Recently, Glen Barnes and Nat Torkington launched the Open Data Catalogue and it is encouraging to see how much government data has been submitted in such a short space of time. There are currently more than fourty data sets on the site, from central and local government agencies. These sets range from economic data provided by the Treasury, geospatial data, various sets of energy data and a collection of directories and registers.

The point to bear in mind as you scroll down this list, though, is that these sets represent a fraction of the data the Crown holds. This catalogue could easily extend to hundreds of pages…

So, while we celebrate the initiative of the Ministry for the Environment releasing data under a Creative Commons license, for example, it might be worth pausing and considering how we can accelerate this process.

That conversation is already taking place on the Open Government Ninjas List, where one of the threads has been about the barriers to opening up government data.

While I agree that most of these reasons have some currency, none resonate as much as the senior American official talking to John Geraci of O’Reilly:

There were some interesting apps in there, but overall they didn’t meet with the mayor’s agenda for the city.
Open Gov Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

This (completely guileless?) admission underscores for me what is the critical issue in opening up government data: culture change.

It’s not about the technology. It’s not about data quality. Or privacy. Or commercial sensitivity, or any of that stuff. That should all be dealt to as part of the everyday functioning of any administration. It is about accepting that we, the government, collect and manage this information on behalf of citizens and that it is our fundamental responsibility to make it available to them in a way that supports the creation of public and economic value.

This isn’t an add-on, or a ‘nice to do.’ It’s an integral part of our operating environment now.

There is an Open Data BarCamp planned for later this year. Come along and be part of the change.

Photo: Justin Marty

Coming hot on the heels of the BBC introducing social bookmarking, I was quite keen to see what social media or Web 2.0 features the new service offered subscribers. Suffice it to say that the initial experience has proved to be underwhelming and frustrating in judiciously equal parts.

So, what is the new digital version all about? It is touted thus:

[...] every page, every section and every advertisement is presented. It provides you with a view of a newspaper page just like the print version, with the same layout and realistic page turning technology.
Dominion Post (my emphasis).

Aside from the fact that it looks just like the paper tossed haphazardly into your shrubbery every morning, what exactly is the point of this exciting new innovation?

Whatever it is, it is definitely not performance. It is slow to load, at around 40-60 seconds per page on dial-up (actually, 44 kbps when tested), and with Internet speeds what they are in this country, that is a non-trivial consideration. And as it is essentially just a series of images, it is completely useless to anyone using assistive technologies.

Even though there is a mobile version, I can’t see why you would want to download a series of large (and expensive) images to your phone – that sort of functionality is the whole point of HTML.

In any event, it is a moot point. Despite filling out a long and complex registration form (for a purportedly free trial) and using Opera Mini (v2.0.4) on a late model Nokia, I was unable to get past the sign-on stage. Frustratingly, I was just cycled back to the same ‘New user’ screen after each apparently successful attempt at completing the form. Now that was helpful.

Someone there obviously has read about Web 2.0, though. They have finally added RSS feeds to this edition of the paper. Bewilderingly, the HTML version of the paper still lacks this feature. Well, perhaps it is not so difficult to understand. There are two feed options on offer: the front page and the full paper.

This is less a reason to rejoice than you would expect. The front page feed yields a respectable 8-10 items. The only other option, the full feed, has over the last week delivered between 140-200 items per day into the aggregator. Saturday’s (at right) is 149. And the feed is, obviously, only refreshed once per 24 hour period. So at the beginning of the day you get 180-odd items dumped into your reader – it’s not so much a river of news as an overwhelming flood…

Why would you pour money into building something that is redundant on so many levels? It doesn’t work as a web site, because it excludes so many people. It doesn’t work as a news channel because you can’t access it (easily, or at all) via your feed reader or mobile phone.

What is it for? Well, if I was a shareholder I would be asking exactly that question. It looks like it is a rather lame attempt to push offline advertising onto online consumers.

It also looks like a ringing confirmation of the suspicion I expressed last year, that Fairfax executives have absolutely no clue about state-of-the-art online newspapers now, or where online news is headed in the short to medium term.

[Media release for the Standards, again microformatted]

Fortunately – unless you have a burning desire – you don’t have to read the whole document. You can just use the audience page to read the sections that are relevant to your role type.

I would, however, recommend that you do read as much of the material as possible. The Internet is increasingly important as a delivery tool for content both in terms of government strategic direction and communications/public affairs practice. Understanding how the web works (and why standards are so important) is no different to understanding the printing process, or the media cycle. It is just part of our job.

If the whole web standards thing just leaves you cold, ask yourself this question: would it be considered acceptable to build a government office that had no wheelchair access? Or that was constructed from materials that were known to be of inferior quality? Or only allowed access to the wealthiest and those with the newest technologies?

Websites are no different. Taxpayers are paying for us to build them, so every New Zealander who wants to access the information or services on those sites should be able to do so. Irrespective of their physical location (and available bandwidth) and the technology they are using (assistive or otherwise).

This fundamental right to access is non-negotiable.

A very interesting fact that is obvious when you read it, but very interesting at the same time, is that there are up to 4 times more mobile devices in use around the world that have web access, than there are computer and laptops with web access.
Read/Write Web: the Future of Web Apps, Day2

Of course, that is not the same as saying that there are 4 times as many people accessing the web using mobile devices, but it does give you a feel for the incredible potential that is either latent, or in some cases ignored, in this channel.

Ignored? How many of you have tried to access your agency sites via a mobile device, like your phone? Does it render:

1. properly
2. poorly
3. not at all
4. don’t know…

To satisfy my curiosity, I did a quick survey of government sites (7 public service corporate sites, 3 Crown entities and 1 from the non-public service departments), to see how they fared. I was running Opera mini on a Nokia 6255.

The results? Much like the RSS survey I did, pretty discouraging. Despite the fact that there are 3.9 million mobile phones in New Zealand (apparently 74% of us own one), based on this small random sample, government websites are not built to serve content to these devices.

What did I find?

• only 2 sites had skip links
• 7 sites loaded (irrelevant) images
• 0 sites serve a handheld stylesheet
• only 5 of the 11 homepages validate

Of course, well structured HTML and CSS should render in any user agent, be it browser, text reader or phone, so a handheld stylesheet is really only an indication of an agency approaching this space strategically. The fact that 6 of the homepages don’t validate (albeit some fail for fairly trivial reasons, like dropped alt tags) speaks for itself.

While this is not a comprehensive look (if you have tried to download any of these sites to a phone, you will know why I stopped at 11), it raises the question of how we are positioning the government webspace for mobile users. Is it because it is (prohibitively) expensive to surf the web on phones here? Or are we missing just an opportunity to really utilise this channel?

Well, the obvious point to make is that they both look remarkably similar. Both have gone for CSS based layouts (which, in terms of a web standards based approach, is commendable) that use the same background and three column spread. It is not surprising that the Stuff site looks like its Australian stablemates, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, but the NZ Herald’s similarity is odd. I put it down not to industrial espionage – which would make a terrific story, but to a (more prosaic) failure of imagination…

Technical detail

Both sites homepages are on the hefty side, Stuff weighing in at 219KB and NZH a bloated 381KB. The Herald page load, at least this morning, is a shocker. You could finish your breakfast and the hard copy of the paper before this thing loaded…

Neither homepage validates, but the Stuff website fails really badly. Why would you build a site using CSS and then still include <font> tags? It is just shoddy web development. Period. Both sites are missing some <alt> tags but, given newspaper sites reliance on posting images, it comes as no shock.

Overall

The improvements to the Stuff website are both the most welcome –only because the old site was such a disgrace– and the most disappointing. Sure, not everyone cares about the quality of the markup (except those people using assistive technologies), but you would think the developers would have taken a little more professional pride in their work. What they really screwed up, however, was missing the opportunity to implement RSS feeds for the site. The Herald site offers an array of feeds and, for that reason alone is – from a user perspective, a far superior site.

Fairfax don’t offer RSS feeds on their Australian sites, so I guess it is part of their business strategy to force their readers to the site to ingest the advertising there. Smart move. Why would you want to cater for your audience when it is the advertisers that are clearly your cherished relationship? Fairfax execs have obviously yet to be won over by the whole Web 2.0 thing.

So, what do you think about the new sites?