Group -

Welcome to The Perfect Curve.

There are 35 posts in total.

Making maps accessible

simon gray — 2023-03-01, 02:13:14 - 1443 words

How many times have you been to read the Accessibility Statement of a website, and if it’s even mentioned maps, it’s said ‘unfortunately it’s not possible to make maps accessible’?

I was recently asked by a colleague to comment on the accessibility issues of a request by an internal department to put some interactive maps online. It transpired along the way there had been some confusion between the terms ‘access’ and ‘accessibility’, because when I went to look at the content in question in order to form an opinion I couldn’t actually access it anyway, because it was on an external party’s Sharepoint site protected by a login, and it turned out it was that aspect they wanted some help with.

So at the point of my initial reply to the email, without having seen the content, all I was able to respond was - to my shame - ‘because there’s an understanding there’s no real solution to making maps accessible, maps are generally allowed to be exempt from accessibility requirements’. I hopefully redeemed myself with my next sentence by adding ‘however, in many cases something at face value looks like it’s not possible to make it accessible, but with a degree [...]

Read the rest of Making maps accessible .

Manifesto for Local Government Digital Services - part two

simon gray — 2019-11-06, 17:02:48 - 3011 words

I recently attended Nick Hill’s Public Sector Digital Transformation Forum event Local Gov MIDLANDS Transformation, Collaboration & Digitisation at which I did a session to introduce and talk about my Manifesto for Local Government Digital Services.

One thing which especially pleased me about the event was the extent to which the other speakers there were sharing insight and experiences which complemented the ideas in the Manifesto quite well - to the degree that rather than simply write up the other sessions as a simple event report, I can write it up as a Part Two of the Manifesto.

So, to round up what I learned from listening to Kate Hurr, Hilary Jones, Ben Proctor, and others and their presentations:

Transformation

For about the last 10 years, the work we’ve collectively done to develop and improve our online services has been done so under the banner of Transformation. We could say there have been four phases of that transformation up to now:

  • Phase one - 1996. The creation of the first council websites and the baby steps of development they took, starting with initially with just a handful of pages and a handful of reporting forms, eventually crystallising into comprehensive websites (some of which may have been [...]

    Read the rest of Manifesto for Local Government Digital Services - part two .

Local Government Digital Services 3.0 - A manifesto

simon gray — 2019-06-11, 17:41:11 - 3593 words

"There will come a time soon when for some councils there won't be a council website any more - the website will be the council" - Tom Steinberg, founder, MySociety

This is the second time I've opened an article with this quote - the first occasion was in March 2016 at the start of A Web strategy for local government. I don't normally do pithy quotes from other people in articles, but this one seems sufficiently relevant that it bears repeating.

Setting the scene - council website home pages


The standard council website home page

Go to any modern council website these days, and you'll see more or less the same layout of links on the home page - at the top, you'll see the so-called Top Tasks, links to specific services such as paying your council tax or a parking ticket or reporting a pothole or that your bins weren't collected, followed perhaps by some links to more general service areas, some links which will have been provided by the council's communications and marketing team to the latest council news stories and some marketing and information campaigns they want highlighting, and a series of other links which make perfect sense to [...]

Read the rest of Local Government Digital Services 3.0 - A manifesto .

Council digital teams - have we stopped innovating?

simon gray — 2017-10-05, 16:15:41 - 4044 words

Way back in November 2013, as part of the project to improve Birmingham  City Council's website I was leading on, I wrote a blog post speculating on a few ideas which might be coming up in the Local Government digital sector in the coming year; at the time of writing I didn't expect I'd be likely to be implementing any of the ideas myself, because at that point my project was principally an information architecture and content strategy project, we weren't at that point expecting to be in a position to improve the underlying technology behind the site. So these things which I predicted somebody else might do were: 

  • Open data, 
  • Mobile, 
  • ‘The Internet of Things’, 
  • Responsive Design, 
  • Ebooks, 
  • Crowdsourced content, and 
  • Real time information 

So when recently I was copying the old blog posts from the site for that project into this site, that original post caught my eye – in the sense that I was moderately surprised that nearly four years on, actually not much has changed. 

Let's examine those predictions and what's transpired over the last four years: 

Open data 

Open data in local government is still a niche area; yes, many councils now have their data portals with a handful of datasets on them, but they tend to [...]

Read the rest of Council digital teams - have we stopped innovating? .

Applying for a copy of a Birth, Marriage, or Death Certificate

simon gray — 2017-01-20, 16:08:44 - 1065 words

tl;dr - Applying for a copy of certificates from your council's register office is considerably more painful than it should be. And for online applications, it probably makes more sense to signpost people to the central government General Register Office site.

A couple of years ago it occurred to me that I didn't know where my copy of my birth certificate is, and that it might be a good idea to get another one. When I went to the website of the council where we lived until I was 10, I saw there was no online process to order copy certificates, meaning an order process of sending a cheque or postal order through the post. Since I've not had a chequebook for about 10 years, that meant going to a post office to buy a postal order - and Birmingham city centre only has two post offices, meaning most lunchtimes and near-closing time the queue is out the door and down the street. So since I had no pressing need for a copy of my birth certificate at that point I didn't pursue it.

Time passes and more recently a need for my birth certificate arose - but [...]

Read the rest of Applying for a copy of a Birth, Marriage, or Death Certificate .

Local Government Digital Service Standard Summit, 19 September 2016

simon gray — 2016-09-19, 13:20:35 - 2038 words

Earlier in 2016 the Local Government Digital Steering Group, of which I'm a member, held a workshop day at the Government Digital Service to discuss whether there was any mileage in creating a local government version of the GDS Digital Service Standard. Not surprisingly, there was overwhelming agreement that it was indeed a good idea, so the steering group set to work in collaboration with local government digital practitioners up and down the country to create one - the Local Government Digital Service Standard. Today there's a summit at City Hall in London to share the work that's been done so far, gaining insight from people working in central and local government in their experiences of using the standard - and an important point being emphasised that it's not about creating a whole load of bureaucracy, and neither is it about replicating the same thing across hundreds of councils - it's just about creating good digital services.

Here are my notes from the morning main speaker sessions.

Natalie Taylor, Head of Digital Transformation, GLA - City Hall and the Digital Service Standard - Building the new london.gov.uk

UK Parliament petitions website - potentially compromised?

simon gray — 2016-06-29, 12:39:08 - 609 words

In the aftermath of the referendum vote to leave the European Union, one of the things being focussed on is a petition (which ironically was created a month before polling day by a Leave supporter when it was looking like there would be a likely Remain win) calling for a second referendum. At over 4 million signatures it is probably the most-signed petition in history. Or at least it would be, if those signatures were valid.

Suspicions started to be raised when somebody had a look at the raw open data JSON feed for the petition and noticed there were a number of signatures appearing to come from the UK - including more signatures from certain countries than those countries' populations! The Government Digital Service is already investigating these potentially fraudulent signatures and removing them.

As much for a programming exercise to learn how to parse a JSON feed as anything else, I decided to make a tool to make that country data human readable, and display on a pie chart what the proportion of UK to non-UK signatures might be, and how significant that proportion might be.

So the tool is at https://perfect-curve.co.uk/toys/petition, and on there you [...]

Read the rest of UK Parliament petitions website - potentially compromised? .

A content strategy for local government

simon gray — 2016-06-21, 12:45:57 - 9003 words

In a previous job role on the main corporate webteam for a local council, one of my main focuses was on website content strategy, for the Birmingham City Council website; towards the end of that role (before the team itself was fundamentally changed in a departmental restructure) I completed the first draft of that strategy. As departmental and corporate priorities have shifted my original document has been changed and expanded considerably, but I thought it seemed worthwhile sharing it here for the wider community - the Local Government Digital community and any other public / third / educational sector digital community to use as a basis for their own work on developing content strategies.

It is high-level, strategic in nature; its goal is to outline principles to be followed when creating content; although there are some specific matters of detail towards the end of the document, a content strategy should not be expanded into a highly detailed how-to guide for creating content or checklist for evaluating it - such detailed information is best contained in separate documents rather than expecting content designers to read and absorb one large all-encompassing document.

Many of the principles outlined are taken from the work of others, [...]

Read the rest of A content strategy for local government .

Brought to you by simon gray. Also find me on Mastodon

The code behind this site is a bit of an abandoned project; I originally had lofty ambitions of it being the start of a competitor for Twitter and Facebook, allowing other people to also use it turning it into a bit of a social network. Needless to say I got so far with it and thought who did I think I was! Bits of it don't work as well as I'd like it to work - at some point I'm going to return to it and do a complete rebuild according to modern standards.