Ideal Government Europe

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Text of talk byWilliam Heath at EU Ministerial e-Government conference, Manchester 24 Nov 2005-11-24

I’d like us to think of e-Europe as a new, man-made complex system
… to share with you some themes from an on-line conversation we’ve been having in the UK and now across Europe called Ideal Government
…and I want to talk about Feedback mechanisms as we set out to Transform Public Services

SEE SLIDE SEQUENCE: BIO2

This is my favourite scientific experiment of the last 20 years. Eight people, plants, soil, air, water, fish, insects and animals including a goat were

hermetically sealed into a space station on earth called Biosphere2. They knew every input, they watched and monitored every trend with every instrument they could devise.

Just as well, because CO2 reached worrying levels and they lost oxygen. One person – an art restorer by profession – says she warned them that concrete would absorb oxygen. Anyway they took in more oxygen, sealed the concrete surfaces and survived.

When we create quite new complex systems unintended consequences are entirely to be expected. We need feedback mechanisms, and we need to listen and act on them. And amid all the noise out there might be someone who sees the world differently from us trying to warn us what can go wrong.

e-Europe isn’t a Biosphere, but a Noosphere –a new complex system of intelligence and knowledge. It’s not simply a market - we’re all in e-Europe together – the whole of culture, business and civil society. Getting e-Europe right means
• Doing it for Citizens and customers of e-enabled public services, and
• Engaging with critical friends – the doubters and Cassandras who spot unintended consequences and worry about what wil go wrong. A good example is the European Digital Rights network EDRI, currently campaigning – for very sound reasons – against plans across Europe for systematic mass data retention

SEE SLIDE SEQUENCE: KABLE EUROPE ICT SPEND

We’re surrounded by evidence of progress towards e-Europe. The experiment is irrevocably under way. Europe’s public sector is spending €88bn on ICTs this year, rising to €100bn, according to Kable.

Here’s that spend per head and as a % of GDP. It shows three groups:

It shows the high priority given despite relatively low GDP by the Baltic countries, Hungary, Czech, Poland and Malta,

a European norm of significant investment, and

Where the labour markets are tighter and there’s real pressure for productivity, a Scandinavian big-spenders club to which the UK aspires.

We’ve also got new benchmarking studies, evidence from Eurostat, and the award-winning examples we’ll celebrate tonight

There’s a welcome trend towards measuring effectiveness, usage, take up and satisfaction with e-enabled services, and to language that recognises the central role of the consumer/citizen and to businesses on the receiving end of public services.

But €88bn is a lot of tax to be spending, so it’s fair to ask did we ever have a user requirement for e-government? Is it giving people what they want? Would we know?

I started the Ideal Government conversation to ask this, to turn complaints into a wish list – to ask what do we really want, and to say “wouldn’t it be better if…” It’s a blog with 150 registered authors, 1200 articles and comments in the last year. Do join us.

Three lessons quickly emerged. We need

1. Quick wins
2. Co-creation
3. and a Foundation of Trust

The Internet is a rich source of quick wins for smart people. The web, search and syndication tools can make government navigable. People can access and pull just the information they want, cutting out the cost, human error and intrusion involved when government tries to know everything about everyone so it can provide each with what government thinks they want.

As Philippe Baret, editor of France’s Vie Publique says of simple syndication tools– “RSS allows you to break walls between structures without formal agreement.” If anyone isn’t familiar with RSS do check it out: it’s free and has huge potential for government.

Or just look at the quick wins available in mapping.

SEE GOOGLE MAPS OR GOOGLE EARTH

This sort of Military or high-end commercial Satellite imagery has become Commonplace through books, Films and TV. But in 2005 Anyone with a PC and Broadband can zoom in on For free to the UK, Manchester and the GMEX conference centre. It’s much more Fun than my static slides suggest.

These “Quick wins” from search, XML, RSS and mapping are the basis for the second Ideal Government strand which is co-creation.

If the basic message is “let’s design e-Europe for users”…
…the advanced message is “let users help co-create e-Europe”.

Co-creation is well described by Eric von Hippel in his book Democratising Innovation. Users innovate better than producers because users develop precisely what they need and with the brand and style they want. Motivated and proud, they share their innovations with others. But co-creation can be stifled, he warns, by obstructive government policies and over-zealous copyright and patents.

Let’s illustrate co-creation, again using on-line maps.

Google launched its maps on 8 February 2005. The interface was hacked within 24 hours of launch. Instead of prosecuting and closing down the innovators, on 19 May Google published its application interfaces and invited co-creation.

So Ideal Government, with the UK mapping agency Ordnance Survey, held a competition for the best Google maps mashup to use public sector data.

So here are -

- the primary schools near G-Mex, with each pointer linked to the school’s inspection report
- links to local roadworks and traffic jams today
- main BBC news stories in the region
- Links from Manchester to articles in the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia –
- for example, if you really must, read here about a local US-owned soccer franchise (as of yesterday looking for a new sponsor
- the weather forecast from a local firm that wants to sell you a caravan

These aren’t government procurements and projects such as we’ll see outside. This is spontaneous innovation by hobbyists who show off and share their work, and wanted to win a lava lamp.

A final example –anyone driving might want to memorise Spod.cx’s map of Manchester’s speed cameras. Welcome to Britain, world leader in CCTV.

Make government navigable, and Europe will benefit from co-creation, not just by map hobbyists but political campaigners, consumer advocates, tax, health and welfare case workers.

And the less government feels it has to do itself, the more focus and energy it can bring to getting right the third and hardest theme that arose in our Ideal Government conversation which I call the Foundation of Trust. This means the legal, cultural and technical basis that underpins e-Europe.

Public-sector systems should match best commercial practice for integrity, transparency, audit and accountability. They must be resilient and expandable in the face of rapid changes, and not open to subversion by hostile parties – be they foreign governments, criminals or corrupt or incompetent insiders.

The human dignity and rights of Europeans tops the user requirement for e-Europe. We often hear of data sharing described as a benefit – an end in itself. But if people are to enjoy the dignity of any privacy we need maximal anonymity and minimal intrusion.. This is well understood and accepted in some administrations across Europe, less so in others.

The EU-funded Prime project is doing extremely important work to define privacy requirements, suggesting that government systems need an integrated design for maximal privacy, transparent to the user and based on clearly enforced rules.

Principles like these should be integral to our plans for e-Europe. There’s no lack of powerful privacy-protecting technology. It’s just demand for it which is patchy across Europe.

E-government activity which is not deliberately based on a properly conceived and implemented Foundation of Trust, is just activity – it’s not necessarily progress, and it could be the opposite.

Given Europe’s political traditions, open markets and media, its philosophical and technical heritage and a resolve grounded in the memories of the consequences of our conflicts perhaps Europe can be the place which defines an exemplary Foundation of Trust for e-government.

That’s a flavour of our Ideal Government conversation about what we want from e-enabled government. Join us; disagree, take it further.

Let’s now dig further into the idea of feedback. e-Europe needs to evolve on the basis of feedback about what people want and what works.

- Are Europe’s public-sector institutions open to such feedback?
- When they hear it, can they – do they even want to act on it?

As a union of free-market democracies Europe has a set of feedback mechanisms. We can vote, lobby, demonstrate and choose to spend our money on organic food and more fuel-efficient cars. Our opinions and spending habits are relentlessly researched and profiled and our lives reflected in a range of traditional and new media.

But the new e-Europe is an interactive Europe, complete with new and enhanced feedback mechanisms.

Here are some local examples we’ve seen in the UK this month alone.

HearfromyourMP, launched in London three days ago, builds an online relationship with your MP. You sign up by postcode, the MP is alerted and given an e-mailing list and the constituents share a discussion space. It builds on

WRITETOTHEM helps you contact your representative effectively and for free. Madrid University says that only 17% of Spanish MPs reply to email. WRITETOTHEM publishes complete response performances online, automatically.

Users have even contacted their MEPs over 6000 times; 45% of users had never contacted their representative before.

Theyworkforyou.com make the official record of Parliament Hansard searchable and interactive – you can see what any MP has said, follow subjects you’re interested in, and add your own comments to any part of the debate

Paul Hodgkin, a GP from Yorkshire, Launched Patient Opinion this month. It collects stories about the National Health Service and gives health managers unvarnished feedback. With RSS the individual responsible gets precisely the relevant feedback for their specific unit.

Health Managers were pretty apprehensive about this – wouldn’t you be - but so far half the replies have used this service to say “thank you”.

A quarter do raise problems, but generally in a dispassionate and responsible way. Of course Health Trusts want any criticisms removed, but Patient Opinion, which is supported by the DoH, is brokering process to manage even complaints about a named member of staff.

The Internet supports interaction and provides fully automated feedback on web traffic levels or where your site visitors come from – here are
Ideal Government’s European visitors in the last month. This isn’t complicated - it’s a cut and paste of four lines of XML.

So in online e-Europe more feedback is inevitable. When it comes, what are we going to do with it?

Imagine we’re having breakfast in our Biosphere. An instrument reports worrying levels of CO2.

We could just ignore it and die.

We could fool ourselves the instrument wasn’t working correctly, and die.

Or we could accept it, act on it, and adapt our system to survive.

Acting corporately on feedback is not trivial. You can’t do everything your customers want. But government departments can visualise the role of feedback in transforming public services,

SEE JOHN CASWELL SLIDE SEQUENCE

as John Caswell has done here.

Here’s a three-minute glimpse into a process that took US Homeland Security or the UK Work & Pensions department several intense sessions. The detail isn’t essential – my point is just that the effect of customer feedback can be visualised.

K: Here are your ultimate goals and political drivers
I, J: You’ve got a Board and a plan
H: a management process
F: and a brand – the story
E: of what you actually do (shown as these geometric solids)
D: You’re in a world of changing trends and requirements
C: with a set of stakeholders and
B: segmented into groups
A: Your customers who are out here.

None of these elements exists in isolation. It’s an interdependent complex system.

So,
A: your customers start giving you new Feedback – “Child support isn’t working; the GP opening hours are wrong; this call centre wastes my time and asks the wrong questions”
B: It tests front line services and how you segment your customers,
C: but it may affect other stakeholders, or they may have more feedback
D: You may have to accept a trend of changing requirements
E: It may challenge whether your services are still the right ones?
F: Is your brand adequate or does it need to evolve?
F: This needs to get through to the management team,
G: to the board if necessary

H: and in some cases you may need to revise the political framework – for example when evidence shows that arrest, court and prison are working perfectly but we’ve just got the wrong drug laws.

Please don’t worry about the detail – my point is just that it’s perfectly possible to envision the effects of Feedback on the different interlinked parts of a huge organisation. It’s possible corporately to hear and act on it, to adapt, to imagine different outcomes and change what you do. That’s what we mean by Transforming Public Services.

But you cant do it in 15 minutes.

So to conclude

- in e-Europe we are constructing a brand new man-made complex system. Not a Biosphere, but a Noosphere – a system of knowledge.
- Unintended consequences are inevitable
- When we encounter them we must adapt our system according to external feeds
o we can borrow quick wins of on-line innovators
o we can co-create new services with customers
o but we must define a robust Foundation of Trust with a little help from our critical friends

New feedback is available and inevitable whether we seek it or not
To listen to it, to restructure and to adapt will be a fact of life, a duty and a matter of survival.

You’ve had to listen to me talk about feedback for 15 minutes. Now it’s your turn and I’ll be delighted to have your feedback about what you think we want from e-enabled public services.

Thank you.

Ends

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