Too much of what I’ve been responsible for doing over the last few years, and some of what I see others doing elsewhere, falls into the “pat-on-the-head” category. You know the kind of thing. That Twitter Q and A, that piece to camera for YouTube, that Pinterest board.

It describes the things that I’ve done just because it’s possible to do them. Or because I felt that I needed to add something to an empty space in a media handing plan. Or because I was asked to add “add something whizzy” to a policy engagement plan. It describes the stuff I’ve done on issues that were of no importance at all, because it didn’t matter if I failed, or because I was so keen to demonstrate that digital engagement mattered.

Pat-on-the-head engagement has sometimes been necessary of course. My career would have turned out very differently if I hadn’t sometimes embraced any given opportunity to use the tools of digital engagement. Very few of my early efforts were exemplars for open policymaking. For every commentable bill, there’s been a Second Life conference.

But we’ve come a long way since 2007 (when I did my Second Life thing). I think there are more than enough examples of serious digital engagement delivering real, tangible results in government. Digital engagement has matured. It’s no longer a quirky add-on to traditional methods. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

I don’t think we need to prove that digital engagement is worth doing any more.  I see great examples all around me, and you can read about the ways in which we’ve used digital engagement in DH recently in our blogs or the case studies in our digital strategy.

So I’m determined that the DH digital team won’t be responsible for any pat-on-the-head digital engagement any more. We’ll continue our drive to use digital engagement techniques to help solve the most important and difficult issues that the department faces, like the transition to the new health and care system or the challenge of tackling the problems associated with long term conditions like dementia. We’ll increase our focus on  insight and evidence so that we can choose the most effective methods for a given task and understand the impact. And we’ll have the confidence to say no when we’re asked to do a bit of stick-on digital engagement that we know won’t achieve anything.

That’s our pledge. So if you see me or Susy, or Liz, or Anna, or Claire, or Sam or anyone else connected with the DH digital team peddling a bit of pat-on-the-head digital engagement, feel free to call us out on it.

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Sketch of the DH content plan

It’s been quite a process to get here. I’ve been writing blogs about how it feels to be on the fringes of the GOV.UK project  for the last 2 years, and in DH we’ve been working towards a smaller, clearer and better digital presence for longer that that.

For that reason, I suspect that we’ve found the transition a bit easier, and been a bit more relaxed about it, than our peers in other departments. We’ve certainly benefited from having other departments move first, solving all the problems before we arrived.

Alice, Rob, Charlotte, Francis, Dean and Stephen in DH and Will in GDS  in particular, and lots of others have done a brilliant job getting us to this point. They may or may not agree with me about how relaxing it’s been.

One of the useful things that the drive towards GOV.UK has forced us all to do is really think about why we produce, publish and retain all of this digital content. The result of all the migration projects across government will be a slimline collection of government content on GOV.UK, and a much fatter collection of content in the National Archives. It turns out that we didn’t need all of that content in the first place.

Last week I published a note on our Digital health site about how and why we publish digital content:

• Digital content: why and how we publish it

We’ll refine this, and we’ll have more to say about it as we go, but it describes the 3 main reasons that we publish digital content in DH (to explain policy, for policy engagement, and for transparency). And it describes the formats and channels we will use to do each of these things.

Over time, GOV.UK will provide all of the formats we need to explain policy and publish for the purpose of transparency. DH content on Inside Government will be closely managed and controlled, with most of the content published by specialist editors in the digital team.

Inside government won’t ever provide all of the methods we use for policy engagement however. To do that we will need to produce and publish digital content for other platforms, partners and social media.

The content we need for policy engagement will be produced and published by a much wider set of authors. Our emphasis will be on providing content from named individuals, because our audiences are more likely to engage in conversations with real people.

We’ll also be retaining a handful of spaces we use to present engagement around our policy priorities, such as the Dementia challenge. These sites won’t compete with Inside government for explaining policy, but they will provide us with a place to present active conversations from multiple sources around a theme, and occasionally to host some of those conversations ourselves.

And we plan to make full use of the GOV.UK blogging platform when in arrives at the end of April.

Other departments have faced the challenge of reviewing their mainstream content at the same time as their corporate content. But health and care information and services for citizens will be provided by NHS Choices and it’s successor, so we haven’t addressed that here. We don’t have any mainstream content on GOV.UK.

Moving our content to GOV.UK has provided a very welcome spur to reevaluate why we do what we do with content. I’m not sure the teams of people editing content across government realise quite what a radical solution they are working towards. And we might not see quite how radical it is until all the policies of every government department and organisation are presented together next year.

It has sometimes felt uncomfortable ceding control of our content and our content formats to a much bigger machine. I’ve made many promises based on the promises of others, and that’s not always an easy position to be in. As I write this, we’re about to press publish on a crucial piece of content, using a format that hasn’t been used before, with a preview function that doesn’t work yet.  But I’ve retained my faith in the method and the people, even when it takes us down to the wire. Ctrl F5 in the morning.

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I’ve got out of the rhythm of posting things here. But it’s not because I lack prompts. I just haven’t synced correctly.

I’ve got into the habit of making notes about things that I intend to post, often using Remember the Milk, but then failing to convert them anything beyond a title and a vague idea.  Every so often I’m nagged by reminders from my past self to get on with it.

Here’s my current list of unwritten blogs:

• a blog about what the Mori NHS Tracker tells us about the impact of our communications work
• a blog about the secret little thrill I got when I noticed that someone in my team had posted a tweet about a Vine video which was embedded in a Coveritlive blog embedded in a WordPress site
• a blog about the moment when my son’s optometrist dropped his (paper) medical notes all over the floor
• a blog about abandoning trying to do the job of a digital press office
• a blog about it being a brilliant time to be doing digital in government, with GDS helping to raise the minimum standard for everything
• a blog about the neat thing we did last year with publications.dh.gov.uk, the cross-posting sub-site that nobody sees
• a blog about our digital content strategy
• a blog about the success of our internal comms work around our digital strategy, and being invited to a lot more meetings as a result
• a blog about the difference between people recognising that digital matters, and having any idea about what to do differently as a result
• a blog likening the Government Digital Service to a sinister cult
• a blog about the Peter Principle and the amount of time I spend with my head in a spreadsheet
• a blog about the bronze, silver and gold levels of service offered by the digital team to the department
• a blog expanding on this line from our digital strategy: “indiscriminate reach is rarely an objective of the department’s communication work”
• a blog about apples (I actually can’t remember what this one was – something profound no doubt)

I might yet write some of these. In the meantime, you could do worse than read what other members of the DH digital team have to say.

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It’s been quite a task to produce it and get consensus on some of the things it commits us to doing, driven by the challenges set for us in the government digital strategy which was published last month.

The last digital strategy I worked on for the department was a straightforward affair by comparison. Back then, I talked to a few people, drafted something that seemed to make sense, shared it with a few more people, published it, and then got on with doing the things it described (most of the things it committed the department to doing were the responsibility of the digital team).

Putting this strategy together was a trickier task, and I think that’s a (positive) sign of the changed status of digital in government. This strategy has broad ambitions cutting across all areas of the department’s work. Most of the commitments we make are not actually for the digital team to deliver.

Lots of people in the department have been involved in the process. We’ve held workshops and meetings, written notes and submissions, we’ve blogged about the process, had protracted email conversations and late night negotiations. And that’s probably all as it should be. If we get it right, this strategy will affect everyone in the department –  they all have a stake in what it commits us to doing.

So what’s in it?

• It’s about digital and policymaking, because policymaking is what the department does, and there are massive opportunities to use digital techniques to improve the policymaking process.
• It’s about the ways the department works with and communicates with its external audiences.
• It’s about how we embed digital approaches in everything we do, giving staff the skills and tools they need to get things done.
• And although it’s a strategy for the department itself rather than the wider health and care system, it’s about the role of the department as a steward for a digital system, drawing on the information strategy for health and care that the department published earlier this year.

And of course it responds to the 14 actions in the government digital strategy.

Unlike some of the other strategies published today, our strategy does not focus on high volume transactions or services for the public. This is a strategy for the department itself and in the health system, these services are delivered by the NHS and the broader health and care sector rather than the department of state.

There are 21 case studies dotted around the strategy to help illustrate some of the ideas and the commitments we make. If this strategy succeeds, the kind of things we’ve described in our case studies this year won’t seem at all innovative next year. They will just be the routine behaviour of a digital department.

• Read the Department of Health digital strategy

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We’ve thought quite a lot about digital engagement at the Department of Health, and how we can use tools and techniques to invite people into the policymaking process. Our plans for how to do this better (and by default) will form a large part of the digital strategy that we publish in December.

Over the last year or so we’ve taken quite a few different approaches. Sometimes we’ve just wanted to explain policy effectively, sometimes we’ve wanted to invite people to join a public conversation, sometimes to help co-create policy. Our work has usually involved consulting the views of others in some way. Interestingly, our better examples of digital engagement tend not to have been around formal consultations.

I’ve described 5 different methods that we’ve used for policy engagement below. I’ll post some of them as case studies for the Open Policymaking discussion too.

Long term conditions strategy

We asked stakeholders and others to contribute to the development of the cross government long term conditions strategy by asking them to submit comments openly on a DH website over 8 weeks, and by partnering with the doc2doc forum to host conversations about the issues that the strategy might cover.

We received 446 comments on this post, which went directly to the team working on the strategy along with the comments in the forums and more organic communities

• Comments on the long term conditions strategy

Dementia challenge

We’ve been running a policy engagement campaign for the Dementia Challenge in partnership with the Alzheimer’s Society. The campaign has encouraged people to get involved with the champion groups who are reviewing how we tackle aspects of dementia care.

The campaign has mostly been delivered through social media and partners, with the department running only some of the engagement exercises itself on official channels, and curating the wider conversation centrally.

We have used DH channels to ask some consultation-style questions on behalf of the champion groups, including about how care for people with dementia and their carers could be improved and how we can create dementia friendly communities.

• Dementia Challenge engagement site

Care and support bill

We invited people to participate in the drafting of the Care and Support Bill.

We published the draft bill, inviting people to comment publicly clause by clause, providing people with an opportunity feed into the process of parliamentary scrutiny.

This is fairly niche engagement, but people have used the site to post 600 comments on the draft of the bill directly to the team working on the Bill.

• Open policymaking case study

Listening exercise

Last year, we worked with the NHS Future Forum to help gather and understand feedback on the changes to the health and care system, during the pause in the progress of the Health and Social Care Bill.

The digital bits of the listening exercise included formal consultation-style questions on DH channels. 2,500+ comments were posted on our official engagement channel to be analysed by the future forum team.

And the work included personal engagement from the Forum leaders via blogs, webchats, participation in live blogs and outreach to online communities.

• More on the listening exercise

Maps and apps

This was a crowd-sourcing exercise over 6 weeks to identify and showcase the best existing health apps and the best ideas for new apps.

We used Ideascale to gather ideas, user comments and votes, supported by blogs and other social media to extend the conversation. There were 495 entries, with tens of thousands of votes and other interactions.

• Maps and Apps on Ideascale

Our best examples tend to have a few things in common:

• They use multiple methods – sometimes asking questions, sometimes participating, sometimes on our own channels, sometimes elsewhere.
• They are delivered in partnership with others.
• They have a digital home, usually on an official site. But that’s not necessarily where all the engagement happens.
• They include personal engagement – ministers, officials and partners openly taking part in digital conversations.
• They require energy and expertise from the digital team, and the full commitment of policy teams.
• They prompt involvement from people who wouldn’t otherwise have felt they have an opportunity to contribute.
• There is a genuine need for engagement, and a desire to act on the results.

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It’s a bigger deal for other bits of government than it is for the Department of Health today. Information and services related to health and care continue to be provided via NHS.UK rather than GOV.UK, and our departmental website won’t move to GOV.UK until March next year.

As a government digital person though, it was still a thrill for me to try out some of those redirects this morning.

GOV.UK looks pretty smart. I suppose I’ll only really get a proper sense of the change when I need to use it for something real. But GOV.UK is as much a movement as it is a website. It’s the ideas and energy that make this exciting. It’s the promise of more to come, and the positive influence that the GOV.UK project will have on everything else.

• For more about what will happen to health information and services see: Digital first: the information strategy for health and care
• For more on our plans to move our departmental website to GOV.UK see: Out with the old and in with the new – how we’re preparing for GOV.UK
• For more about GOV.UK… you don’t really need my help with that – it’s everywhere.

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It’s a wordpress.com site, so I gave him some instructions that he could refer to when adding new content. They read like this:

1. Go to www.wordpress.com/wp-admin
2. Click on “Add post”
3. Type the title in the box that says “title”, and type what you want to say in the other box
4. Click on “Publish”
5. Have a cup of tea

Easy. But when I was visiting at the weekend, he still wanted me to sit next to him while he published the programme of meetings for the year. I sat next to him, and he did it all himself. I did nothing at all to help.

Yesterday I spent a long time looking at this Denki Puzzle at the Design Museum. It’s a working radio made up of circuit board pieces whose form indicates their function. So the LED looks a bit like a light, and the capacitor looks a bit like a battery.

I know nothing almost nothing about electronics, but I reckon I could build a radio using the components designed by Yuri Suzuki. I might want someone to sit next to me, but I probably wouldn’t need a training course.

In DH, since we switched our main content management tool for dh.gov.uk to WordPress, we’ve expanded the range of people who can publish DH content. We’ve been able to do this because it’s now dead easy for people to do it. WordPress removes complexity for the editor – form relates to function pretty well.

Now we have lots and lots of people publishing digital content. Our transparency pages, for example, have about 50 different editors, each with (controlled) publishing rights for certain content, including FOI notices, minutes of board meetings, and statistical releases. Our editors don’t need to understand much about digital to do their jobs, they just need to be able to follow the same set of instructions that I gave to my dad.

As a result the digital team spend much less time publishing than we once did, and less time training and supporting editors. So we are able to focus more of our effort on ambitious uses of digital for health and care, and our policy engagement work.

I’m expecting the publishing tools for the Inside Government bits of GOV.UK to be a bit like the Denki Puzzle. So that our editors won’t need a manual and a training course to do their jobs. From what I’ve seen, it’s looking good.

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It’s not new, or a new idea, but it has been getting a bit of extra love recently.

Alice, our head of channel strategy, has posted a few things there in the last couple of weeks, and Rob posted something the other day about our preparations for GOV.UK.

If you take a look today, you’ll see posts covering:

• Out with the old and in with the new – how we’re preparing for GOV.UK
• Infographics – what we’ve learnt so far
• A basic guide to filming, editing and sharing videos
• What a difference a year makes – reviewing the use of mobile devices

As it says on the homepage, the site is “for staff and our partners, and anyone else who’s interested”.

It’ll continue to contain a mixture of highfalutin stuff about the channel strategy for the health and care system, examples of our policy engagement work, and more prosaic guides to getting digital stuff done in a government department. We intend to share more, and from different voices.

If nothing else, the act of sharing guidance and writing up case studies is a useful exercise for our team. I hope you find it useful. If you do you can subscribe, or get email alerts on the site.

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I listen to essays, podcasts about sport and science, slick radio shows, and podcasts recorded on a kitchen table.

My habit started, I think, giggling to myself on the number 3 bus, listening to Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. And when they couldn’t publish them quickly enough for my needs I started subscribing to more and more. I would take slightly longer bus routes to make sure I had enough listening time.

I don’t listen on the bus any more (I have other things to do). Now, I find that different podcasts fit into different moments of my day. I listen to Great Lives in the 26 minutes it takes to walk between DH buildings. On the way I learn a little bit about Edith Wharton or Winston Churchill. I listen to This American Life when I’m digging my allotment, The Life Scientific when I’m cooking my dinner, and Dave Gorman in the bath. I listen to Test Match Special and eighteensixtyfive if I’m awake in the middle of the night. I’m working my way through the Radiolab back catalogue walking around West Norwood, and sitting on the tube.

I think podcasts might be the perfect medium. They are brilliantly convenient for the user. Subscribe and sync, and that’s it. The best of international radio just turns up on your phone, for free. There’s no restriction of time, location or cost. They’re dead easy to create too. So easy that you can record and publish a podcast from the same phone that you use to listen to them. Just a dictaphone, plus RSS.

There are a few people doing interesting things with audio in government. Couch to 5K might be an ideal match for the medium. DFID produce regular stuff, and the Wilton Park Dialogues seem to work well. BIS and others do nice things with AudioBoo.

In DH, the digital team are increasingly choosing audio to create rich content from events, as quicker and easier (and sometimes better) alternative to video voxpops.

And we encourage our bloggers to use tools like AudioBoo themselves. In health in particular, it seems to make sense for our medically trained thought-leaders – who are often used to dictating notes and letters – to record the odd clip for their bulletin or blog. Alistair Burns does this well, and his short interviews and clips add a richness to the content around our Dementia Challenge work.

But it feels like we’re not quite making the most of audio yet.

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Yesterday the Department of Health published the care and supprt white paper, and a draft care and support bill. It’s a big deal for the Department, and the country. And it presented an interesting challenge and opportunity for the digital team in DH.

The first challenge was how to explain the ideas in the white paper to a range of different  audiences online. We’ve used a dedicated engagement site to help do this, using graphics, videos and summaries for different audience groups to help explain complex ideas. Creating something like this takes a bit of doing, but it follows an approach we use elsewhere, so we know how to do it. The site sits at the centre of our policy engagement effort, and it provides the department with material to help market ideas elsewhere.

The draft bill provided an opportunity to do something we hadn’t done before. We’ve published it in a commentable format, enabling users to post public comments on each clause, as well as more general comments. The aim is to encourage the kind of micro-comment that will be useful in the drafting and scrutiny process. And to do it publicly so that the bill benefits from the kind of open collaboration that can work so well online.

• Draft Care and Support Bill - Your comments on the provisions in the draft Bill

I think this is pretty exciting. It’s digital engagement, but it’s some way removed from a Twitter Q and A or a webchat. With a public commitment to feed the comments that we receive directly into the process of parliamentary scrutiny via the team working on the bill, we’re effectively enabling people to publicly contribute to the drafting of law.

There’s not much precedent for inviting public comments like this at this stage of a bill. There was the pilot of the Public Reading Stage for the Freedoms Bill a little while back, which we’ve tried to learn from. But most draft bills are published as PDF, with an email address for comments.

So what have we done, and what have we learned so far?

• We published 83 clauses as individual pages on a dedicated sub-site. There’s no technical innovation. The site uses our existing HealthPress theme – it’s pages and comments, and not much else.
• We wanted the site to feel a bit different from our engagement or campaign sites, and more like the source document we were working from. So we’ve washed out all the colour, and we’ve avoided the temptation to cross-promote content from elsewhere.
• Turning a draft bill into navigable content that works in a way that a user might expect it to is tricky. The text is full of headings, parts, chapters, and clauses. I think we’ve ended up with something that just about works, and remains true to the format and structure of the bill text.
• The language in the text of a draft bill can be pretty impenetrable – we know that there’s a pretty niche audience for some of this. And it doesn’t always lend itself to a web treatment (there’s a section of the bill called “Chapter 3 – Miscellaneous and General”)
• We’ve spent no money on this. But we’ve needed a factory operation within the team just to get all the text into the site in time. We’ve benefited from a big collaborative effort over a very short period, making decisions as we’ve worked. We didn’t underestimate the work involved, but it took a big effort from Claire, Anna, Francis, Liz, Raj and Alice in the last day or so to get the thing ready. By Tuesday we were on 3 team huddles a day to check we were on track to push the button on time.
• We’ve found a nice way to present explanatory notes alongside the clauses they refer to by using a lightbox approach to include the notes within the pages that contain the clauses (eg view notes on this clause). This made the task of presenting related content together a bit easier. And we’ve find a nicer way to show the full contents of the site than we’ve used before. Necessity leads to creativity.
• If we were doing this again, we’d certainly follow up on our initial conversations with people at legislation.gov.uk and elsewhere, to learn from and properly integrate this with their approach. We compromised on some of the cleverer things we could have done with this in order to make sure that we could meet our main objective – public comments by clause – in the time we had.

I don’t know how this will go, but it feels like it’s worth the effort. If we’re able to reach a few people that wouldn’t otherwise have felt they had an opportunity to contribute to this, and their comments feed directly into the scrutiny of the draft bill, and we get better law as a result, then we’ll have done our job.

I’d really welcome comments.

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