It’s not a case of benign confusion or clumsiness but more a case of breathtaking arrogance on the part of HMIC.

But if I could distil my various points down to just one, it would be my disappointment in the lack of imagination so often shown in new online development by government.

Picking a nice new branding, and publishing some statistics under it might have been what the web was about 10 years ago. But now? When we have the tools to do so much more in terms of engagement, feedback and smarter ways to share the underlying data?

Given the “About the site” page on Oneplace says: “Welcome to Oneplace. This is a new website that…” I do think it has been conceived as a new site, rather than genuinely integrated into its surroundings. I might have reservations about the whole approach to rationalising sites (that’s for another post, perhaps in a few weeks’ time) but I’m just calling out what I see on the screen today.

And the obvious user journey I took on Oneplace – to find out about my own area – led me swiftly to a marvellous page telling me that there were neither red nor green flags relating to my area. That small part of England known as Surrey. Nothing to see here, as they say. So I moved on. It didn’t look neat to me – just a search engine delivering thin content and no follow-up for me to engage, challenge, support or find out more.

You know that I’m a big supporter of working with online communities and ensuring government supports digital innovation from outside government. But that doesn’t mean that government shouldn’t try too, or that civil society efforts are *necessarily* better (even though they often will turn out to be).

In June 2009, MyPolice.org won SiCamp. It’s a great idea, with passionate people behind it and some hard work behind the scenes – yet as of March 2010, there’s still not a lot to show for the site that I could see just now. If HMIC launched their own service without prior awareness of the ideas already out there, that’s a shame, but not worthy of the vilification they’ve had from some commentators. Ask plenty of startup founders who’ve been beaten to market by a competitor what they learned and they’ll say: ship early. Patient Opinion is an excellent service and survives despite the existence of NHS Choices because its unique value is widely recognised, and – I think – they were first to market.

OnePlace is trying to do something ambitious and complex, and to my eye, does an OK job of it with some neat little tricks. Sure, there’s room for improvement. But it’s a good idea, clearly taken seriously. And it’s on Directgov, as it should be.

Sure, Government schemes have deeper pockets than civil society projects, though they’re also generally subject to more technical, regulatory and political constraints. Hopefully, the rise of data.gov.uk will put services both on the inside and the outside on a more equal footing in terms of source data at least. And I’d hope that publicly-funded projects of this kind developed these days would make big efforts to develop APIs or a delivery platform which supports re-use and enables the service to be refined from the outside.

So I do agree with you about extracting value from public money, and that services like this depend on genuine interactivity to be truly useful. But lots of other things matter too. And I can’t help feeling that some constructive competition between the folks on the inside and the folks on the outside will get us to a better result in the end.

OnePlace may be one steaming great heap.

But TotalPlace may be totally different. The web presence may be mediocre here, but what os really happening is important. Bringing senior reps of all the different local services together to view the issues and budgets in an integrated way is definitely worth trying. There’s much more to this than meets the online eye.

> Every day you leave this matter of mypolice.org.uk squatting the existing mypolice.org domain prolongs the impression of an arrogant or clueless and indecisive bureaucracy stumbling around without any grasp of the effect of the Internet on public services.

How about:

1. issue an immediate apology for confusion and distress caused

2. put a link to mypolice.org from your home page and from mypolice.org.uk pages to show absence of malevolence and a desire to get things right quickly

3. find a new name eg policestats.gov.uk for what you’re trying to do, which the online community would like to be able to be supportive of

4. make a statement about how this very poor decision was reached and the extent to which those involved (whether officials or an external agency) will be beneficiaries of taxpayers money in future.

5. give the mypolice.org.uk domain to MyPolice as a goodwill gesture.

It was an error on their part to leave it available, but your behaviour is inexcusable, especially for a public body, and above all for a public body whose bevaviour shd be “whiter than white” if we are to restore trust in the police.