WRITTEN ON February 18th, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Power of Information, Save Time and Money, Transformational Government, What do we want?, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

There’s a flattering reference to IdealGov in this week’s Economist, with a bit of a sting in the tail. But it makes me look like an unconstructive critic, so to be true to the spirit of Wibbi I have to add something. The Economist says (in a piece about e-government/i-government called Look it up on the web)

But directgov has its critics too. William Heath, who runs a witty blog on government reform, idealgovernment.com, describes the website as a “random generator of self-referential public-service information”. That may be a bit unfair. Directgov’s managers agree that the site’s search engine needs improving, but argue that its main role is to package information into useful clusters: “coherent citizen-focused topics”, in e-government-speak.

This begs the question: how could DirectGov be better? Is our criticism unfair, as The Economist suggests? It’s intended to be friendly and constructive, and perhaps I have to do a bit more work to make it that.

What’s the background? This isn’t an official history, but how I see it from off the top of my head. DirectGov replaced UKOnline which replaced open.gov.uk. Each brand change betrays a more prescriptive role. In the beginning was an intention to use the web to help gov be more open. That brings with it transparency, ease of access, trustworthiness. I believe open.gov was conceived by the technically able Mark Gladwyn, a thoughtful and clear-headed telecoms expert keen to open up the possibilities of the web for government.

It would have been great if government had stuck to the task of putting its own house in order, but the dotcom boom drew the politicians and spin doctors into this web agenda. On 11 September 2000 ukonline.gov.uk was launched by a government that by now saw itself as the champion in getting us all online. It squatted on an existing UKOnline brand (remember that footer on our official UK web site which said

The Government-backed service UK online should not be confused with the Internet Service Provider UK Online.

The whole UKOnline stage struck me at the time as an unnecessary and unwelcome piece of rebranding. I still don’t know how much the taxpayer had to pay UKOnline to make them go away. Apparently the PM wanted it to be UKOnline, and that’s what happened. The new UK government webmaster general was not a computer scientist but a spin doctor called Lucian Hudson. He wanted the site to be sticky. It became an editorialising, one-size-fits all mess.

I lost interest. I can’t be doing with the voice of government spin and PR. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of opening up government to reform, improvement, scrutiny and all the good things that create trust and accountability. I don’t want to be told how many veg to eat a day, how to handle savings or what a good job our elected representatives are doing.

DirectGov was launched April 2004 to hold content, as opposed to just pointing to it. In the spirit of Transformational Government it is citizen-directed, breaking people into groups and telling them what to do. It now has a vast amount of content, all on the direct.gov site, accessible by direct.gov search, A-Z directories and topic guides. The news headline from the Jan 2007 Transformational gov annual review was that 500-odd government web sites would be cancelled and subsumed into DirectGov. I’ve no idea whether there are sighs of relief, howls of outrage or just indifference from the users of those sites, or whether anyone has researched this.

We’ve made a lot of play through the years about how much better the MySoc volunteers’ twopenny-halfpenny DirectionlessGov site is for search – see eg this thread on the Alan Mather site). Hence my criticism quoted above. But it’s fair comment – I disagree with The Economist – and it holds important lessons. The Wikipedia entry covers it and Francis Irving’s challenge is that since people find things by search Direct.Gov should not exist.

This might sound like a counsel of despair – give up, go home, leave everything to Google. But I don’t think it is.

Government can use the web to do fantastic things. It could become open, transparent and – as we asked from week two of IdealGov – navigable. It could open up data sets to people and business and create new value and efficiency. This is explored in the “Power of Information” Review (pdf). The challenge the authors Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo identified, which the government accepted, was

to maximise the benefits for citizens from this new pattern of information creation and use. When enough people can collect, re-use and distribute public sector information, people organise around it in new ways, creating new enterprises and new communities. In each case, these are designed to offer new ways of solving old problems.

Its recomendations are that government welcome and engage with the user-generated web sites which have common social and economic objectives (NetMums, TheStudentRoom, Moneysavingexpert); supplies innovators with government-held information when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens; prepares citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information and helps excluded groups take advantage.

This is a really exciting agenda. The DirectGov team is in the right place to do this, and has the right resources. It would be highly illogical to ask anyone else to do it. DirectGov has the right links to other government departments and the resources. It could be the government’s BBC Backstage. It could present the friendly face of government to MySociety, NetMums and the rest of innovative, online NGO-world. It could even be the government’s SourceForge. These activities aren’t expensive, intrusive, editorialising. They attract really smart technical people (who, oddly, sometimes aren’t as expensive as people who think they’re smart and think they understand technology).

The “Power of Information” agenda goes with the grain of what technology wants (as Kevin Kelly puts it) and of what people want (which is after all Ed Mayo’s specialist subject). It’s open.gov with a technically-informed agenda. It could be profoundly transformational. Let’s do it!