Well, Public Sector Forums (PSF) are having a meeting following their real-world accessibility workshop next week to look at how exactly to kick-off their Public Sector Web Managers Group.

As I won’t be there, but I’d still like to be involved to whatever degree I can, because not only do I work in the public sector, but I firmly believe that the public sector can and should provide an excellent value and high-quality service, and I think this sort of initiative will help in that aim.

With that in mind then, I’m going to propose some ideas for how the PSWG should evolve. I’m not saying that this is how it must be: I’m offering these up as a starting point for discussion.

I’ve even trawled through the various areas where this has been covered before (several discussion threads, several blog posts and about half a dozen ‘features’ on PSF). Phew. I need a sit down…

Anyway, the main questions are who, what, when, how and why. If you don’t know the answers to these, there’s not much point in starting.

Who?

I think the ‘Public Sector Forum Web Managers Group’ is a little bit too much of a mouthful: it also implies that Public Sector Forums own the group, which I don’t believe should be the case. I think they should be involved — it would be foolish not to take advantage of their expertise — but I think they should only be one of the stakeholders, the other stakeholders being the people who have signed up to it.

I’d therefore suggest the PSWG. Public Sector Web Group. It’s simple.

I’ve deliberately not included the word ‘managers’. That is because I, and many other people who would like to be involved in this, aren’t web managers. We’re not decision makers in that regard. I don’t think that means we should be excluded from the group. If we’re willing to put our time in and to contribute to the group, we should get a say in how it works. The reason for this is simple: what incentive do people like I have to take part if we don’t get a say in it?

But equally we do need the managers to be signed up to this: we need a good mix of people to get an overall view: to balance the needs of the business and time constraints against the techie desire to produce the perfect website at any cost. We need visionaries; we need nuts-and-bolts technicians, and we need practical people.

I suggested earlier that the group needed a constitution, and a decision making body. I still think that, but I don’t necessarily think we need one right away. Until the group is making pronouncements on behalf of it’s members, making representations to other agencies or setting out standards, I don’t think we need any formal decision making process.

But we ought to start thinking about it, because we’ll need one at some point.

There also needs to be some consideration as to how ‘membership’ works. Do organisations sign up? Is it just individuals who sign up? Can individuals and organisations sign up?

What?

What should the PSWG actually do? It might sound facile, but that’s probably the most important question of the whole lot, as everything else depends very much on this.

Let’s start with the aims initially proposed by PSF:

• To exchange knowledge and good practice and assist others in the problem solving process.
• Through collective effort and consensus create more useful assessment and benchmarking criteria than appear to exist currently, against which members’ websites can be measured in order to provide genuine tools for improvement.
• Where appropriate make collective representation to and liaise with outside bodies and organisations both within the public sector but also the Internet / web industries reflecting the interests and concerns of members.
• Tap into, make use of and understand industry (rather just public sector) expertise and good practice and as a group to keep fully appraised of these.
• Share experience and thoughts on suppliers and their products.
• Meet regularly to explore specific issues and network with other members via conferences and other events at which developing good practice can be showcased.
• Via these and other means begin, over time and again by consensus, to define what might be meant by ‘the perfect public sector website’ and moving twoards the creation of such sites.

Public Sector Forums

I’m happy about the majority of that. I’m sceptical about ‘the perfect public sector website’ because what is perfect for one purpose may not be as good for another, but in general, I’d be happy to start off with those aims.

I’d like to add one more, though. While I’m a fan of jolly old PSF, they know I’ll disagree with them from time to time. One of the things I have disagreed with them about in the past was what appeared to be a confrontational-cum-sensationalist attack on the SOCITM Better Connected Report. Yes, there were problems with it, but it wasn’t all bad, and I think if the PSWG is to succeed, it need to acknowledge successes as well as failures and work with people and organisations, even if that’s at the expense of a good headline!

I’d like therefore to have a clear differential between PSF and the PSWG, even if many of the same people are involved. PSF can continue to do the investigative journalism thing, shining a shiny light over things unsavoury; PSWG should be less publicly critical of other organisations and instead seek to work with other groups and organisations in order to improve things.

I wouldn’t want PSF to change: they do a good job the way they are. Equally, I’d not want the PSWG to be seen as an arm of PSF — I think it’s important to have some clear demarcation, even if there is PSF involvement with PSWG.

That, more or less, is what I’d propose for our ‘mission statement’. Now how should we go about achieving it?

How?

Let’s look at the aims individually:

To exchange knowledge and good practise and assist others in the problem solving process

What has been suggested here is some sort of round-robin email list: someone has a problem, they email it around everyone else on the list. The great thing about that idea is its simplicity; however it does have two potential problems — won’t it mean you get a lot of junk mailings that are of no benefit to you, and what happens once it’s been sent — isn’t there a risk that the information will be forgotten about?

Which is why I’d suggest a variation on Mark Roberts’ idea of a dedicated area on the PSF forum and instead suggest dedicated areas on a forum. The idea being that people can post a topic or a question in a particular sub-part of the forum (accessibility, internet security, information architecture, whatever).

Then — and this is hopefully the clever bit — people who have signed up to that particular area get a notification of the posts; they can try and answer them. That way you don’t get emails about areas you don’t have a particular interest in, and the information is held on the searchable forum permanently.

What you could then do once per week is to offer a newsletter which summarises the main activity on the forums that week, to nudge people into reading up on anything that was particularly interesting.

Okay, it might mean a dedicated forum needs to be set up for this purpose, if the existing PSF noticeboard can’t handle this, but I think it’s worth the effort to make sure it’s done right.

Creation of Assessment and Benchmarking Criteria

In order to do this, I think we need to put together a dedicated team of volunteers who are willing to sit around and try and come up with useful and practical ways in which we can compare sites against one another.

Obviously my thoughts are going to wander back to accessibility/usability as that’s my specialist area, so I apologise for this, but we need to consider things like how do we carry out testing? What sort of tests can be automated? Which need to be carried out manually?

We also need to be clear and open about our testing methodology: what are we testing, how are we testing it, when did we carry out those particular tests and so on.

We also need to be clear about the way in which we use language. One of the things the SOCITM Better Connected report was criticised for was for implying sites which didn’t tick every box were inaccessible when that wasn’t necessarily the case.

If we’re going to score sites, we need some kind of scoring metric that not only looks at what the sites have done badly on, we need to be able to give bonus points for things that they’ve done well, so that a great site with one mistake doesn’t score worse than a bog-standard site with no mistakes.

Producing these metrics won’t be easy. We’ll need people who know what they’re doing, who’ve carried out testing themselves, and who understand when it’s right to ignore a particular guideline.

Once we’ve got some draft metrics together, I would suggest that they then should be circulated to a wider group for comments and feedback, but I think the nature of this work requires a relatively small group of people to work on it, at least initially: but it then needs to be accepted and signed up to by the wider group.

I’d also like to see (in light of a seeming thaw in relations between SOCITM and PSF) whether we could introduce some way in which we could suggest new metrics or changes to existing metrics for their Better Connected report. If we can think of something that could improve it, it would seem rather churlish to keep it to ourselves…

Making Collective Representation

I think this one, while a worthy goal, needs to go on the back burner initially. I don’t think we should really be having people making public pronouncements on behalf of the PSWG at least until there is a more formal constitution and some form of written policy that covers decision making and representation.

I do think we should get to this part eventually, but I don’t think it’s something we should be worrying about during the initial stages.

Making Use of Good Practice

Well, if we’ve got the forum, we can share best practice there, no?

Share Experience and Thoughts on suppliers and their products

I’m a little wary of this one. If the group is going to be public, then it’s going to be quite difficult for any individuals to provide negative feedback about a particular company or installation. After all, I wouldn’t (generally) want people to know I was being critical of them.

Also, I wouldn’t want the PSWG to be subject to the same ‘rate my teacher’ stuff where people with a particular axe to grind use the service to launch an attack on a company or individual that may not deserve it.

I think if the PSWG is to share experience of suppliers and products, it should be clear that any such advice provided is provided by that particular individual, and that those comments should not be understood to representative of the PSWG etc.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t go down the route of sharing this sort of information, merely that we need to think carefully about how it should be done…

Meet Regularly…

See ‘when’.

Moving Towards the Perfect Website

I’m not sure we can supply a blueprint for a perfect website, but it might be nice to provide examples of best practice, and possibly even showcase where these can be found, so that other people can learn from them.

When?

Not only when (if?) physical meetings take place, but how often they do, who is involved with them, are agendas and minutes published and so on? Does everyone attend? Does only an executive body attend and make decisions?

I’d say it all depends on how we want to run the group. If, like I suggest, we take a ‘suck it and see’ approach, and keep it relatively informal to begin with, then I don’t think we need formal meetings, or a formal decision making policy — simply a dedicated area on the forum where people can discuss and make suggestions as to the actual structure of the group.

Similarly, while we’re acting relatively informally, why can’t decisions be made by some form of online poll? Obviously that wouldn’t be suitable for something more formal, but it would probably do to begin with…

Similarly, I’d suggest that any sub-groups (e.g. people working on benchmarking criteria) should be allowed to sort out something that suits themselves (again, at least while we’re being more informal…)

I would suggest however that however it’s done, a record should be kept at the very least of any decisions reached, and the votes involved (although not who voted for what) and that this information should be available to all members.

Why?

Why should we do it?

If you’re signing up to say ‘yes, I think this is a good idea and I’ll listen’, that’s one thing: you’re gaining benefit from the experience of others; assuming the group progresses to become a more formal organisation, you’d also gain from the benefit of standing together with other organisations to create a louder voice.

If you’re volunteering to undertake work on behalf of the group however, you might want some other reason. It might be that you enjoy doing this sort of thing, or it might be that you want to help build a new way to measure public sector sites. For those individuals who give of their time, what do they gain from it?

That’s not to say that these people should be materially rewarded (although you might get more volunteers!) but that we need to remember to recognise and appreciate the work that these people put in, otherwise they’ll quickly get fed up, drop out, and unless some other people are willing to invest their time and effort, the group will just fizzle out.

Similarly, unless people see some progress, some practical benefit, then people will be less willing to invest time and effort.