Faith in the Cloud – when it all goes wrong…

Storm Clouds (photo by Flickr user Kuzeytac)

Following up on a previous blog post regarding putting faith in cloud based services comes the bombshell that popular UK based postcode search API supplier website Earnest Marples has been closed down via a Cease and Desist order from the Royal Mail. The previous post mused about what would happen if/when a service that was relied on by other services stopped and this is a prime example. Following this announcement the public service, non profit websites PlanningAlerts.com and the Straight Choice, as well as a number of others, are no longer functioning. But this has had a bigger impact still – TwitterPlan, developed by Stuart Harrison of Lichfield DC, and the Planning RSS feed and map for City of Lincoln Council are no longer available (okay, so it turns out that they do work, however their future rests in the balance of whether PlanningAlerts.com can keep running or not…) as they relied on PlanningAlerts which, in turn, relied on Earnest Marples. You get the picture.

I’m sure there are many more casualties in this but the big question is; who’s at fault? The immediate finger of blame will be pointed at the Royal Mail, being the big bad corporation behind this; there is a strong argument that postcode information is public data and, therefore, should be publically available. Earnest Marples was doing the honourable (and daring) thing in doing this; making this data usable by non profit organisations who want to provide a service that is simply not possible with this locked down data model. My personal opinion is that this data SHOULD be open and usable however the reality is that, legally, Royal Mail owns the data and has the right to charge for it and, yes, what Earnest Marples was doing was technically against the law.

So we’re now back to the question of “Should we put our faith in the clouds?”. If this is anything to go by then relying on cloud based services is a risky business indeed – sure they little to nothing to implement but once the rug gets pulled out, it’s back to the drawing board, having to invest time into fixing any broken links and damage that may have been done to services that have been put in place on the back of this. But, as people expect more of this kind of service on the web, maybe the big corporations who own this kind of data need to think long and hard about their “business model”; being seen as the bad guy is not good for your corporate image…

Faith in the Cloud and the Quest to #freealncl

Cloud computing. It’s great. I’ve been a long time supporter of the concept that you can host your files and your applications on the web, accessing your email, documents and photos where you want so long as you have access to a computer. It has helped me shift work between the office and home without the need for physical media, has helped me show holiday photos to relatives without the need to send a CD or get the images developed, and it’s allowed me to work collaboratively on projects without having to leave my house. It’s really, really great.

But it does have one very big caveat; what happens when it all goes wrong? This is an age old argument that has just come to life again in the last five days. A bit of background; Al Smith from Newcastle DC came to use Twitter last Friday, only to discover that his account had been suspended (@alncl). No reason was given and he certainly hadn’t been abusing his acount. Simon Wakeman blogged a great interview with Al, discussing the background of this. On the surface this may seem trivial; a glitch in the system that led to someone being inadvertanaly banned. But it’s the lack of communications from Twitter Support and the length of time it’s taken to get any kind of resolution for Al (at the time of writing, @alncl is still banned!)

What would happen if this was an orgnisations Twitter account? Not only is there the issue of faith in these new forms of communication that the web is currently heralding in, there is also the issue of reputation. Why was this organisations account banned? Had they been doing something dodgy? And not only the reputation of the organisation, but the reputation of Twitter as a service.

Earlier this year, GMail had some major outage problems. These were resolved fairly quickly and Google were incredibly informative both during the outage and afterwards. Many businesses were affected by this; downtime does happen in this unpredictable world of computing. What retains faith for the end user is how well the manufacturer handles this downtime.

Twitter is quickly becoming the “It” service of the web; everyone wants in on it and corporations are starting to include it in their communications strategy. I can’t help but think that Twitter, as a company, would benefit a buyout – something they’ve always shirked away from. People have high expectations from their online service providers and I personally don’t think that Twitter is currently in a position to provide this level of service. Under the wing of a company like Google, however, this should be a different matter…

But there is still the underlying question; should we put our faith in the clouds?

Why Can’t We All Just Play Nicely?

Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know I didn’t have a particularly peachy morning. It started when our IT manager gave me unrestricted internet access. This brought cries of WooHoo! from me as I could potentially start to look at branching out our SocMed capabilities. The caveat, however, was that the access was handled by our Citrix mainframe, meaning I was essentially logging in again when I needed to access the web. The downsides to this were:

• I could only use IE7
• I couldn’t use plugins (bye bye Web Developer Toolbar)
• I couldn’t use FireFox et al (bye bye cross platform testing)
• I couldn’t upload as I was logged into a different system from my own and couldn’t see my C Drive
• Local apps that log me in based on my NT Login ceased to work

…and so on. Needless to say I wasn’t happy, but I was fully aware it wasn’t IT’s fault; they were trying to help me but unfortunately hindered me because they didn’t fully understand what I required. A lot of this revolves around the requirements placed on them by GovConnect; I don’t know that much about this initiative so I won’t go into it here. Suffice to say it’s caused a LOT of headaches around the authority. Again, this isn’t directly IT’s fault. They’re putting protocols into place because they have to.

I got my restricted but usable access back, but this got me thinking; everyone is very quick to vilify IT for blocking access to things, putting in protocols that hinder rather than help and not letting you install essential software on your machine. But it’s probably not their fault.

We’ve got some major roadworks going on round City Hall. Major. They’re going to screw up the road system, cause delays and generally tick a lot of people off. But this isn’t the workers fault. They’re just doing their job, what they’re told to do. It’s the same with our IT dept; I got a dialogue going with our IT head who told me that they have to follow legislation as to who can and cannot have and do certain things.

That’s fine; I’m happy with that. Large organisations have restrictions, that’s a given. I’m more than happy to play by the rules. But are these rules appropriate in the ever evolving technological world? And why should there not be managed exceptions so that higher end tech people can do their jobs (and I’m not just talking web bod’s like me)? Is GovConnect really THAT all encompassing that every single system in Local Government needs to be locked down tighter than a medieval virgin’s chastity belt?

I think that one of the key issues here is localisation. To my knowlege there is no drive from Central Gov to push a standard that we should all work to. We’re expected to develop better service delivery but set our localised protocols, also working within restrictive legislation such as GovConnect. And the localisation only breeds siloing which means that departments only ever end up working to their own rules anyway.

There is a distinct need to work together internally. IT don’t care about how the website works; and I don’t expect them to. What I do want, however, is an understanding from them of how I want to improve the web, as well as learn from them what their restrictions are and try and evolve their protocols to meet both of our needs. And this is, I’m sure not just applicable to the situation between me and IT; I can name a couple of other sections who can’t seem to gel when their protocols contradict one another. We should be evolving, not rooting ourselves in “My way’s best, so nyah!”

I guess what I hope to achieve from this post is a discussion; who has fallen foul of GovConnect? Is it the big bad wolf I seem to think it is? Shouldn’t we all by trying to forge better relationships instead of squabbling interdepartmentally all the time? Who should be pushing for the cohesion of systems? Or am I simply being a bit of a web-dev diva and throwing my toys out of the pram because someone is telling me I can’t deliver a system in the way I want to?

Local Authority Collaborative Mapping Project

I’ve posted this on the Public Sector forums but I thought I’d pop it here, in a more public area. If you are a local gov type who reads my blog, or if this is of interest to you, please add a comment but also link back so that we can get this idea out to as wide an audience as possible – thanks!

This afternoon I’ve been bandying an idea around with some of my Twitter contacts about how to easily get local authority information mapped on a country wide scale. I think I may have come up with a solution; set up a Local Authority Mapping Collective who can identify relevant information (the example that kicked this off was the location of polling stations), set up a map on Google Maps and then invite other local authority types to add their info on.

Set up a simple network to handle the organisation of all these peeps (using ning or grou.ps) and to keep those involved of the maps currently being compiled, advertise this through relevant channels and this could easily be used to piece together some very useful geocoded data sets.

Off the back of this, the possibilities for the data itself are interesting; embedding localised versions of the information into websites as well as the ability to mash up any collected data into other projects. A big benefit is, of course, making this data massively publically available.

What does anyone think to this proposal? Is it something that people would be interested in contributing to?

Learning Web Skills in Higher Education – a discussion point

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/elevatewebdesignattheuniversitylevel

I have bookmarked this with Delicious but I just wanted to draw some attention to it in a post.

One of the things I always regret about my Uni days is that the skills I learned on a couple of my courses I was never able to apply in a real life environment. One of these was the web course where, upon graduating, I had to relearn everything on my first job. Admittedly my skills increased exponentially, however I feel that the course should have provided current skills rather than the outdated stuff we actualy learned.

I have, for a couple of years, been contemplating moving into higher education as a career. Shout out in the comments; how valid do you feel that current higher education courses in web based skills currently are? What do you think is missing and how can courses be more forward thinking?