This follows one I wrote a few days ago about the unsatisfactory Maryland "Stimulus Transparency" site. That appears to be built on top of a GIS database. The underlying data may be fine, but it is not useful. It's a video game ... marketing ... an ad for the governor. It looks like it was designed on a Commodore 64.
(The "overview" REQUIRES Flash 10. Talk about a big, smelly, honkin' usability accident.)
It's some designer's idea of "Visual Display of Quantitative Information." Except the designer never read Ed Tufte, it's clear.
There's no way to give usability feedback to the state, and it's clear that the state never went through the mysterious and terribly difficult preliminary design stage called "Ask the User." .... Maybe I'll go whining on about it more another time.
So don't waste your time. Instead, go play in Obama's sandbox.
... the Open Government Initiative.
You can read the blather if you like: I find it sincere but too wordy.
The blue button on the right side says "Participate". That takes you to a quick signup page at http://opengov.ideascale.com/
There are a bunch of categories in a clickable list:
* All (1230)
* 1. Transparency
o Making Data More Accessible (113)
o Making Government Operations More Open (188)
o Records Management (46)
* 2. Participation
o New Strategies and Techniques (177)
o New Tools and Technologies (74)
o Federal Advisory Committees (15)
o Rulemaking (35)
* 3. Collaboration
o Between Federal Agencies (22)
o Between Federal, State, and Local Governments (48)
o Public-Private Partnerships (38)
o Do-It-Yourself Government (13)
* 4. Capacity Building
o Hiring & Recruitment (26)
o Performance Appraisal (22)
o Training and Development (42)
o Communications Strategies (28)
o Strategic Planning and Budgeting (45)
* 5. Legal & Policy Challenges
o Legal & Policy Challenges (161)
* Uncategorized
o Uncategorized (137)
You can browse and comment in each category.
Got an idea? Click the big NEW IDEA button and type it in.
Some of the categories are a little murky. The National Adademy of Public Administration apparently has forgotten that not every American is familiar with "GovProcessSpeak" - they could provide a little better explanation of what the categories are supposed to be about.
Not that it much matters because people can vote on the appropriateness of an idea and/or add comments, no matter where it has been posted; and there's always "uncategorized."
Wingnuts apparently make up about 10 percent of the people who post. (e.g., billboard with birth certificates on them for presidential candidates ... sheesh). You can give those the thumbs down.
You can only vote an idea up or down once. Apparently you can comment freely.
As an example, here's what I posted:
Explain Web 2.0 on your Web Site
dadadata 1 hour ago
This is a meta comment. (1) You have to explain Web 2.0 to people, not just assume that they know what it is.
(2) Your introductory material is too verbose.
(3) I suggest a VERY SIMPLE naive-user interface much as Apple had with a "miniFinder" versus "Finder" ... I'm showing my age ... or with later versions of the Mac OS, the ability to choose a simpler or more complex desktop.
The Web miniFinder would still end up taking people to the brainstorming area, but it would go through "baby steps" to get there.
(4) You need to create a place to accommodate people who want to crtique an interface or suggest improvements. And when they do, and they are angry and frustrated, the people handling that feedback need to be able to accept the anger and frustration as a real phenomenon, and accept that the interface is probably responsible.
(5) "Transparency" means more than the data. If the interface is not superlative, there's little point. Data.gov appears to be a step in the right direction. By contrast, the Maryland "statestat" Web site is marginal, and its mechanism for tracking stimulus dollars can only be characterized by the Computer Science Major term of art, "it sucks."
Why Is This Idea Important?
People will graduate to the more complicated interface. People will abandon a bad interface. Open government web sites without people using them are not open government. For an example of an extremely poorly designed open government interface, see this: http://www.statestat.maryland.gov/... and also: http://www.mdimap.com/... I hear that Martin O'Malley, Maryland gov, is in love with this. Sorry, Martin, it's only useful as a bad example. Of people I have spoken to about that interface, NONE have said it's easy to use. NONE. Maryland would be better off dumping documents on a server and letting Google index them. And, ironically, there is nowhere in Maryland to send "bug reports" or interface critiques pertaining to all -- "open government" or agency -- web sites. If the critique goes to a manager, usually the response is "I don't understand what you're talking about." And it is inappropriate to direct the comments to low-level IT people.
Idea # 1223
[and tags] Making Government Operations More Open, ui, gui, web 2.0, meta
[Accumulated thumbs:]
Vote Up Looks Promising! 7
Vote Down I'm Not So Sure...
Then, I looked at how my idea appeared in the chronological list and added this comment:
Comments
dadadata 1 hour ago
And now, looking at the published comment, I don't see the end of it.
The interface gives no hint that there's more than what appears in the first 20-some lines.
You need the standard [more] link at the end of any truncated post in this forum.
(You can read the whole "idea" by clicking on its title. It's all there. But the clicking on the title is nonobvious. There is no "read all" button or link).
At first it was not clear to me if the truncation is due to an arbitrary limit on the "summary" list or is due to a bug in the software that cuts the summary off due to something I typed.
It appears that there are "ideas" that are much longer, but it may be that different lengths apply to different parts of the Web site as on dKos.
After a little more poking, I decided it may be that the section the poster fills out called "Why is this Idea Important?" is the summary delimiter.
And ...
I also noticed that there's something about the formatting that's weird. Apparently you need to leave a double-space between paragraphs (3 returns?) to get paragraphs.
Stuff that's run together in a box in a small sans-serif font is not easy to read. And it makes the writer look like a wingnut.
I guess I'll go look to see what the deal is with this. I remember reading, a long time ago, someone's rant on a Web site (might have been the Iraq vets' antiwar site) about Karl Rove and Valerie Plame. This was months before the MSM got on it. And while it was interesting and plausible, the writer used NO paragraphs.
Well-formatted writing is important to clarity and to engaging the reader.
Update:
Here's another place for discussion, taken from the comments ... Not endorsing this discussion group, only noting its existence.
Stephen Buckley
3 days ago
Dear fellow "Idea" brainstormers and commentors:
For news and moderated discussion (public, but unofficial) about the
continuing development and implementation of the "Open Government
Directive", you are invited to either:
- send [an e-mail to] opengovernmentdirective+subscribe@googlegroups.com
- visit http://groups.google.com/...
NOTE: Because I am posting this to the Comment section of some
(but not all) Ideas, you may see this message more than once.
I apologize for that.
vr,
Stephen Buckley
www.UStransparency.com