Part 2: Implement a Federated Architecture

To read Part 1, see The Case for a Federated Open Departmental Web Strategy

The Government of Canada may require 1000+ websites to effectively engage with all of the various people, organizations and other government agencies stakeholders. Maybe it is as few as 100, but it doesn’t make any sense to select an arbitrary number here. We will only know how many sites the Government of Canada needs when we understand the users better. The UK Government Digital Service’s first principle, Start With User Needs, is key. We know that there are going to be more than a handful and that there will inevitably be overlapping content.

Certain departments must have authority over some content and that this content should be distributed across government so that it is timely and accurate. This was one of the problems that Web Renewal was attempting to resolve by centralizing everything.

With a commitment to Open Standards it is possible to build a federated approach to content so that this can be accomplished. Any modern CMS ca expose content in a machine readable format (to everyone) so that it is open by default. It can then be consumed (either by people or machines) so that it can be easily syndicated within another sites domain.  

Some Practical Examples

Health Canada should be the authority on all information related to health. We can identify places where health information should be included in:

• Global Affairs Canada to help assist travelers
• Immigration and Citizenship in the application process
• GCTools for the public sector employees
• Weather.gc.ca might be useful for seasonal warnings
• Canada.ca the central government hub

Health Canada would be responsible for generating the content, and other government sites would simply be responsible for curating it. For the next SARS or bird flu-like scare Canadians need a central means to manage and update health information, but that can be automated through a federated architecture.

Similarly it would be useful to be able to use government sites to alert people if there are weather warnings in their area. Obviously you only want to include location specific warnings on government sites, when you have confidence about the location of the user. However, it would be possible through a federated distributed network to be able to share this information so as to protect Canadians.  

Some Advantages of a Federated Approach

The current configuration of Canada.ca presents a number of security challenges, that can be overcome with a federated approach. You could set up a workflow of content between internal departmental sites that are inaccessible to vendors, contractors and non-authorized personnel until it is published to external public facing sites where content is exposed to the public after it has cleared the appropriate approvals.

Having multiple sites in multiple environments will make it much more robust, Web Renewal has created a single point of failure (as well as a huge bottleneck for content). Working with open-source communities that have a critical mass of users will also ensure that your infrastructure is not relying on “security by obscurity”.  

The site that generates the content doesn’t need to be the site which displays the content. It makes sense that it would in most instances, but perhaps not all. The point of a central site though is to curate information to help see that users are able to get the information that they need as quickly as possible.  The central site should not be where most content is generated.

The Government of Canada is attempting to modernize. The new Experimentation Direction for Deputy Heads, has a lot of potential but is severely restricted by Web Renewal. Being able to provide a sand-boxed version of Canada.ca for people to experiment with would be a game changer for people wanting to innovate.  Providing a simple framework for A/B testing is key if we are to know how to best to interact with Canadians.  

If Canada.ca becomes just a light framework that collates information from other government sites, there is no reason that this couldn’t be distributed. A central agency could experiment with several versions each of which could independently build up-to-date information from live departmental sites. With a proper cloud-based environment it would be trivial to spin up a new variation, direct a percentage of the traffic to the new instance of the site and evaluate what impacts a change has on user’s behavior.

The Fate of Canada.ca

Obviously we still need a central website for citizens to engage with citizens.  Like Ontario.ca, there needs to be a good starting point for everyone looking for government services.  Citizens who don’t know where to go need a starting point.  But frankly it doesn’t even necessarily need to be a CMS as one could use a static site generator to generate static web pages that are secure & robust, much like GitHub Pages does.

Ideally it would be great to have personalization in this central site to help guide people to the resource that they need, but there are many ways that it could simply aggregate information from federated departmental authorities and display it as part of Canada.ca.

Obviously search will be key with this.  However, once all of the departmental information is in a machine readable format it will much easier to provide one or more search options which may be better suited for different needs.  Many users are already going to start at Google.ca, so simply embedding a Google Search into the government doesn’t necessarily give Canadians a better experience.  

Integrating with other Levels of Government

Once you have Government of Canada departments on-board, you it will be also possible to integrate with other government agencies.  Citizens don’t really care what level of government is responsible for their problem, they just want the problem to go away. But using an open, federated architecture provincial and municipal departments can both include information from the Government of Canada in their sites (in real-time with no manual intervention) and share their data (which could be aggregated as needed).  

If everything developed by the Government of Canada is developed with an Open by Default approach and shared back to the public, then it will be easier for other organizations to engage with government as a platform for innovation. We will see the solutions spearheaded by government (like the Web Experience Toolkit) used and extended by other organizations. We will find it easier and more cost effective to implement secure, accessible, bilingual solutions which can be adopted by Canadian organizations for their own needs.

Long Live Canada.ca

There is a path forward. Let’s stop spending money on expensive American proprietary software solutions, and start investing in a Federated Open Departmental Web Strategy. Canada needs the public  sector to be championing open-source and open standards if we are going to catch up with our allies.

A cultural change is needed to make this happen. It won’t be easy, but we know that with leadership and courage that huge changes have taken place in the least likely places. Dave Rogers and Steve Marshall of the UK’s Ministry of Justice, have said that their “public code repository is an important part of our recruitment strategy.” If the government is interested in recruiting new talent, this could be an important step.

That being said, because our allies have built so much in the open, with some effort we can catch up quickly. We just require the leadership to make it happen.

This outline has been mostly focused on changing the technology, but this federated distributed network will allow communications departments to be more agile & responsive as well. I have trouble imagining any modern organization starting to write a web page by opening up a Microsoft Word document. The web has more than enough capacity as a publishing framework that this step simply gets in the way. Canadians expect their government to be less rigid and more timely and by decentralizing communications tools we can help make that a reality.

Having the right tools in place allows for better workflow management with proper content controls. The end result should be empirically knowing that government sites are always getting better at meeting needs of users.