Disruptive Proactivity

DirectionlessGov was created as a joke in only a morning, just before Christmas. It didn’t take long, and hasn’t had much more work done since it launched. But, 5 years on, it’s still relevant, with roughly stable levels of media coverage and users. If you think that isn’t a long time, here’s a different way of looking at it: when DirectionlessGov launched, YouTube didn’t yet exist.

It’s been a fun time; but we do have to ask the question, given we’ve not changed what it does in 5 years, why is it still relevant and useful? Shouldn’t DirectGov have realised it exists and incorporated the simple idea into what they do by now? Or is it still just plain crazy.

One comparison that always surprises me is that our friends in the US at the Sunlight Foundation randomly complain about a different government website. Over here, we don’t seem to do that much; because almost all of them are so much better than DirectGov. Not because they’re actually good (the new FCO site is well done), but simply because DirectGov sets the bar that low.

But, I’d really rather that I didn’t have to do this any more. I’d much rather be working on other new projects, because DirectGov, with its huge budget and staff, did something better than a group of people cooked up in a morning while Stef was sleeping. Making DirectionlessGov irrelevant should not be a hard problem, but it does appear to have beaten them so far.

I hope Directionless will not get a 10th Birthday party. But I’m not going to bet against it.

After my last offhand comments about visualisation, a friend got in touch about some work I was involved in a few years ago. They’ve done the huge amount of work to get where they wanted to be, and can now do some things with it.

Wordle is a service where you give it a load of text, and it pulls out the words used a lot and displays them graphically. The area covered by the words denotes the relative import of the word in question – bigger area, more important.

I’ve replaced the two biggest words (which give away which group did the work) with LGB and Mormon – mirroring the recent california election Event, since both issues talk about elections. While the letters have been replaced, the areas are the same. I’ve also fuzzed one other word that’s very small:

While that’s resaved to smaller size, but the 900 pixel wide version really hits you – it’s a little over a quarter of the area. We knew that the 3 letter issue was significant, but that visualisation shows just how significant – more than expected.