"Transformational Government"

On-line discussion about the Cabinet Office e-Government Unit (EGU) strategy. Cabinet Office Minister Jim Murphy has been kind enough to kick it off - the first time a UK Government Minister has ever blogged about a new policy. Comments are due back by 3 Feb, so we'll send all comments in to EGU for then.

23 Apr 2008

Anthropologists baffled by onanistic totem

Ethnographers of bureaucracy will be intrigued by the proposed new symbol of the Gershonite tribe of Odjie-See.

It appears to depict the fallen totem or statue of an onanising male figure. The huge head, arms and bandy legs are in flowing interlocking curves There are no facial features. Only the male member, lying at the centre of the construct, is starkly rectilinear.

Such overt sexual imagery is unusual in the external symbolism of British public service. The inner meaning of the graphic, which is believed to appear on mousemats and mugs as well as brass door plates, remains hidden to modern anthropology.

 

04 Apr 2008

Good dinner with bad memes

I can’t reveal the identity or affiliation of any participant at the tasty and interesting dinner I attended last night. I believe (under the revised Rule) I can say it was at the House of Lords. I can definitely say there are some very dodgy memes flying around.

One is the notion that we can decline to “buy into” the European legislative framework and case law behind the UK’s data protection act and data sharing plans. The European Convention on Human Rights and Data Protection directive have legal force here. We can’t just dismiss them as Euro-constiutional claptrap, insufficiently pragmatic for us Brits (any more than I can say I think our laws on tax or whatever aren’t quite right and that I don’t really “buy into them").

Another is a distinct, probably unintended but seriously wrong elitist vibe which suggests it’s intolerable for the media to intrude into the lives of those who run the country, therefore the top 5% need extreme protection from revelations about their private lives. But when conversation turns to hoi polloi people are spoken of as immigrant tax-dodging scroungers of social services and healthcare. Our national situation is one requiring monolithic ID management and a toxic soup of data sharing. Facing the national problems we do a general loss of privacy isn’t a great price to pay. 

People who desperately need a giro cheque will give away any amount of personal information to feed the kids. That’s why they need every bit as much statutory and practical privacy protection as anyone else. We’re all in this together. Just as we’re equal in the eyes of the law so too the systems we create must be good enough for one and all of us in how they protect our personal data and leave us in control of our own lives.

By all means put casual service-sector workers in businesses with 125% staff turnover (Rentokil, apparently) on 50% emergency tax rates while the employers and the system works out who they are, and that they haven’t claimed their allowances already.

The other weird meme is this self-repairing bubble of mutual self-congratulation. Reasonable people tell you in all seriousness that everything is fine and that Whitehall generally and the CIO profession in particular is doing a great job. The same people will reel off a list of dire specific shortcomings, whether it’s procurement processes, large government web sites, political interference, Transformational Government, Connecting for Health, DirectGov search. But as fast as they acknowledge specific shortcomings, the bubble of self-belief self-heals. I can’t work that one out. Surely there are some mistaken assumptions underlying this?

 

01 Apr 2008

Hey! Power of Info task force to make Wibbies official!

Jam fan Tom Watson, the improbably on-the-case blogging Cabinet Office Minister in charge of Transformational Government announced a Power of Information task force at IPPR this evening. UPDTE: Tom’s speech is here, all beautifully linked (he must have been up till midnight! Perhaps CabOff will also release a pdf in due course grin

Hurrah: it’s to be chaired by Captain Sensible himself: blogger Richard Allan (Nick Clegg’s predecessor as LibDem MP for Sheffield Hallam who now works for Cisco doing government affairs stuff). Most people I’ve met in this entire community turn to Richard for advice on most things deeply political and technical anyway, so Tom is craftily cutting out dozens of middlemen here.

Tom sees the Power of Information agenda as the most important part of his brief. He’s gearing up to “free our data”, arguing that the rationale for trading funds has changed with the times. It’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs, and a new way for government to speak with itself.

He said some other good stuff:
- CoI and Cabinet Office are drafting a social netwoking code. It needs to conform to the letter of the civil service code but also live in the spirit of the times
- Gordon Brown now has a Twitter channel (was that an early 1 April ref?)
- he sees immense potential for internal blogs, wikis and discussion fora to improve how makes policies

This is all pretty, well, Ideal really, and chocabloc with potential Wibbies. What e don’t yet know is how this plays out when it hits every other department and Minister’s agenda. Tom has the power to persuade, but no executive authority or budgetary control over others. Some are keen, others will take some persuasion; it’s the mother of all change agendas. But we’ve got an enthusiastic starting point.

Full terms of reference for the Power of Information “task force” (or “support group”, as non-Thacherites and pacifists might prefer to call it) are TBA, also membership. But from a few smiley-eyebrows in the pub afterwards I detect there are already some promising choices.

 

28 Mar 2008

No sign of NHS-ID System linkage discussions

I’m very surprised. DoH! tells me there is no correspondence between themselves and the Home Office about linkage between the Benighted ID System and probematic Connecting for Health. But it’s quite clear that Home Office made a major bid to forge such linkage, which was robustly rejected by the D’oH! Stuart Craig sens me a polite FoI reply:

Our ref: DE00000284182

28 March 2008
Dear Mr Heath,

Thank you for your email requesting, under the terms of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000, copies of communications between the Department of
Health and the Home Office about the relationship between the National
Programme for Information Technology and the National Identity Register.
Your request was received on 27 February and it has been passed to me for
reply.

I can confirm that the Department does not hold any information of the
nature you have requested. It may help if I explain that there are no
plans to disclose NHS patient information to the National Identity
Register, and no plans for physical or electronic linkage between what
would be two completely separate systems.

If you have any queries about this letter, please contact me. Please
remember to quote the reference number above in any future communications.

Can such a significant and robust exchange have left no audit trail at all? 

 

17 Mar 2008

Channels, marketing and pin-point accuracy: Tower08 and the language of Transformational Goverment

Here are my written-up notes from the panel session intro I did last week. Many thanks to the organisers (to whom I’ve also sent private feedback)

Both our hosts, John Suffolk and John Higgins, know of my unease about the unfolding of Transformational Government and of the outcomes of a cosy bilateral relationship between the CIOs and Intellect. I’m sure that’s why they asked me to be here at Tower 08, and I hope that in exploring that concern I’m doing what they wanted, constructively, and without being either churlish or ungrateful.

Because they have been excellent hosts; we enjoyed a terrific dinner last night in stimulating company. I greatly enjoyed the Minister’s speech (with one quibble - see below).

We’ve been asked to talk about “channels”. Already I’m uneasy. Channels are what broadcasters beam at viewers. The channel is what IT vendors exploit, in one memorable phrase, to “kill the competition and hoover up their footprint”. My specific unease about the language of directive marketing mirrors a broader unease about Transformational Government.

It’s upside down.

It purports to be citizen-centric, but is based on the principle that we the government own the data, and we the government will join it all up, the better to do things to you.

Of course we need to transform government, but my fear is that the underlying motivation behind Transformational Government is not yet right.

We all need financial targets as a discipline. Money makes it possible, and can measure whether we’re doing is really needed. We needed the financial dimension of the Gershon efficiency review. Eithne at Fujitsu needs to meet her targets.

But I question whether money is the right motivator. It’s a poor guide to ethically complex questions. Whether or not we go to war, pursue GM or build supercasinos has tremendous financial implications. But money is not the best guide to what decision we should make in these situations.

Nor is it the best guide to how we should refashion the politics of participation, use personal data, shift into greater co-creation of public services define a mechanical, rules-based relationship between the individual and the state. These are deep and difficult questions.

Let’s get better at two things. We all, not least those who have concerns about Transformational Government and ideas about how it could be approached better, need to express ourselves better and more constructively. And we all need to learn to cultivate a better form of respectful listening so we appreciate the complexities and dimensions of what is being undertaken, and the underlying purpose of what others are trying to achieve.

Personally I’d like to see us reject militaristic language: less of the golden bullets and carpet-bombing. Tom Watson wants to “deliver services to citizens with pinpoint accuracy” as he speaks under the logo of Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms dealer.

Let’s also move on from the language of manipulative centralised marketing. IPS ponders “various forms of coercion” for its ID system. TG talks of sharing of intelligence, driving take-up, exploiting technologies. It’s all focus, target, segment, execute. This is the discriminatory and coercive language of those who cancel 161,00 Egg credit cards, not the respectful, empathetic language of whose who place human dignity at the heart of their plans for public services.

It’s good that the voice of the customer has crept into the margins of the Tower08 event. It’s in the NCC town hall discussions shown as vox pops, Bob Johnston spoke in those terms, also with respect for those on the front line. Alexis Cleveland used emotional mapping to differentiate between the effects of an efficient school-meals decision versus a long-winded one. So that voice is here, and that’s a welcome improvement.

But that voice needs (as Ed Mayo describes it in his NCC booklet “Playlist for Public Services") to become the driving force of what we do. When you listen to it in the right way, it’s very articulate. You may not like what you hear, but at least you have a true starting point.

John Suffolk talks of “citizen-centric” and Tom Watson about open-source government, and the driving principles of the “Power of Information” agenda. If we start to fulfil the potential of these words we’ll be undertaking something really radical and worthwhile. This is not about the centre gathering, hoarding and sharing personal data, or broadcasting through new online channels how many veg a day we should all eat and what a good job our elected representatives are doing.

That’s upside down!

Instead of supporting human dignity, that drowns out creativity, participation, expressions of real need, feedback.

People are largely responsible for their own health, education safety and earnings through their careers. Rowan Williams says we should call people “agents” of public services, not customers or clients, because their role is an active one.

To put this the right way up again, the data should reside with them. They have the greatest motivation for looking after it and keeping it up to date. That puts the person at the centre of public services.

The final project I was involved in at Kable (now part of The Guardian) was ThePublicOffice, which helped service providers practise listening to people with complex service needs, then to rehearse designing services which met those complex needs. They quickly worked out that we need, simultaneously, channels of three sorts. This is easily illustrated based on health care:

1. We need a GP: a professional who is on our side, even to the extent of being pretty sceptical (as we heard from Ben Page) about the NHS
2. We it all goes wrong we need blue flashing lights and A&E, no questions asked (but with the allergy bracelet to hand)
3. Much of the time we need low-cost self-service access to information. NHS Direct online or by phone is fine. There’s no need to ask my address or date of birth, or indeed for any entitlement criteria.

None of these channels prevails at the expense of the others. Each has its time and circumstance. Clearly there are great cost differences.

To conclude, we need to turn Transformational Government right side up again. We need to start to use different language. My vision of the future (since John H asks us all) is that we predominantly control our own data as it relates to our case load for banks, retailers and public services. We use freely distributed open source software on local systems, or on web services such as personalised Google or Microsoft Healthvault. We share data as necessary with the parties we transact with. If we seek to defraud the system we lose the right to participate and the pattern of our activity is revealed, but if we play by the rules we can be anonymous or pseudonymous. Our data is with the person who cares for it most: ourselves.

 

13 Mar 2008

Tower08: TellThemWhatYouThink’s perspective

Crossposted from the TellThemWhatYouThink blog:

I had the pleasure of speaking to the assembled great and good at the Tower08 Transformational Government conference on Monday this week.  I hope that video will be available at some point, and I’ll link to it if it is.

I talked, reasonably predictably, about the resusability of public data, and about why it’s important to embrace the idea that data should be made available in ways that allow people to use it, reuse it, combine it in new and clever ways and produce new, useful tools.

I also pointed out that there is an incredible amount of value to be generated from this data if it can be published in ways that allow more collaboration, and that it’ll be much cheaper in the long run if Government doesn’t try to solve all the problems. I drew a comparison between DirectGov’s fairly awful search facilities and the results produced by DirectionlessGov, which drew both heckles and laughs—an odd response. I am rather surprised to find that there actually are people out there who think that DirectGov’s search is better than Google’s. It’s a strange world we live in!

Being fairly new to the scene, I was most struck by the huge differences in people’s interpretations of what transformational government should be about. In fairness, this shouldn’t have been that surprising: everyone is interpreting it according to their vested interests, which is predictable enough.

At one end, there are people saying that everyone should own their own data, that public data is public property and should be disseminated in ways that make it as useful as possible, that massive data sharing and joined-up delivery of public services through one site is a dangerous folly.

At the other, you have people saying that we need to make identity card systems to share everyone’s data throughout government, that we should make public services usable online by having ultra-secure identification methods, that we need one place to find everything anyone might want from government, and that web 2.0, sharing and mass collaboration are merely the whimsical trends du jour.

I think it’s probably easy to tell where I stand! I’m happy to say that there is a cadre of people in government who also tend towards the former view, and that it is larger than one might think. These ideas are gaining some traction, at least, and that is quite something.

 

Personal-data centric isn’t personal

Becky makes a good point: Transformational Government isn’t person-centric. It’s personal-data centric. There’s a big difference.

There’s nothing “personal” about the personalisation it advocates; it would be truer to describe it as “data-subject-specific”.

 

12 Mar 2008

Blogging Minister blogs his Ministerial speech

Tom Watson spoke at the Trans-Gov Tower08 event, with a theme of open-source government. Apart from some website consolidation (which I still don’t quite get) he promises to do a number of ideal things:

- improving our online content, including minimum standards for the content of remaining websites
- Ensuring that all content held on government web sites is fully accessible to the major search engines.
- Embedding data mash-up into thinking across all of government not just the early adopters within departments.
- Driving through the cultural change in all our communications that sees the internet, mobile and other new media as the norm
- ensuring better innovation and much faster implementation. Build stuff small, test it out then iterate, iterate, iterate.
- capturing the skills, talent and energy we need for change - from within the public service and from outside. Over the next few weeks I hope to say more on this.
- using new media to engage more directly and more effectively with individuals and communities.
and the most frequent question my civil servants will hear from me is, ‘Why not’?

Tom’s prescription for this job seems to be the Power of Information, and I can think of no better basis.

I was also pleased to hear him speak sensitively about the Civil Serf position. Granted she transgressed, but the IdealGov principle is that if people complain about something it is because they still care. The civil service needs such people, and to draw on their energy. In a transparent, open, self-confident administration how big a misdemeanour would it be to describe life as you see it (without breach of confidence) and show you care?  Anyway, Tom is now taking comments on some possible civil-service blogging guidelines, which seems the constructive response.

I spoke on day 2 in a session about channels.

I thought I spotted our new correspondent Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom there, but he must have left very early. 

 

22 Feb 2008

DirectGov Ts&Cs and the spirit of transformational gov

What do the DirectGov terms and conditions say about the spirit of e-enabled “transformational” government? An innocuous-looking offer of help turns out to be an overt threat for a transgression we’ve already - inadvertently - committed.

In a phrase of Richard Granger’s, it takes you in one step from dealing with Numpty to dealing with Dracula.

On the “about” page, my friend N. points out, it sweetly says:

Linking to Directgov
Directgov welcomes and encourages other websites to link to its information pages. You don’t have to ask permission to link to Directgov but we can provide wording and linking graphics.

...and there’s then a link called

* Get help with linking to Directgov

It’s reasonable to suppose that if you want help you click the link, and if you don’t need help you don’t. There’s nothing to suggest that “getting help” actually means “here is a set of arbitrary and unenforceable rules by which we insist you abide if you link to us”. If you ask for the “help” what you get is this (or see extended text below).

By creating a link, asserts DirectGov, you have accepted all these Ts&Cs. But does linking need permission as a matter of law? As N. puts it:

If you came to a building on a public road, and saw a notice on the outside to the effect that you could if you wished put up signposts on your own land pointing to the building, on condition that they described it as the architectural marvel of the town, you would think it absurd. And you would be right.  No permission is needed, and no conditions can therefore be placed on granting it. I think the same is the answer to linking to web pages.

This idea of saying that “by linking to Directgov you are deemed to have signed up to the terms and conditions” won’t wash. Most people linking will be unaware of these Ts&Cs. You’d never be aware of them unless you clicked on a link asking for “help” linking to DirectGov. Most of us manage to link to other web sites without asking for help. I only clicked because I’m curious.

IdealGov has many links to DirectGov, dating back years. DirectGov (whatever that entity may be) therefore asserts I’m bound by their terms and conditions of how to describe it, use its logo and material, and what sort of content I can have on my on site. They insist I describe DirectGov as “Directgov - public services all in one place”. But I’m already on record describing DirectGov (unfairly, The Economist says) as a “random generator of self-referential public-service information”. I didn’t mean that as a defining and complete description of everything DirectGov aspires to be, or suggest they adopt it as their strapline. But I maintain it’s a fair description of DirectGov’s search capability, especially compared to the Google-scraper DirectionlessGov.

(IdealGov has far more links to DirectionlessGov, which doesn’t editorialise, searches better, and (we now have to add) doesn’t impose unreasonable, intrusive and unenforceable Ts&Cs under the guide of “help”.)

As N. puts it: “It seems especially obnoxious for a government site to try to dictate how it is described.”

And what about this:

Removal of links - If we contact you to remove your links to Directgov, you must do so immediately.

Can I just contact Google and require it to remove all links to here immediately? IdealGov doesn’t fall into the various categories of sites that are proscribed from linking to DirectGov, but it is critical. That’s a matter of free speech. It’s meant to be constructive, and we try to say “wouldnt it be better if...” but people don’t always take kindly to criticism.

I take the view, and it’s echoed by many Whitehall insiders, that government is less good at listening, more over-sensitive and insecure just now than most of us can ever remember. This affects how it plans health records, the ID System, childrens’ databases (as much as the war on drugs, terror etc). At the heart of transformational government, where public services are all in one place, sits DirectGov with these eminently unreasonable and ill-thought-out terms.

Do we need a campaign of civil disobedience, linking to DirectGov using non-standard logos and describing it using my late-night throwaway remark quoted in The Economist instead of the strapline they want? Are they touchy enough to issue a wholly unreasonable request that blogs like IdealGov remove all links to DirectGov, including the backdated ones? I guess we cross that unlikely bridge if we come to it.

(Thought: we could tuck away on IdealGov somewhere a page saying that anyone who ever refers to it online, in print or in conversation is obliged to add the words “Do you know, it’s full of ideas about how to save public money, provide better services quickly, have users participate in the design of successful services and dig deeper to create a foundation of trust in e-enabled public services. They really ought to pay more attention to it”. We could then assert unilaterally that “by clicking on any link on this web site you agree to be bound by these terms”. It might work. Not)

 

21 Feb 2008

Google personal health records plan takes shape

The Google personal health record project starts off with a collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, we learn today from something called Webware.

Between 1,500 and 10,000 patients at the Cleveland, Ohio, facility will participate in the project’s test run, volunteering to have their medical records transferred to their Google accounts. The hospital already keeps electronic records for over 100,000 patients in an internal system called MyChart, but when those personal health records, or PHRs, are shared with Google, patients will be able to use them outside of the Cleveland Clinic. Included in the data will be prescription information, medical histories, and details about conditions and allergies.

“Patients are more proactively managing their own healthcare information,” Dr. C. Martin Harris, the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer, said in a statement. “At Cleveland Clinic, we strive to participate in and help to advance the national dialogue around a more efficient and effective national healthcare system.”

“We believe patients should be able to easily access and manage their own health information,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search projects and user experience, said in the same statement.

I saw a MyChart presentation, and I think this will be a whole load better.

Webware also points to other initiatives and explores the privacy concerns

Google isn’t the only tech titan looking to change the healthcare industry. AOL founder Steve Case has launched a new company, Revolution Health; InterActiveCorp has invested in several health-related start-ups; and Microsoft has been working on a medical record service.

But all these “health 2.0” initiatives will inevitably raise privacy concerns, and critics of such projects have already begun to make themselves heard. The World Privacy Forum, which has highlighted concerns about medical identity theft in the past, has already issued a report voicing concerns about third-party PHR systems that aren’t covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which has been in effect since 1996 and requires individuals to be notified when a party other than a patient’s doctor wants to access confidential medical data.

Not only is security an issue, the nonprofit has said, so is the likelilhood that marketers and other corporate entities will be able to exploit otherwise confidential data. The World Privacy Forum has not taken a specific stance on Google’s new project or on others like Microsoft’s.

It’s coming to something, you might think, when the world takes lectures on the best way to store medical records from a leviathan tech company that’s barely out of its nappies, But, weirder still when such a company takes a more sensible approach, and explains it more straighforwardly, and charges us less for it that our own government does.

The PHR advocates make complete sense to me, and make nonsense of our overpriced and meandering Connecting for Health programme. And if there are any cost overruns (or indeed weird unaccounted-for expense claims) it’s their problem, not the generally law-abiding UK taxpayer’s. 

Similar story in the Reg (26 minutes ago - they can’t have had such a big dinner as me); Infoworld etc.

 

18 Feb 2008

DirectGov, The Economist, and the big IdealGov Wibbi…

There’s a flattering reference to IdealGov in this week’s Economist, with a bit of a sting in the tail. But it makes me look like an unconstructive critic, so to be true to the spirit of Wibbi I have to add something. The Economist says (in a piece about e-government/i-government called Look it up on the web)

But directgov has its critics too. William Heath, who runs a witty blog on government reform, idealgovernment.com, describes the website as a “random generator of self-referential public-service information”. That may be a bit unfair. Directgov’s managers agree that the site’s search engine needs improving, but argue that its main role is to package information into useful clusters: “coherent citizen-focused topics”, in e-government-speak.

This begs the question: how could DirectGov be better? Is our criticism unfair, as The Economist suggests? It’s intended to be friendly and constructive, and perhaps I have to do a bit more work to make it that.

What’s the background? This isn’t an official history, but how I see it from off the top of my head. DirectGov replaced UKOnline which replaced open.gov.uk. Each brand change betrays a more prescriptive role. In the beginning was an intention to use the web to help gov be more open. That brings with it transparency, ease of access, trustworthiness. I believe open.gov was conceived by the technically able Mark Gladwyn, a thoughtful and clear-headed telecoms expert keen to open up the possibilities of the web for government.

It would have been great if government had stuck to the task of putting its own house in order, but the dotcom boom drew the politicians and spin doctors into this web agenda. On 11 September 2000 ukonline.gov.uk was launched by a government that by now saw itself as the champion in getting us all online. It squatted on an existing UKOnline brand (remember that footer on our official UK web site which said

The Government-backed service UK online should not be confused with the Internet Service Provider UK Online.

The whole UKOnline stage struck me at the time as an unnecessary and unwelcome piece of rebranding. I still don’t know how much the taxpayer had to pay UKOnline to make them go away. Apparently the PM wanted it to be UKOnline, and that’s what happened. The new UK government webmaster general was not a computer scientist but a spin doctor called Lucian Hudson. He wanted the site to be sticky. It became an editorialising, one-size-fits all mess.

I lost interest. I can’t be doing with the voice of government spin and PR. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of opening up government to reform, improvement, scrutiny and all the good things that create trust and accountability. I don’t want to be told how many veg to eat a day, how to handle savings or what a good job our elected representatives are doing. 

DirectGov was launched April 2004 to hold content, as opposed to just pointing to it. In the spirit of Transformational Government it is citizen-directed, breaking people into groups and telling them what to do. It now has a vast amount of content, all on the direct.gov site, accessible by direct.gov search, A-Z directories and topic guides. The news headline from the Jan 2007 Transformational gov annual review was that 500-odd government web sites would be cancelled and subsumed into DirectGov. I’ve no idea whether there are sighs of relief, howls of outrage or just indifference from the users of those sites, or whether anyone has researched this.

We’ve made a lot of play through the years about how much better the MySoc volunteers’ twopenny-halfpenny DirectionlessGov site is for search - see eg this thread on the Alan Mather site). Hence my criticism quoted above. But it’s fair comment - I disagree with The Economist - and it holds important lessons. The Wikipedia entry covers it and Francis Irving’s challenge is that since people find things by search Direct.Gov should not exist.

This might sound like a counsel of despair - give up, go home, leave everything to Google.  But I don’t think it is.

Government can use the web to do fantastic things. It could become open, transparent and - as we asked from week two of IdealGov - navigable. It could open up data sets to people and business and create new value and efficiency. This is explored in the “Power of Information” Review (pdf). The challenge the authors Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo identified, which the government accepted, was

to maximise the benefits for citizens from this new pattern of information creation and use.  When enough people can collect, re-use and distribute public sector information, people organise around it in new ways, creating new enterprises and new communities. In each case, these are designed to offer new ways of solving old problems.

Its recomendations are that government welcome and engage with the user-generated web sites which have common social and economic objectives (NetMums, TheStudentRoom, Moneysavingexpert); supplies innovators with government-held information when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens; prepares citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information and helps excluded groups take advantage.

This is a really exciting agenda. The DirectGov team is in the right place to do this, and has the right resources. It would be highly illogical to ask anyone else to do it. DirectGov has the right links to other government departments and the resources. It could be the government’s BBC Backstage. It could present the friendly face of government to MySociety, NetMums and the rest of innovative, online NGO-world. It could even be the government’s SourceForge. These activities aren’t expensive, intrusive, editorialising. They attract really smart technical people (who, oddly, sometimes aren’t as expensive as people who think they’re smart and think they understand technology).

The “Power of Information” agenda goes with the grain of what technology wants (as Kevin Kelly puts it) and of what people want (which is after all Ed Mayo’s specialist subject). It’s open.gov with a technically-informed agenda. It could be profoundly transformational. Let’s do it!

 

04 Feb 2008

“Complex health care requires modern IT support”

In the wake of the HMRC data fiasco I wrote to my MP about my concerns about centralised health records. Jeremy Hunt replied within 18 hours (which must be some sort of record), wrote to the Minister, and has now forwarded me the reply - see below. 

 

01 Feb 2008

Britain: “a dark outrider among liberal democracies”

Tim Garton-Ash (aka Bwezhnev) adds his considerable voice to the urgent national concern about the database state. In a Guardian CommentisFree piece he writes

This has got to stop. Britain’s snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don’t think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain...An over-mighty executive, authoritarian busybody instincts at all levels of government, a political culture of “commonsense” bureaucratic judgments, rather than codified rights protected by supreme courts and, until recently, a gung-ho press forever calling for “something to be done”: this fateful combination has made Britain a dark outrider among liberal democracies. The birthplace of laissez-faire liberalism has morphed into the database state. We have more CCTV cameras than anyone. We have the largest DNA database anywhere. Plans are far advanced to centralise all our medical records and introduce the most elaborate biometric ID cards in the world. All this from a government which, having collected so much data on us, goes around losing it like a late-night drunk spreading the contents of his pockets down the street…

. It’s compact, powerful stuff - worth a full read.

He attracts a lot deal of comment, mostly less abusive than other CommentisFree pieces. David Moss asks what the IPS actually does all day:

In any normal business, if you tried to convince the board to market a product you can’t describe to people you cannot name for reasons which, after six years, you still can’t list, you would be ignored. Imagine what the Dragons in the Den would do to IPS if they turned up to make a presentation.

David has done an open letter to get Gordon Brown off the hook arguing that mobile phones already provide the functionality we need from ID cards. He concludes:

The government cannot disregard reality. Reality is daily attracting ridicule to the NIS and daily destroying confidence in the government. The NIS cannot achieve its objectives. It cannot help to fight crime and terrorism or to deliver more efficient public services. Meanwhile, thanks to the global mobile phone network, we already have a superior ID card scheme anyway, so we don’t need the NIS – that is the government’s escape route from mirage and back to reality.

 

30 Jan 2008

“Various forms of coercion…”: Wikileaks meets the ID System

Did you like the sound of Wikileaks? And do you enjoy the regular attempts to open up discussion around HMG’s proposed ID System? If so, you’ll just love this marriage made in heaven: Wikileaks on the ID System

I have to say, what the leaked IPS document - heavily annotated by No2ID - describes is far from ideal. It is not about a participative, user-driven design process. It does not dig deeper to help build that essential foundation of trust. It’s not a quick win. It doesn’t use language or perceptions from the customer’s point of view. It proves they’re making this up as they go along, and happy to lie about their real aims. Dress it up how they will, this project is about immigration and increasingly big government which “does things” to “them” ie us. It’s an authoritarian document, mostly in the passive voice and thoroughly unpleasant in tone.

Gongs away for the author, I reckon, and Wibbi we didn’t have to cough up for their state pension. 

 

27 Jan 2008

Welcome e-Government: servant not master! (in the Netherlands, that is)

I get an email from Matt Poelmans, Director of the Citizenlink - an initiative of the Dutch Government to improve the performance of the public sector by involving citizens. Over in the Netherlands, ‘modernising government’ is to be achieved by giving more responsibility and choice to citizens. As far as the Dutch cabinet is concerned, the required empowerment is being supported by ICTs and the award-winning e-Citizen Charter has been drawn up to help citizens in their new role.

This charter is deliberately written from the citizens’ perspective and consists of 10 quality requirements for digital contacts. Each requirement is formulated as a right of a citizen and a corresponding duty of government. This is not to say that a citizen has no duties. A citizen is not only a customer of services, but also a user of provisions, a subject of law and a participant in policy-making.
The charter, meant for both citizen and government, is not mandatory, but - brilliantly -:

is based on the principle: Comply or Explain.

 
Page 1 of 5 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »

Ideal Government

Let's say what we want from e-enabled government. Let's observe government first-hand. Let's say "Wouldn't It Be Better If" (WIBBI). Become an ethnographer of bureaucracy today! It beats getting frustrated with public services.

Categories

Comment

Anyone is free to comment. Or mail with an article if you want to be an author. I'll post it up and send you a password. This whole thing is supported by Kable.

Sponsor

Authors with password: click here to post

BLOGS etc
 Bruce Schneier
Jeff Jonas, IBM
Jerry Fishenden
Headshift
Ian Brown
Kim Cameron, MS
Matthew Somerville
Public strategist
Richard Allan
Robin Wilton, Sun
Sam Smith
Stefan Brands, Credentica
Toby Stevens, EPG
Whitehall Webby
Will Davies

CRITICAL FRIENDS
 Action on Rights for Children
Big Opt-Out
FIPR
Light blue touchpaper
NHS23
No2ID
Perfect e-democracy
Spy blog
Verified Voting

PERTINENT ART
ACLU privacy pizza
Very model of a notional identity
Swizz of the cards
Handelsman: NSA wiretaps
Handelsman: US spying
Wearcam
Googlezon
Three dead trolls
Stefanos Pantagis

ESSENTIALS
Cluetrain Manifesto
RAE Dilemmas of Privacy
NCC Playlist for public services
Sousveillance
Stefan Brands' book summary
Ross Anderson book

Engelbart Mother of all demos
OTHER ID/SECURITY
 ID theft spy
Planet Identity
Pledgebank for refuseniks
Home Office ID cards
Credentica
Ann Cavoukian, Ontario


MYSOCIETY & SAM'S STUFF
 MySociety/
They work for you
Fax your MP
DirectionlessGov
Comment on This

...and the original
Stand ID card campaign
PUBLIC SERVANT BLOGS
 David Milliband
Read my day
Lynne Featherstone MP
David Copperfield - police
Roy Taylor, Kingston
ReadmyDay
Bill Sticker - parking
Ealing Magistrate
Cllr Andrew Brown
Reynolds/Ambulance

MAPS MASHUPS WE LIKED...
 Plymouth Schools
Ben's UK speed cameras
5-day weather forecast
House sale prices
g-Traffic info
Place-O-Pedia

For Google maps mashups see
 Googlemapsmania blog

ADVISERS, NGOs
 Advice now
Advice Services Alliance
Advice UK
Citizens' Advice


Old stuff
RSS in government blog

Authors

Member List

Sign up for new articles

Locations of visitors to this page

Copyright

Creative Commons License - Some Rights Reserved Protect your Bits. Support ORG. Open Rights Group

Designed by...

visit ScoreCommunications Ltd

Statistics

This page has been viewed 987922 times

Entries: 1515 | Comments: 2364 | Trackbacks: 206
Most Recent Entry: 05/04/2008 10:14 am
Most Recent Comment: 05/10/2008 03:27 am

Members: 185 | Logged in: 0 | Guests: 77
Most recent visitor: 05/12/2008 10:58 am
Most visitors ever: 443 on 10/12/2005 02:21 pm