Month: June 2008

Civil Servants and the Social Web

There has been quite a discussion in recent times about the guidance for civil servants on how they should interract with the social web: see Emma and Nick for some of what has been said.

Well, now, as Jeremy announces, we have the guidance. We knew this was coming, because eGovernment minister Tom Watson told us it was imminent on Twitter.

The guidance itself is up on the Civil Service website, while over on the Power of Information taskforce’s blog, comments are being sought. The guidance is nice and short, being made up of 5 bullet points, followed by a bit of text about how the Civil Service Code affects how civil servants operate on the web. The five key points are:

  1. Be credible
  2. Be consistent
  3. Be responsive
  4. Be integrated
  5. Be a civil servant

There is still room for some slightly more detailed guidance, which I understand will soon be on its way. For example there is a difference between a civil servant commenting on a post on (say) this blog; commenting in a post on their own departmental blog; or writing on a personal blog of their own. This stuff needs exploring, and hopefully it will be done so in a social, collaborative way.

My hope is that even this short guidance will find its way to a wiki, where is can be grown and expanded as people see is appropriate. A more important thing to do is to try and make what is a pretty limited document in terms of scope (ie, it’s just for civil servants) applicable to the much wider audience of all public sector workers in the UK – including local government, for example.

Here’s some of the feedback so far from others, firstly from Steve Dale:

The initiative is to be applauded, and I particularly like the succinctness of the guidelines, which is most un-civil service-like, but in keeping with the overall concept of agility and flexibility that one associates with the brave new world of Web 2.0.

Emma:

I think they are brilliant in their simplicity – not entirely sure why they have taken so long to be published, but am not mud-slinging. Now I want to see civil service engagement all over the place!

Justin:

I’m not sure this will lead to an explosion of government bloggers but it does provide some sense of security for those already blogging. It will be interesting to see where this leads – the public sector digital community seems to be responding positively: some can already see potential in the announcement, whilst for others there is a general sense of relief.

Simon:

This is a big step indeed. And it shows the benefit of having a blog-literate Minister for e-Government. I’m just glad I registered govblogs.co.uk earlier in the week… for purposes which will soon become apparent.

Jeremy:

A recent sense check around Whitehall, with support from the egovernment minister has resulted in a much slimmed down set of principles for participation. They’re not perfect, they’re not comprehensive – but its a jolly good start and much welcome.

links for 2008-06-17

Personal Democracy Forum

Interesting article on TechCrunch about the Personal Democracy Forum taking place in New York next week:

It’s also time for more industry leaders to push politicians to take a more forward-thinking approach to how government distributes public information. We hear a lot these days about how the internet is affecting the election, which PdF will cover from every conceivable angle, but in some ways it’s far more important to look at how we can start rethinking how government works, and how it can more effectively connect with American citizens to help solve problems. PdF is expanding to two days this year to devote a whole day to this issue, and my guess is that come 2009, we’re going to have an administration (either Obama or McCain) that is more open to trying to use the tools of the social web-blogs, wikis, crowd sourcing, etc-to open up governance.

More evidence of the increasing overlap between the tech communities and the eGovernment/eDemocracy crowds – something that has recently been discussed on the UKGovWeb list as we plan another Barcamp-style event.

WordPressers – make your URLs readable!

I’ve noticed that quite a few folk who have installed their own version of WordPress (as opposed to those that use WordPress.com) haven’t got round to making the URLs (the bit that appears in the address bar of a browser) of their posts ‘human readable’.

In other words, they look like http://www.myblog.com/?p=1027 rather than http://www.myblog.com/postsubject.

Why would you want to make your links appear in this way?

  1. It helps in search engine optimisation – if the link says something about the content, Google etc like it
  2. It makes it easier for people to know what they are getting before they follow a link to your site
  3. It probably helps accesibility-wise
  4. IT JUST LOOKS NICER!

That’s enough reasons. Anyway, if you are a WordPress user, changing the way your post URLs – or ‘permalinks’ as they are known – is pretty easy. All the options are in the control panel, just click Settings then Permalinks and choose an option from:

  • Default: http://davepress.net/?p=123
  • Day and name: http://davepress.net/2008/06/17/sample-post/
  • Month and name: http://davepress.net/2008/06/sample-post/
  • Numeric: http://davepress.net/archives/123

I use the second option, day and name. Once you have made your choice, just hit Save. That should be it.

The only complication because of the way a file is setup on your server, called .htaccess. For WordPress to make the changes to your post URLs, it needs access to write to this file. If it, can’t, it will provide you with the code you need to paste into your .htaccess file to get it all to work. Don’t worry, this is pretty simple and you should be able to do it within your web host’s control panel.

Another thing not to worry about are all those links out there on the web linking to your old, number based, post URLs – these will still work!

Load more posts!