Consumer Focus Labs

What have we been up to? Pt. 2

By Dafydd Vaughan Wednesday March 3, 2010

In our last update we talked about some of the new responsibilities we’ve inherited and what our plans were for the next few months. We wanted to give you all an update on what we’ve been up to since then and what we’ve still to do.

Consumer Focus Corporate Website

Consumer Focus Homepage In October we announced that we had taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. One of our first jobs was to transfer the site from the ASP.NET content management system provided by the original developers to Wordpress. This involved converting the existing design to Wordpress templates, bringing over all the content and training the staff involved in updating the site. With everything completed we launched the “new” site in late November.

Since then we’ve been working on the second phase of work – a complete content restructure and update to make content easier to find across Consumer Focus’ target audiences. This, together with several tweaks to the look and feel of the site (designed to take advantage of some of the features available in Wordpress), will be completed in the next few weeks.

Both phases have been a huge undertaking, but we felt it was important to make it as easy as possible to make changes in the future, hence the switch to Wordpress. One of the advantages of the Wordpress platform is that it is so easy to extend. Where we need to add in new functionality, it is likely a plugin already exists to do the job. If it doesn’t, creating one is fairly straightforward.

For those that are interested in some of the technical aspects- the site now uses Wordpress MU on a LAMP platform. We control all the code through our SVN repositories and deploy to the servers using Capistrano. This is almost identical to the way in which we manage our other projects such as this site and Recalled Products.

Guidelines for public sector websites

As some of you may be aware, the Central Office of Information (COI) publishes a set of guidelines for UK public sector websites. We’ve spent a fair amount of time working out what we need to do to reach compliance and we’ll be making the necessary adaptations to all Consumer Focus and Labs websites over the coming months.

Does Directgov Deliver?

In December we launched ‘Does Directgov Deliver?‘, Consumer Focus’s first report to allow comments directly from members of the public by way of consultative website. The report itself was produced by the Public & Community Services Team within Consumer Focus and looks at whether Directgov delivers on its promise to ‘provide information and online services for the public all in one place’. We wanted to make it easy to comment on each part of the report, so Wordpress was the obvious choice. We adapted the Commentariat theme developed by the BIS innovation team to power the website.

If you want to comment on the report, head over to the website. Comments will be closing soon but the website will remain online. Sign up to the mailing list on the website (powered by Google Groups) to be kept up-to-date on Consumer Focus’s work on Directgov.

We are now looking at how we can improve the process of collecting comments on our reports, so keep an eye out for future experiments like this.

Recalled Products

As you may have noticed, in December we turned on another set of features on the Recalled Products website. We now pull in photos and related documents for products when they are available. We’re also experimenting with producing some statistics on the number of recalls we import every week, what categories they are in and what the dangers are. Let us know what you think of these and how we can improve them.

What have we been up to?

By Dafydd Vaughan Monday October 19, 2009

We’ve been really quiet on the public front lately, but there has been a lot going on internally. This is an update on everything that we’ve been up to and what we’ve got planned for the next few months.

Our work on the Stay Private project has continued amongst our other duties. We now have a framework in place and are starting to build the part that submits information to the Telephone Preference Service. As you might imagine, this is one of the most complicated parts of the system as there are multiple forms that need to be submitted for the process to work. We are hoping to have a very early stage test site available in the next few weeks.

We’ve continued to chase Tesco with our data protection request. They have finally responded and sent some of our data to us – although it isn’t quite what we were expecting. I’ll be posting some more details about this on our data blog shortly. (Update: You can read the response from Tesco here).

Some people may have noticed that we’ve moved our websites to a new server. Up until now, we’d been using Slicehost as our hosting provider. While they did a good job and served us well, we weren’t that comfortable with using a server based in the USA. This would have been of particular concern when we got around to launching the Stay Private website. As a result, we’ve moved everything to a new UK based server.

CF Labs has also recently taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. We felt that we were best placed to manage new developments and overall strategy including introducing a social media programme. One of our first priorities is to move it away from the current ASP.NET system to the open source Wordpress CMS. This work is currently on going and is due to be completed in a few weeks time. While the website will not look any different (aside from a few small layout changes), moving it to Wordpress means it’ll be more flexible and easier to maintain. We’re also looking at how we can make Consumer Focus reports and publications more open by using the Commentariat theme developed by the people over at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

As you can see, there are quite a few bits and pieces going on. We’ll keep you updated as work progresses.

Working to open up data

By Joe Cicero Friday September 11, 2009

We like data at CF Labs – indeed we’d be nothing without lots of lovely data to build our apps around. So it’s logical that we’re committed to opening up and sharing data that we feel is in the public interest but is withheld unnecessarily or unfairly – think raw, infinitely useful data idling on dusty government shelves (virtually speaking) or customer account data (including YOUR personal information) locked-down in alcatraz-like corporate silos.

We’ve been feeling our way around in this area, submitting pilot Data Protection Act and Freedom of Information requests to various bodies in an effort to hone our information-extracting skills to the level of some of the more frequent denizens over at the excellent WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Our exploits thus far are documented in the new DataBlog section here on the site. Definitely worth a read in the case of one big commercial concern at least.

But we haven’t stopped there. As firm believers in the principles of leading by example, share and share alike and giving something back, we’re currently involved in exploring ways of getting Consumer Focus data out there for use by the development community. CF commissions veritable mountains of research on an enormous range of consumer-related subjects which, after inclusion in reports, invariably ends up languishing on the system in a folder within a folder within a long-forgotten folder. It’s a common situation. Fortunately, CF shares our vision of sharing the data and to this end we’re investigating the status of licensing agreements between CF and its research contractors to make this happen at a point in the not too distant future – watch this space for developments.

Wireframing StayPrivate.org

By Dafydd Vaughan Friday August 21, 2009

Work has begin on our next project – StayPrivate.org. The aim of the project is to make it easier to opt out of receiving unwanted marketing communications from organisations registered with the Direct Marketing Association.

The first stage of our work involved planning out what we wanted the site to do. We did this a few weeks ago during a session involving lots of sticky notes, coloured dots and pieces of paper. The outcome (as you can see below) is a sheet of paper outlining what features we want to have and roughly what priority they are. In this case, there are two possible priorities, “essential” and “not essential”. Features like “registration form” are classed as essential, whereas “pretty charts showing complaint levels” are less important.

Planning StayPrivate

Once we had done this, we used it to produce a rough sitemap and list of features for the first release. This list of features is a subset of the ‘essential’ items we originally had. These are items we think we must have in order for the site to work – so it includes things such as database structure and user accounts. Once these items are done, everything else can be built ontop.

Our next stage has been to wireframe the site. This has again involved in reverting to the good old pen and paper to sketch out how parts of the site might look and how they will work. Now we have these, we can start building the functionality for the site.

We’ll keep updating you as the site progresses.

Digital Switchover in Wales

By Dafydd Vaughan Thursday August 13, 2009

At midnight yesterday the Digital Switchover began in Wales with the switch off of BBC 2 in the Swansea area. Over the next few months, the rest of Wales will be converted, finishing in March 2010.

Prior to the start of the switchover in Wales, our parent organisation Consumer Focus Wales conducted a mystery shopper survey of aerial installers in Wales. The aim was to see how well aerial installers in the country were responding to the challenges. The outcome of the survey has been reported across the media in Wales.

We’ve put together a small and simple website to expose the results from this survey. The site provides a little backgound to the survey, some analysis, and the results in a Google Spreadsheet. We’ve released the data under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license. This means you can use the data in any way you like as long as you link back to us as the original author. If you do use the data for something, please let us know – we’d love to see what you do with it.

You can see the website at http://dso-wales.consumerfocuslabs.org. A Welsh language version is also available.