WRITTEN ON January 21st, 2007 BY Sam Smith AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, Save Time and Money, What do we want?

A number of recent reports (most recently Varney and the Transformational Government (TFG) Annual Report 2006) talk about consumerisation and simplification of access to Government services.

The headline out of the TFG report is the destruction of 550 Government websites, to be subsumed under DirectGov. But wouldn’t it be better if government websites just linked to each other and sent you to the right place, wherever you started from? Isn’t that what direct.gov.uk was designed to do?

To see what works you have to look at the failures and mistakes, the costs of design, development and integration, and usage and promotion, and not just immediately, but over years to come. Are we going to start seeing on bus stops URLs like www.direct.gov.uk /departmentofadministrativeaffairs/ registration/breedinglicense? That approach will fail.

DirectGov does not exist in a vacuum. As Varney says,

The focus is increasingly on the totality of the relationship with the citizen.

And that brings us to identity of the citizen.

The serice provider needs to a way of identifying all the data for one account, and to know that the person to whom that data belongs is the person with whom they are currently dealing.

No part of government needs to know all the data about me. It just needs to know enough to do whatever is currently required. There is no reason for my income tax information to be attached to my car tax information. One is supplied by my employer, one comes directly from me. The contexts are very different. Context is critical. While my doctor can legitimately ask me to try stand and touch my toes in order to aid a diagnosis we’d all feel a bit weird if the tax inspector asked.

One account and one account only for individuals mandates total transparency from the citizen. It requires complete faith in government. It discourages any transparency on the part of that Government. That’s not very balanced, is it?

WIBBI citizens could create as many accounts as they wished? Can’t people decide for themselves how much sharing to allow? Most people would have only one account setup, and run all their dealings through that. But those who choose to separate them out into multiple accounts should be able to do so – at the cost of duplication of mandatory information for services on different accounts.

Many people have multiple online identities. They have a work email address and at least one personal email address. If people act in different roles (eg chairman of a local organisation), that is likely to provide yet another. While those identities (email addresses, or phone numbers) are the same person, it is the identities and actions carried out in them that is important.

But even that isn’t enough.

This system is not being built for this Government, or even the next Government. It will exist, evolve and continue for many years.
While this Government claims to be trustworthy and honest, from their advertising around the time of elections, they don’t believe that anyone else would be. Yet they’re building something that they wish to exist for many decades.

Long term governance is vital. Safeguards can be built in. Best practice (and the Data Protection Act) state that you should be able to edit and correct any information held about you – and that should include deletion of personal data from the system.

But even that is irrelevant if policies around it change. And should that ever change, or for any reason at all, users must be given an easy option to destroy their records. When citizens have control of their data, and the government treats it as the data of the citizen, not their own, you have a basis for trust.

Abuse will always be possible by those who are sufficiently motivated and skilled Their actions must be traceable, allowing abuse to be dealt with through the legal system. It’s already illegal. If we just unplug the computer, preventing any use and abuse, the attacker would just raid the filing cabinet instead. What matters most is the steps that are taken to prevent and mitigate abuse at a system level, the steps a citizen can choose to take, and the response of the authorities when abuse is detected.

For this to work people have to believe that the civil servants responsible for the system will care more about the privacy and rights of a nameless citizen whom they do not know and they will never meet, than the arbitrary target, aim or policy of the current Government. This belief comes not from spin, style or structuring of a policy; but because the substance and transparency of what is being done presents a convincing case.

The above is impossible if you care more about perception than reality, and focus on the headline in the current news cycle.

However, if you look up towards the horizon and care about potential impact on all people in 20 years, both those registering now and those as yet unborn, then it becomes possible.