Disruptive Proactivity

Parliament has released the first set of feedback it had received on the Parliamentary Digital Service. While Parliament pulled out important or repeated feedback, backing up various points with anecdote, it didn’t try to separate it into themes.

I was pleasantly surprised that they sit easily into just two themes:
“Delivery” and “Parliamentary Process”.

Delivery must be a key metric for the PDS, and it is completely understandable that, on day zero and before, there will be a large number of questions on how that will happen. Delivery should be the primary focus of the PDS, but that’s not something that the existing hierarchies are set up to do.

“Parliamentary Process” is the other side, the rest of Parliament and it’s interactions. It is no surprise that large chunks of Parliament doesn’t quite understand what might happen next. The mySociety report indicated the next steps, but the steps that follow those will be decided by the Head of the Parliamentary Digital Service, who hasn’t yet been appointed.

A major point is that the entire feedback (minus anecdotes) fits on 2 sides of A4. One for delivery, one for process. There isn’t a large amount of detail that needs working out with large substantive questions that have fundamental differences in whether they need to be addressed, and how.

Improving the Parliamentary web estate, and maintaining other services, isn’t particularly hard. Getting Hansard out, on time, every day, is important, but it is not particularly difficult in the abstract to deliver (even if, in practice, that’s not quite true currently).

But if you haven’t expressed your support or thoughts on the PDS, and consider it a good thing (or have substantive concerns that can be addressed), Parliament is still taking feedback (it says the deadline has passed, but it’ll still be read).