our strongest ‘competitors’ are well ahead of us on this: the Simons at Code for The People have been contributing their plugins to the WordPress directory and playing an integral part in core releases too for years. Harry at DXW has been submitting patches and worrying about password hashing in WordPress core too. So it’s about time we started sharing more of our code and contributing back a bit more, and building time to handle those lovely emails into our business model. These days, GitHub and other tools make that easy.

I think there’s an important difference between saying ‘you can use our stuff, it’s on GitHub’, and actually helping the writers of those lovely, exotic, time-consuming emails to use the stuff that’s been released in their own work – many of whom aren’t especially expert developers but see the appeal of reusing work from elsewhere. We work mainly in WordPress, a massive community project with a vibrant ecosystem of plugins and themes where people expect to find answers ready-made, reliable, and free (and they’ll complain bitterly, without justification, to altruistic plugin and theme developers when they don’t). So releasing a WordPress thing isn’t just an extra commit, it’s a proper commitment.

Luke’s written more about what we’re doing, but in a nutshell, we’re releasing a tidied up, customisable version of our work for DCMS which anyone can pick up and use on their own intranet-style site. We’re started the process of documenting it better, there’s a demo you can play with, and we’ll do our best to answer questions. Thanks to GitHub, technically minded people can contribute their own improvements, so it hopefully becomes a small community project of its own.

We’ll also be introducing a new section of this site to bring together information about our code releases, where they are, their requirements, current status and more. In some cases, we’ll submit them to the WordPress plugin/theme directory too.

Open sourcing your core outputs feels like a scary thing to do as a micro business when they’re so easily re-usable by others working in the same sectors. But we reckon we’re about more than just code, as Luke’s blogging over the years clearly illustrates.

Make things open: it makes things better, as some wise folk once said.

At heart, I’m an evolutionary, softly-softly kind of digital person, so I instinctively disapproved of chunks of Martha’s report. But even I can appreciate that, amid the destruction GOV.UK has wrought amongst the websites of Whitehall, there are some breathtaking vistas to a new way of doing things thanks to the mantra of ‘revolution, not evolution’.

DCMS wouldn’t have ripped apart its intranet in the same way without GDS’ inspiration and encouragement, for one. The quick answers that really answer the question. The radical presentation of government – not departmental – policy is another. Despite the awards, I think the jury is still out on whether tidying up the lawn to make policy accessible to new audiences was worth alienating the existing ones, currently screaming at departmental web teams around Whitehall.

But the work (and inevitable shouting) going on to improve transactional services and content publishing aren’t having the same effect on digital engagement, where many people I’ve talked to recently are evolving their approaches rather than developing explosive new ones. There’s a sense of needing to focus more clearly, to avoid being distracted by yet another request for a Twitter Q&A or microsite. Some are weary that the lauded examples are of shiny platforms, rather than transformed process and attitudes – which is happening, in progressive pockets of the Civil Service.

I’m not sure the GOV.UK grenades that work against bad online services will shift the culture of policy teams or ministers, which aren’t operationally-focussed or so vulnerable to bald financial arguments in the same way. So I’m left wondering if the softly-softly, pat-on-the-head approach to digital engagement is ever going to break through and scale. Or if we’ve all just been wasting our time.

I was sorry to miss yesterday’s Teacamp where open policymaking was on the agenda, but the tweets inspired me to a thought experiment: what would a really revolutionary approach to digital engagement look like? Something that would, by, say summer 2014, have the same impact on open policymaking as GOV.UK has had on departmental websites.

Here’s a few ideas, some quite daft:

• Every government policy team (minus the secret ones) blogging, without Press Office clearance, to make it truly part of everyday civil service life, and demystify communication. Bonus points for warts and all posts. Ride out the inevitable embarrassments.
• A strict ban on ghostwritten social media content, no matter how senior the ‘blogger’.
• Recruit a central team of 25 community managers, organised by audience group to build relationships with online communities of young people, parents, business owners and more with budget to back up those partnerships with financial support and help in kind.
• Support them with a ‘field force’ community management team ten times that size with individuals attached to every significant policy group, leading monitoring efforts, running partnership activity, shaping briefs and helping individuals when they get stuck.
• A minimum proportion of 30% of any marketing campaign budget to be spent on search, digital partnerships, content marketing, email or tactical social advertising – the stuff that takes effort to plan and manage, but generally beats conventional media and display advertising for efficacy.
• Harder rules about killing experiments with weak results within, say, 100 days – No Pinterest Without Demonstrable Interest.
• An independent commission to rewrite the Civil Service Code, to rethink the roles of Ministers, senior officials, and more junior officials in terms of engaging in policy discussion and taking responsibility for decisions. Alongside it, a frank Parliamentary discussion about the responsibilities of backbenchers and Opposition in holding government to account without stifling open policymaking.
• Every consultation with topics deemed of ‘general public’ interest to have a companion plain English document which asks different, clearly-worded questions about the issue at hand (and no more than 20 of them)

Some of these thoughts have been sparked by a new role I’ve just taken on (along with Anthony Zacharzewski from Demsoc, Simon Burall from Involve and others) as part of an independent panel on the Consultation Principles, contributing to a review currently underway by the Cabinet Office, for the Minister for Policy, Oliver Letwin.

I’m keen that as well as helping to advise on whether reducing the 12 week ‘rule’ on consultations was a good idea and what should happen next, we don’t miss the opportunity to describe how informal digital engagement (speaking to a variety of audiences) should complement formal consultation process (usually speaking to a more professional policy audience of membership bodies and lobby groups). They’re clearly not the same thing, but there’s a risk that we further erode the credibility of digital engagement unless we can say what it is, who it’s for, and how it’s done properly.

So, help me and the other Panel members: how can we improve open policymaking using digital methods, not just in progressive pockets, but across the whole of government?

So what’s the role for a company like mine in a GOV.UK world? It’s just over three years since I incorporated this blog into Helpful Technology Ltd, and the world around us has changed quite a bit. So we’re making some changes too.

For a start, we’re properly plural now – Luke Oatham has flourished in his six months on board, delivering some awesome work for Wilton Park, CLG and DCMS amongst others. And from next month, there will be three of us, when my former BIS colleague Howard Gossington joins the team. Howard’s an actor as well as a solid gold webby, and I’m excited about what he’ll bring to the team.

We’re two separate companies now, too: the work we’ve been doing with social media crisis simulation is a global enterprise now, with export clients in the US, Singapore and Europe and hopefully more to come. It’s a very different kind of business too, from simulating tram crashes with Manchester Fire & Rescue Service, to throwing petitions-gone-wrong at the team at Change.org (and they’re just some of the ones we can talk about).

We’ve also been working closely for a couple of years now, particularly on social media training, with our good friends at Claremont Communications, and we’re hoping to start sharing office space this summer, with a view to blending more of their social PR nous with our nuts and bolts digital skills.

But over the last three years, our bread and butter has been central government work, and as Inside Government gets smarter, there’s likely to be less of that around. That’s a good sign.

Like many small firms, at times over the last six months, we’ve found ourselves stretched in lots of different directions. So in 2013-14, we’re going to be trying to focus our work in four main areas:

1. Digital engagement: effective digital engagement lives or dies by the strategy, skills and connections which underpin it and we’ve too often found ourselves at the end of a food chain, supplying a platform without the involvement to help make it effective. A year ago today, I launched the Digital Engagement Guide; now, I’m hunting for more opportunities to help organisations consult better and discuss policy online, and be a less peripheral part of the teams doing it.
2. 21st century intranets: Luke’s work for the terrific team at DCMS has rightly been celebrated by GDS. What they’ve achieved with content, and how Luke has shaped a platform for it, is really impressive. There’s much talk (but few examples) of ‘social intranets’ and led by Luke, I’d like us to help more people turn their intranet from a waste ground of corporate guff, into something people use to solve their problems. Maybe it’s time for Intranet Club II.
3. Power to the elbow of the little guys: a client once described themselves as ‘puffer fishes’ – able to do what appeared to be a big team’s work with a small team’s resources, thanks to the magic of WordPress and friendly, can-do support. Working for one- or two-person teams at Involve, Wilton Park, LGIU, University Alliance, and the Committee on Climate Change amongst others has been really rewarding, and they’re the clients for whom we add the most value.
4. Social media in a crisis: around the globe, organisations large and small are realising that bad news travels differently now, and we’re refining a platform and consulting service that rivals anything in the world. We’ve established partnerships with around half a dozen agencies so far to offer social media crisis simulation services to their clients, and we’re developing intermediate products focusing on practical writing skills and Twitter in particular.

So while it’s sad to see old friends like the Department of Health’s innovative WordPress site fade into the archives, even I can wish it a fond farewell. The good stuff is around the corner.

Photo credit: Simon Booth-Lucking (I promise, the body language belies a lively discussion…)

I ran a little session with a pretty self-serving goal: to pilot brainstorming a generic ‘Wheel of Misfortune’, or a set of communications risks, that I (or anyone else) might be able to use to help prepare an organisation for hostility in social media.

To me, the purpose of the Wheel of Misfortune is really threefold:

1. To make risk assessment for communications something a bit more engaging the normal dreaded grids, and provide the thinking behind formal documents that can demonstrate to bosses and others that you’ve thought through what might go wrong
2. Issues Management: to identify some of the potential problem areas or vulnerabilities which, if you handle them well, can help you avert a crisis
3. Crisis Management: to identify some of the constraints or dependencies which might cause you problems when you find yourself needing to communicate in a crisis

The basic plan was to divide a circle into about 20 segments, and brainstorm the ‘misfortunes’ recording one in each segment. Then we went round and tried to find some mitigations or solutions to each misfortune (though in the time, we only got about half way round):

About 20 CommsCampers helped me out, and we ended up with the following list of misfortunes:

• Confidential policy info or personal data is leaked
• Something embarrassing is posted from wrong account/inadvertently made public
• Message timing is bad, clashes with news agenda or makes organisation look insensitive/out of touch
• Hashtag or discussion gets hijacked
• People from across the organisation give out inconsistent messages
• Communications get watered down and become ineffective
• Excessive process delays speed of response in a crisis
• Short social updates/messages get taken out of context
• Ongoing customer service issue: sustained customer complaint doesn’t get handled properly
• Organisation faces an exposé/investigative report due to FOI/transparency
• Personal abuse is directed at staff/leaders
• Messages are deliberately misinterpreted to suit someone’s agenda
• Get drawn into heated online discussion
• Audience/internal colleagues have over-inflated expectations
• Nobody cares
• Internal politics and egos overrule communications strategy
• Key platforms or data are lost/shut down
• Organisation or key individuals are spoofed/parodied
• Organisation is accused of abusing platforms/breaking rules
• Someone posts something with an embarrassing typos or makes a miscellaneous cockup

(I particularly enjoyed ‘Nobody cares’, the perennial fear but all-to-frequent reality of public sector communications…)

The mitigations had some sound threads in common (but as I say, we only got half way):

• Have the clarity of process and skills in place to act quickly
• Monitor actively
• Develop strong internal/stakeholder relationships and contacts, in order to co-ordinate activity
• Defend sensible strategic communications, and don’t be swept along by ego or events
• Seek second opinions
• Be prepared to ignore or block abuse

I took the thoughts into a session Ben Proctor and I ran on Friday for the Government Communications Network on Digital Communications for Crises and Emergencies, which was a fascinating day in its own right, highlighting the breadth of crises that public sector communicators deal with, often day-in-day-out.

So many thanks to the CommsCampers who brainstormed, and may the Wheel of Misfortune spin kindly for you all…

Things will be tight in the public sector – and local government especially – in 2013. So far, so Mystic Meg.

I don’t underestimate the effort required by the brave souls who, unlike me, are still in public service, just to keep the lights on next year. But it’s not a question of martyrdom: a lot of folk I meet are rather enjoying the challenge and the opportunity that some of that disruption has created. Digital channels look suddenly rather appealing, and as GDS begins to solve age-old headaches of corporate web publishing in central government, more interesting ways to apply digital tools start to emerge.

So without making predictions, here’s a suggestion from me for 2013: try something a bit wackier for 2013. Eschew that new Pinterest board, tell the boss you won’t film them for YouTube this time, and don’t set up that Facebook page right now. Try something that sounds a bit odd, see what happens, and share what you find – like the guys at BIS did with their Instagram Your Policy idea (whose time will come, I say). In fact, here’s five wacky things you could try:

1. Schedule a massively multiplayer teleconference: the Autumn Statement saw an interesting pilot by Politicshome to arrange and run a large-scale teleconference with an interested audience - similar to the earnings calls CEOs and CFOs have with analysts. Keeping it punchy, human, authentic – that’s what phone calls can do well.
2. Write the FAQ live with your stakeholders: try out a tool like HackPad or Google Docs to open up a document not just for comment, but for actual writing together over a few days. Answer the questions people really raise, or throw things out for others to fill in the blanks.
3. Open mic a corporate channel: ‘a new Swede every week’ promises @sweden, which has attracted its fair share of controversy. But with the right caveats and a decent following, could @InsideAnywhereshireCouncil, with a guest tweeter each week, get some internal buzz going and start a few passionate staff members on their own social media journeys?
4. Make mobile your primary response channel for a campaign: there are work things I’ll peruse on my phone on a bus or train that I wouldn’t have time for at my desk, and I don’t think I’m alone. Pick the right project, and reach some of the folk (like me) who’ll rarely come to an evening meeting or daytime webchat, with something intended for the mobile UX: low bandwidth, big buttons and text – get us choosing, liking, voting, sharing, snapping, installing and texting.
5. Publish your next big document as an eBook: Web pages are still usually a rubbish way to read the long documents that policy will always come in, but we can do better than PDFs printed out to be scribbled over on the train. I know Matt Jukes at the MRC recently managed to get their annual report published in a couple of mainstream e-reader formats, albeit with some bumps on the way. It’s worth persevering.

Wacky for wackiness’ sake? Not intentionally I promise. In fact, here’s a test to apply to any proposal before you sprinkle the wacky dust on it.

• Does it help someone understand this issue better, and take the next step more easily?
• Does it make any feedback we’ll receive more useful, and manageable?
• Does it strengthen, rather than weaken, the trust in the relationship between our organisation and its audience?

Be confident saying ‘yes’ to all three before sprinkling. And have a wacky 2013.

Today’s seen the launch of the latest little site on our Read+Comment platform, designed for fast-turnaround, flexible publishing of documents for comment. DCLG wanted a site to make commentable the Report of the Planning Guidance Review, led by Lord Taylor of Goss Moor. DCLG is one of the pioneer departments which has moved its corporate site to GOV.UK, so this was an opportunity to revisit Commentariat, the customisable WordPress theme I developed for Read+Comment, and sprinkle a bit of the GOV.UK cosmic dust over it.

CommentariatGOVUK, the new version of the theme, is designed to be reminiscent of the Inside Government part of GOV.UK, in terms of basic layout and some elements of typography. Clearly, there’s a lot more to the GOV.UK platform than visual design, but we’re not in a position on Read+Comment to impose style guides or integrate with other Departments’ content. But we can offer a bit more flexibility in terms of functionality through the openness of the WordPress platform, and the skills that are out there amongst WordPress developers.

See a demo of the theme in action (content from ministryoflorem.com)

I quite like the simplicity and flexibility of what we’ve come up with, and decided (with CLG’s support) to release it today:

• A range of templates to support home pages, landing pages and content pages with an easily accessible table of contents
• Flexible menus to link to forms, other sites, or pages
• Ample use of WordPress widget areas to drop in RSS feeds from elsewhere, little promos, listings and videos
• The same kind of user-friendly theme options panel that we’ve always had, enabling site managers to customise colour schemes, decide where comments should sit and add their own tracking code or custom CSS
• Added responsiveness, so things work nicely on smaller screens, thanks to a new foundation based on the 1140 Fluid Grid and Starkers reset theme (our standard WordPress starting point these days)

The theme works nicely coupled with a few solid WordPress plugins we often find ourselves implementing for clients, particularly Spots from the chaps at InterconnectIT  and Gravity Forms (for flexible response forms).

On the DCLG site, we’ve used Transport New from K-Type, a budget DIY version of the elegant typeface GDS commissioned, but which hasn’t been released or made commercially available, yet. Since this is a paid-for typeface, we’re not able to distribute it here, but included a couple of links so you can set this up yourself if you want to. Otherwise, things just fall back to Arial, which looks just swell.

It’s labelled as a 0.1 theme, and it has its rough edges. But in the spirit of its big daddy, I thought I’d ship early and iterate. If it’s useful to you, or you find yourself making your own enhancements, do let me know. And of course, of you want a bit of help with tweaking and hosting, we’re more than happy to help with that too.

Download CommentariatGOVUK (zip, 571kb)

Merry Christmas!

When you tweet something about work that you shouldn’t have, or from the wrong account and it gets picked up, you want the ground to swallow you up. It’s awful, and the chronicles of social media crises are full of heads on pikestaffs.

But what feels like a full-on social media crisis at the time, often turns out to be a storm in a teacup a few days later, with only a few red faces to show for it. It’s one of the ‘mishap’ scenarios described in a great piece of guidance from New Zealand (hat tip: Craig Thomler) which they deem the more easily fixable.

In a training course on Monday, we gave participants three ‘crisis’ scenarios, and got them to share what their handling strategy would be for each. The one that sparked the most debate was a version of this one:

A junior communications officer has been tweeting live coverage of a ceremony taking place, at which national VIPs are present, including a Cabinet Minister and senior managers. During the sombre event, thinking they are tweeting from a personal account, the officer accidentally tweets a picture along with the comment “stick a bomb under the lot of them and there’ll be #nomorecuts”, which is widely retweeted.

Assuming you’re responsible for the channel, let me know in the comments or by Twitter (checking you’re logged into the right account first) what you would do:

1. immediately?
2. in the following few days?

For extra credit, how would your response differ if the account in question was the individual’s own work-related account (where they say in their bio or username where they work), rather than the organisation’s corporate channel?

Not sure there’s a right answer, but I’ll post an update with my thoughts tomorrow.

Update:

Thanks for the comments and responses on Twitter – all pretty sound thinking, I’d say. Here’s what my answer would be:

We can conclude a few things here:

• The perpetrator of the offence will have learned a salutory lesson, and will be a wiser and smarter tweeter as a consequence who double checks before posting a controversial opinion (a valuable learning experience)
• This isn’t the right place for humour: this was a sombre ceremony, and a fairly serious mis-tweet
• We need to be transparent about what happened and how we’ll learn from the experience
• We need to respond quickly, ideally within a few minutes but certainly within a couple of hours
• Longer term, we need to avoid similar mis-tweets, which in this case means ensuring people don’t mix accounts in apps like TweetDeck

So, assuming this happened on a corporate account, I’d suggest the team:

• apologise
• set record straight (including deleting the tweet)
• take some action to reduce the risk of it happening again (not necessarily preventing the original tweeter from ever tweeting again)

“Sorry, a member of our team inappropriately tweeted an offensive personal opinion through this account”

“We’ve removed it, as it’s not the <org>’s view, and we’ll take steps to prevent that kind of mistake happening again”

“Today is really about <sombre ceremony>: [link to coverage/round-up of event]“

If it happened on an individual’s own professional account, the approach would be the same, with a couple of differences:

• distance the professional persona from offensive remark
• promise to learn, making sure you come across as an individual and show a bit of remorse
• be clear this is about foolishness, not self-flagellation

“Sorry, I foolishly tweeted an offensive comment through this account in the heat of the moment. I’ve since removed it.”

“It didn’t reflect my professional view or the view of my employer. I’ve learned a tough lesson and will apply better judgment in future.”

Any views?

What’s most interesting about today’s launch of GOV.UK isn’t the savings, nor the focus on user needs, nor even the remarkable (for Government) technology stack it’s all built on.

What’s really interesting is the team that built it.

When Alan Mather or Dan Harrison describe the eDelivery Team c.2004, you get a sense of the purpose and energy that great teams can have. I’ve been part of or around some truly great teams in my career so far – teams that felt like families at times, where going to work was fun because it was challenging, where people often worked long hours but didn’t notice them, or hung out together with their awesome colleagues afterwards just because they could. It felt fabulous to be on the inside of those teams, and rather lonely to be on the outside.

Like Alan, I don’t know what life at GDS is like, but I’ll bet some GDSers would recognise that description of their team right now. Some civil servants elsewhere, and some in big systems integrator firms, might too.

There have been great developers in government before, but never with the multi-skilled teams around them to help them really deliver on their promise, and keep learning. There have been awesome project managers, but not backed with the same capacity to say no to powerful stakeholders. There have been many, many excellent content people before, but not ones given usable tools and an overriding don’t-mess-with-the-Principles Red Pen of Influence. There’s been the odd designer even, but they never went on field trips.

What’s remarkable about GDS is the culture and people magnetism that Mike Bracken, Tom Loosemore, Richard Pope, James Stewart, Ben Terrett and others have managed to establish and nurture. People who could work anywhere, want to work for central government now. Those people, in that culture, create user-focussed experiences, great technical architectures and almost certainly, a healthy bottom line. Mike’s always said that you can’t really innovate with hired help, for the same reason that large-scale outsourcing often fails: it usually destroys the sense of team that you need for big things to happen. Hence Tom Steinberg’s rather snappy tweet.

Inevitably – somewhat tragically – the history of great teams though is that they don’t last forever. A new boss comes in and shakes things up in the wrong way. A stupid process cuts across people doing smart work. Organisations merge. Lynchpins get promoted and take on slightly too much. One or two key people drift off to see the world, have babies, deal with illness, or try new things elsewhere. Other forms of ‘teamicide’ emerge (for more on that, read Peopleware [PDF]). I’m not being downbeat: It’s a fact of corporate life – and a reason to celebrate and enjoy those teams while they’re there.

So, carpe diem, GOV.UK.

Keep doing us proud.

Photo credit: Government Digital Service

Think back to you last digital engagement project outside Facebook. What did you ask people for?

Chances are, you asked for a ‘comment’. Maybe a ‘reply’. ‘Feedback’, perhaps. A handful of you might have requested a ‘submission’.

That’s not necessarily wrong – all of those are valid forms of input and depending on the goals for the project and the audience you’re talking to, may be entirely appropriate. But it’s worth being aware that they’re the language of the office – a world of track changes, loops and signoff – which may or may not suit the audiences and contexts you’re working in.

For instance, say you want to hear from shoppers about how they’d like their rights to be protected. Or from staff on the front line about how a new procedure is or isn’t enabling them to work more efficiently. Or a rail commuter about how services should be reconfigured.

For a while now, I’ve been banging on about the value of taking a layered approach to digital engagement generally, and consultation specifically – in other words, asking different people to tell you different things. While some people will happily comment on proposals, they’re probably a minority in most cases (there are lots of things I don’t feel qualified to ‘comment’ on but still care about; or where I don’t have the time or ideas to write a paragraph or two in response). And putting it gently, people willing to ‘leave a comment’ are not always the people you’d ideally most like to hear from.

Instead of a ‘comment’, how about asking for:

• experiences: what stories do you have to tell about how you’ve been treated?
• advice: what advice would you give us on how we could improve things? How would you advise a colleague to do X?
• examples: tell us about a time when X happened to you. What did you feel, and do?
• heroes & villains: in your experience, which organisations are brilliant at X? And which ones are awful? Why?
• help: what practical help could you offer to enable <positive outcome> to happen? (e.g. help at an event, pass on a message to your contacts, give us an interview/case study, keep a diary of your experiences of X…)
• priorities: what’s the most important thing about X? Which of A, B, C matters most to you?
• frustrations: what one thing would you change about how X works? What do you reckon could be fixed easily, and what’s harder to change?

I said ‘outside of Facebook’ in the first sentence of this post, because smart Facebook pages are already a step ahead in some ways – for a start, posts can be commented on or Liked, depending on how much a reader wants to get involved. But perhaps because posts are usually shorter and more conversational, it’s often easier and more natural to ask the kind of questions above rather than falling back on the tyranny of the comment box.

What do you reckon? Angels-on-pinheads stuff, or is there something in it?

For the last month or so, DCMS have been running a little site we helped build for them on our Read+Comment platform, to open up discussion around a series of seminars they’re running to inform the Department’s ongoing Communications Review. The Review is looking at strategic issues around use of spectrum, content and consumer value from the regulation of communication in the UK.

The site is typical of the kind of WordPress work we’re doing at the moment – flexible, low-cost, fast-turnaround, and designed to work nicely on mobile and in search.

But a few weeks on from launch, what Lizzie and colleagues at DCMS have done with it is a great example of smart digital communications on a budget. The fact is that in 2012 you don’t need to build a digital platform that can do everything; you just need a platform that doesn’t fence you in.

So the DCMS team have been:

• embedding discussion documents and agendas using Scribd (who kindly removed advertisements from the account when we explained how it was being used)
• uploading the presentations from the events to Slideshare, and embedding them
• recording audio and video from the seminars, and making these easy to consume online via SoundCloud and YouTube
• promoting discussion on the #commsreview hashtag (but sensibly, not embedding an unmoderated stream, just in case)
• providing useful context, like lists of who attended, related news stories and so on
• using (and attributing) Creative Commons images from Flickr to add a bit of visual colour
• analysing traffic using Google Analytics (of course)

Virtually all of those services are free to use, and those that aren’t are priced at consumer-level prices, rather than the levels government is more used to paying. And though I’ve helped make a tweak here and there, Lizzie has been running the platform as she wants, thanks to the flexibility of WordPress (especially widgets, menus and WordPress’ support for embedded content), but more importantly, her own vision and skills. It’s the same story from friends and clients at the Department of Health, University Alliance, LGIU and Foreign Office, amongst many others.

Three cheers for shoestrings, and all who thrive on them.