Keeping an eye on the competition...
Proof that our listeners are more eagle-eyed than government departments. Remember we announced the winner of the government's Show Us A Better Way competition on PM. Well - there was a hitch. The competition to develop new public information websites had picked a winner, Can I Recycle It, which turned out to be very similar to a site that already existed, Recycle Now. Adam Temple the member of the public who proposed Can I Recycle It didn't know about the pre-existing site, nor it seems did the Cabinet Office. But listener Peter Whitehouse spotted it, and emailed us about it. He said, "Interested in the Show Us a Better Way competition the other week (good idea). Then I learn the winning idea already existed, but they didn't know about it?"...
The Cabinet Office have admitted the oversight, and will now work to improve RecycleNow rather than creating an entirely new website (and Adam may well be involved in that work). So well done Pete and blog commenter Novojack who posted a similar thought. Read what the Cabinet Office had to say over the fold...
A Cabinet Office spokesman said the competition judges had been unaware that RecycleNow existed, despite having looked 'long and hard' for similar initiatives.
"Searches for similar ideas did not throw up any similar sites and nobody mentioned it in the comments section of Show Us A Better Way.
"The Power of Information Review was very clear about not duplicating sites so we won't be building a whole new one. The competition was always about ideas and this is an idea that visitors and judges agreed had legs. As it was already out there we'll be working with them to make it more successful, providing the service the person who suggested the idea wanted."
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On the one hand it shows how search tools are far from ideal. I've certainly come across 'search tips' from Librarians on some academic sites, but when one spots 500,000 'results' in response to a search one cannot be sure of spotting an 'appropriate' match, and of course, changing the words (or just the order of the words) for the query can have a significant effect on the results that get reported.
On the other hand, it shows how difficult it is to track a multitude of projects within an organisation such that each project group is aware of the 'call for papers' or 'reports' from the other 1001 groups in that same organisation. It doesn't help that some sites are .gov.uk some .uk.com and others .org or .com - however it is slightly less 'odd' that so many sifferent TLDs are used than the recent WAG tour of Wales to meet businesses... their tour was promoted on their E-Crime site (sorry, don't recall the full URL, but we know politicians 'cannot be trusted' already :) )
I use a number of search engines rather than Britain's 'favourite' to have a chance of seeing the odd gem rather than a mish-mash of sites which manage to get listed (as they seem to accept any random strings and give a 'result' - or do they quietly pay for 'inclusion').
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