http://www.directionlessgov.com/

http://www.directionlessgov.com/about.html

Genius.

But absolutely agree with the astonishment at the lack of quality on Directgov.

PS with the new version of this blog engine we can make comments more open, what do you think?

Charles

Don’t know if you use Thunderbird, I’m reading this via an RSS feed using it. Also loads of extensions etc to play with. On FF I use adblock - try it with the Guardian site. They have the nerve to charge for this service. Adblock does it free.

Charles

Microsoft’s Brazilian subsidiary has taken the country’s leading open source advocate to court over what it calls defamatory remarks. Sergio Amadeu, president of the National Institute of Information Technology (ITI), a software libre consultancy, compared Microsoft’s Windows license discounts for the public sector to running a “drug dealer practice”. Brazil is moving towards open source at a pace, with central government and education leading the way. The magazine in which Amadeu’s comments appeared last month is also named in the request.

From The Register http://www.theregister.com

I’m using opera 7.23 on a linux box at the moment. I’ve just resized the browser window and it behaves really well, it is quite impressive (and it is telling direct.gov that it is opera, not IE or mozilla).

Directgov.gov.uk sums up for me the problems with the proliferation of .gov sites. I work for a .gov and I find the .gov site naming labyrinthine and even recursive in some cases. They are /so/ unmemorable and/or confusing.

Direct.gov should be consistent with govtalk.gov.uk I suppose, but it just sounds like “guv” endlessly repeated to me!

Another anomaly with this site is its name - ‘Directgov’ is the name of the site, but the URL is ‘www.direct.gov.uk’ - logically (but tautologically) shouldn’t it be ‘www.directgov.gov.uk’?

If I was booking up the URL’s on behalf of the department running this site, I’d have snapped that one up and routed it to my site before something else, such as a critical mirrorsite perhaps, is put in place.

Where possible, I’d also do the same with ‘www.govdirect.gov.uk’ (which seems a much more intuitive name to me) and other variations, including all final extensions and possible typos on each.

Weirdly, http://www.govdirect.co.uk takes you to a for sale domain ‘airportpark.co.uk’

Interestingly, ‘www.gov.uk’ does take you to the Directgov site.

I agree that the site looks good (when displayed correctly) and seems very useable.

I am using IE6 and Directgov looks fine to me - news is in the top right hand corner.

The Directgov site was quite well received by users when we looked at it as part of a bigger project a few weeks ago.

Users like the blocks of information and the ‘Do it online’ section was particularly well received.

Your article looks good and is quite a good read, although I am confused by the atoms and swimming pools metaphor(s).

Also, I wonder if the article supports and thus perpetuates the myth of public democracy apathy, rather than explores or deconstructs it.

Our findings at UsabilityWorks time and time again suggest that, while the public itself initially verbally supports the idea promoted by politicians and the media that there is general apathy to voting, elections, politics in general and local democratic issues in particular, the reality is, in fact, the opposite.

Apart from the initial assertion of apathy to the political process, we have actually found little evidence of it once we start digging around. Rather, once people get going on local democratic issues and they see someone listening and responding, they are well away: many good ideas, many sensible opinions, many unvoiced views.

The evidence suggests that people feel that anything they have to say will not be heard and will have little effect within the current system. So, they have learnt not to waste their time.

This is not apathy. It is frustration, scepticism, and, dare I say it, fermenting anger.

As often, it is the system that is at fault, not the user. The user is simply circumventing/ignoring a system that doesn’t cater to their needs and doesn’t work properly.

Best,

John Cowpertwait
UsabilityWorks Limited