The Case for a Federated Open Departmental Web Strategy

The Government of Canada’s Web Renewal Initiative has failed. It may not be public yet, but there really is no way to redeem this half-conceived initiative to centralize all government pages onto a single website - Canada.ca.

This goal was lifted from the UK Government’s Government Digital Services (GDS). The goal of the GDS team was no less than digital transformation. Our government appears to have mistaken the alpha.gov.uk site as the end goal, rather than a platform with which to experiment with new ideas in government usability. The GDS is continuing to innovate to better serve the needs of their citizens, and having an open strategy allows for them to have their ideas validated by the world. Our government has been focused on radically reducing the number of pages it maintains by looking for Redundant, Out-Of-Date And Trivial (ROT) content, or just content nobody wants to fight for.

The Web Renewal Initiative (mega-migration to Canada.ca) was started by the Conservative government who was obsessed with centralizing communications & outsourcing as much as possible to the private sector. The Liberal government has a clear mandate to modernize government.

Centralizing on Canada.ca was a Bad Idea

Serving all public Government of Canada content via a single site guarantees that this project will not be able to Fail Forward and learn through constant iterations. If governments are going to learn and grow with their IT projects they need to be structured so that public servants are able to take on small risks. Building the “one site to rule them all” will ultimately leave everyone focused on limitations of the tool rather than the needs of the user.

There is not a single user for government sites. There is no way to appeal to the scientists, students, seniors, travelers and businesses owners, just to name a few, through a single voice. You do need a single Canada.ca site to be able to effectively answer most questions of citizens, but also need to be able to direct them to a more detailed department site if they want more information.

Many departments also have websites or web apps that they have built for specific purposes. Most government sites aren’t as active as weather.gc.ca and won’t need their content to be updated 100s of times an hour. People go there for one specific reason (to get a permit, to find out if a drug is approved, to find the address of our Embassy in DC), and Canadians depend on this service. There are countless other examples where an agency might choose to set up a new website to try to target an audience or need which their departmental site cannot satisfy.

This project went off the rails before the RFP was even awarded. The very first item in the UK Government Digital Service’ Design Principles is to Start with user needs. Although there are great usability folks who have been involved, there hasn’t been a mandate of “service transformation”, to really put users first. The rushed mandate of Canada.ca started with a bunch of assumptions and hasn’t brought on the user researchers or data analytics people to understand how to better meet user needs, let alone talk to users. The best hope with Web Renewal would be that it could save money, it was not designed to improve service.

It is worth stressing that this initiative is built on proprietary software and managed completely by American-based international corporations. This approach does not support the broader public policy of a modern, open by default government that is supporting Canadian innovation. The process of centralizing and outsourcing Government IT makes it inevitable that multinational corporations are going to win contracts. Most Small & Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) just don’t have the resources to bid on multi-million dollar contracts let alone win them. When leveraging open-source, large projects can be broken down into smaller ones that will allow more Canadian companies to become involved.

Whether it is a giant multi-national or a small business, it is never a good idea for government to give a monopoly to a private sector company, like they did for Canada.ca. The vendor lock-in that comes with proprietary software makes it even worse as any transition away will include both migrating to a new technology stack as well as finding a new company to provide support. 

I’ve previously highlighted the many problems with the implementation of Canada.ca. It is now time for everyone to admit that Web Renewal has failed. But if we do that, what should it be replaced with? What can be learned from this experiment and pulled forward into a plan that to help build the innovative modern government that Trudeau has promised Canadians?

I don’t think anyone is calling for a return to how government developed websites before Web Renewal. There does need to be more structure. There were too many orphaned projects that lacked proper accessibility, security & branding. What is the alternative?

"10) Make things open: it makes things better"

This is the final item in the UK GDS Design Principles. Last but not least, particularly since it frames the Open Government approach that is framing this discussion around the world. Building in the open has a great many advantages which have been articulated very clearly by government leaders in the UK, USA, Australia, France, Spain, and indeed most of the G20.

“Open source software can support the Digital Government Strategy's "Shared Platform" approach, which enables Federal employees to work together-both within and across agencies to reduce costs, streamline development, apply uniform standards, and ensure consistency in creating and delivering information.” - U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Website

At the 2016 Open Government Partnership meeting in Paris the importance of Open Source was acknowledged by governments around the world, including the Government of Canada.

So start with an open platform. The tool doesn’t particularly matter, but the approach absolutely does. There are almost no acceptable reasons why the government should ever build software from scratch. Governments need to find existing software communities and become engaged with them.

• Review open-source software in use by our closest allies (USA, Australia, New Zealand, the EU & it’s members countries)
• Experiment with public repositories other governments have shared
• Adopt several that meet Canada’s unique needs in specific domains

Adopt an “Open” IT Workplace

With the rate of change in IT, just to keep up, organizations need to be constantly investing in their workforce to ensure that they have the modern skills required. Working in the open makes developers more careful with their code. If your work is going to be published, you want to make sure that it is well written, documented and not introducing embarrassing bugs. Having a good reputation is increasingly important in the internet age. Working in the open also allows governments to have their work verified by external developers (for free). 

“By making our code open and reusable we increase collaboration across teams, helping make departments more joined up, and can work together to reduce duplication of effort and make commonly used code more robust.” - Anna Shipman, Open Source Lead UK GDS

To increase the collaboration outside of government it is always useful to release code under a commonly used license (such as the GPL, MIT or Apache) which aid with the distribution. The Open Government Licence adopted by Canada might become well understood in Canada, but not internationally. The US government defaults to Public Domain, which is very pervasive and also well understood.

Prepare for Linguistic Diversity

The ability to fully manage bilingual content is difficult for many sites. The Government of Canada also needs to be able to support languages of First Nations, Inuit, Métis and New Canadians. Any Content Management System (CMS) chosen should be able to support, at a minimum, the orthographies of Ojibwe and Inuktitut in addition to languages like Arabic & Chinese which is the first languages for many Canadians. There are several open-source solutions that can already address our complex linguistic requirements.

With a commitment to open-source one could also build in decentralized readability evaluator to ensure that the content author knows how complex their work is (in real time) and that departments can assess a cross-site picture of their content. Writing in Plain Language isn’t something that comes naturally, but it is an important part of any accessibility or usability goals. There are well established open-source tools that already allow for multiple ways to evaluate language complexity, it is simply a matter of ensuring that it is built into the new websites that are used for creating the content. 

Commit to Adopting Open Standards

When the Government of Canada formally gives up it’s goal to implement one site for the entire public service, We need to see a real commitment to Open Standards. Software interoperability allows the government to move the discussion away from specific tools and to broader cross-departmental needs. The UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defines them this way:

“‘Open Standards’ are standards made available to the general public and are developed (or approved) and maintained via a collaborative and consensus driven process. ‘Open Standards’ facilitate interoperability and data exchange among different products or services and are intended for widespread adoption.”

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is such a body, and has ongoing committees that work to improve standards like HTML, Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) as well as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 & Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0. Some of these are used to base government initiatives like the Web Experience Toolkit, as well as the Common Look and Feel before that.

An important W3C standard for this discussion are the Semantic Web Standards most fundamentally the Resource Description Framework (RDF). One could also look at a machine readable markup language like the W3C’s eXtensible Markup Language (XML) or even cutting edge features like Web Components. The important thing is that there is a set of agreed to standards with which government websites can effectively exchange information with each other.

A Coordinated Decentralized Approach

I don’t know of a government that has fully embraced the Semantic Web, but the technology is already well established. Adopting this set of standards would allow for the realization of much deeper content sharing between networked sites. With a cohesive implementation you can divide the roles of content generation and content curation.

In Part 2 of this article I elaborate on how this approach could be leveraged within the Government of Canada.