WRITTEN ON August 30th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Ideal Goverment - project

Now that Kable (the Ideal Government mothership) has become part of Guardian News & Media its time to take stock of where Ideal Government has got to since September 2004. Shall we do more, or pack it in?

We’ve written a decent-sized book here. The stats say 1293 articles over 79 pages, 1846 comments, 171 trackbacks (not counting the growing amount of comment and trackback spam I’ve deleted in recent weeks), 13m hits and 394,000 home page views. Our visitors come from here, according to Clustrmaps (whose user of the month award we won during the UK EU Presidency. Alexa says that 0.000045% of Internet users visited the site which ranks it the 1.29millionth most visited web site (up 843,000 places on the previous quarter. Let’s face it, we’re part of the long tail, and that’s where we belong.

For me the core insight was that the Ideal Government conversation quickly questioned the assumptions behind the conventional and supposedly self-evident wisdom of government’s “transformation” strategy. That was, and still is, centralising, clunky, insecure and not respectful of people, their dignity and how they wish to be treated. Instead, the collected wisdom of contempory IT practitioners, service designers and consumer advocates that shared their ideas around the Ideal Government “wouldn’t it be better if…” theme quickly and repeatedly pointed to

– the quick wins available by doing things in the sort of smarter ways the contempory Internet makes possible
– the power of co-design, co-creation or what the Tampere EU public services conference dubbed co-governance, and
– the need for a foundation of trust based on honest science and respect for human dignity.

Ideal Government spawned real-life meetings: rehearsals at the October Gallery for key presentations and talks, presentations at the EU Manchester summit, for global government CIOs meeting in Guadalajara (who on the whole were a bit miserable, to be frank) and the splendid EU public services gathering in Tampere Finland, and Chatham House rule dinners of the same name which have started to break down the big tricky subjects we tackle with some of the people who matter most because they can actually do something about it (each of these written up on the blog). We’ve experimented with Ministerial blogging (and succeeded in the sort of way that experimental jazz does, ie not really), ran a maps mashups competition, tried to collect pertinent art (and there is so much more) and tracked much honest work and effort going on around that most malevolent and odious of government IT policies, the national ID register and card.

And above all, our proudest collective achievement to date, it triggered The Sensational Ideal Government Walk-Thru Experience now known by the more reasonable title ThePublicOffice

It seems to me, almost three years into rehearsing this question “what do we want from e-enabled public services” that the agenda is clear. There’s a small and willing community who “get it” and have a clear vision based on good science and compassion for their fellow human beings. But reality and present trends – CfH, ContactPoint, e-borders and the national ID programme – are far from ideal. The job of creating e-enabled public serivces formally designed to meet people’s real needs is barely started and the obstacles, inertia and resistance are daunting, colossal. Call it incompetence or “forces of darkness”, things are conspiring to make life worse – more intrusive, expensive, inconvenient and annoying – before it gets better.

It’s great to feel some key people know where we’re trying eventually to get to. But I do feel the need to think through what is the role if any of IdealGov in helping us get there.