Power of Information

Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo's policy review on "The Power of Information – a review of information sharing and its uses". It's about new developments in citizen and state-generated public information - (not about individuals' private data held by the public sector).

16 May 2008

CRM turned upside down and inside out

We can’t say who said it or where, but the other night we had a meaty dinner conversation (apologies to veggies). Customer Relationship Management (CRM) hasn’t fulfilled its promise, and new ways of doing things are emerging. To what extent may this hold important lessons for government and public services?

Unfold and continue reading...

The big centralised databases of CRM have their limitations. There’s massive reduplication as every organisation seeking a relationship tries to maintain largely overlapping database records about the same person. Data is harvested with varying levels of consent and deception. Often as the data subject understands this process better it appears increasingly intrusive. Unease creeps in; even distinguished public servants treat CRM as a process which should be subverted eg with false middle initials or misleading information about buying power in the hope of making it work more in line with individual wishes.

At best CRM systems record a slice of history. Amazon’s state of the art CRM might know what you bought from Amazon, but not from Barnes & Noble, nor whether the books reflect your own interests or were a gift, nor how your interests have changed. CRM is not where buyers store their future intentions, and buyers don’t tell CRM systems when their needs change. CRM is expensive and the results can be disappointing. As one public servant with a huge customer base put it: “People don’t sit still long enough for us to devise a service mechanism to address them.”

Public services such as welfare, health, education and child protection are increasingly based on centralised databases. These must be universal, as the clients include everyone – there’s no picking and choosing of ‘customers’ in these parts of the public sector. They are often based on statutory requirements (for example to know quite a lot about a client to whom welfare payments are made). Over the last few years, the declared policy intention has been that such public services should also become increasingly personalised and customer-centric: the one-size-fits-all approach is no longer appropriate. Thus both the security-by-control and the personalised customer services agendas have depended on more data being gathered, aggregated and shared, setbacks such as recent data losses notwithstanding.

The news coming over the hill is that CRM is about to be turned on its head by a user-driven model of relationship data. In this “vendor- relationship management” (VRM) model the individual maintains the one comprehensive and up to date version of the ‘truth’, selectively sharing what they choose to with their preferred suppliers and partners. It avoids duplication, keeps the facts up to date, and can make marketing demand driven and therefore far more relevant and effective.

This is of course not how the world of marketing yet works, but contemporary web developments make it possible and a very strong case can be made that it is a huge and imminent trend. Straws in the wind would include search web sites and personalised health records such MS Healthvault and the Google/Cleveland clinic collaboration.

This change would be a fundamental inversion of how relationships are managed. But that’s not to say that it is universally applicable, that it is entirely “right” for public services or should be “sold” to government either in the political or commercial sense. But it does seem intuitively incontrovertible that the locus of personal data management should lie in many circumstances with the individual, and the availability of new tools to manage that data will be an important development for public services as well as the world of commercial marketing.

This raises deep questions about citizen and community empowerment, identity management, ownership of personal data and how we will successfully deliver personalised services.

A buyer-centric, citizen-centric or VRM approach to public services cannot be a universal answer for many reasons. There will remain a digital divide perhaps for generations. It’s essential that services are seen to be fair and equitable, challenging those who try to play the system, and that the benefits of new ways of doing things should not broaden yet further the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Such an approach is clearly inapplicable in certain areas: we’re hardly going to invite people to manage their own criminal records or history of traffic offences. But it is entirely relevant for any customer-like service relationship where the user chooses. There is a role for independently authenticated fields (eg a valid driving licence or NI number) when an essentially user-managed service is deployed, for example when hiring a car.

We caution against accepting a digital token or data field (such as a CRB check) as a substitute for common sense, whether it comes from a user-managed or a centrally managed system: no certificate of suitability removes the need for basic best practice procedures when working with children. Similarly we recognise that there are very real risks of aggregating data, whether it’s the comprehensive picture one individual needs to manage every aspect of their lives (based on perhaps 3500-4500 fields) or the aggregation of “slices” of data about millions of people’s health, child welfare or benefits.

If we look at the example of health records, some of this is professional confidential data. The data subject - patient - has to accept they should not be able to edit or alter their mental health history. But they may well wish to add subjective data, or share parts of their record with non-NHS care providers. This might give the patient a greater sense of ownership and responsibility over managing their own condition. Asthma sufferers might be willing to share their personal data with government (and other services) in return for helpful information about the weather, the geography of pollution and other knowledge which support self-management of the condition. The DoH might be open to interaction with personal health records such as the Google or Microsoft developments. Clearly there’s a risk of pursuing a centralised NHS approach to care records to the exclusion of what appears to be happening in the market. We could waste a huge amount of taxpayers’ money producing the wrong thing.

We’re grateful to the long-term care lobby for the insight that the risk of differential uptake (ie people moving forward at different speeds) should not stand in the way of progress. These are deep questions, and we saw that they challenged some of our deeply held assumptions about the journey to transform public services. That’s a good sign. And there is specific progress: the Government Gateway is piloting user- centric ID for local authority employees, and working on this with ContactPoint in children’s services.

How significant the potential for VRM in public services is perhaps comes down to how active or passive we see citizens as being. Are public services such as health, education or law & order only something we do to people? Or are these desirable community outcomes in which people and communities should and can play an active role?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if government really wants to see personalised public services, choice and contestability, and increasing numbers of citizens actively engaged in creating and managing their own outcomes, it will need to be open to a more empowered user model. An openness to a user-controlled approach to information (even just in a few defined areas to start with) would also go some way towards restoring trust in government’s handling of personal data (or perhaps removing the requirement for such trust). The potential is great: let’s continue to explore how truly user- driven outcomes are likely to be based on user-driven data.

Wrap up...

Posted by Ruth Kennedy on 16/05/08 at 12:36pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: user-oriented · Foundation of Trust · Identity · Power of Information
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03 Apr 2008

Patient Opinion: you can’t fool a good SRO

Picked up by the IdealGov concealed microphones at a recent CIO meeting, spoken (it would seem) by the senior responsible officer for spending £25m a year of taxpayers’ money on NHS Choices

“You should see this other site...”

Quite right. NHS Choices’ “voice” function promises to be more expensive and less well moderated than the existing and simple-to-use Patient Opinion. But most serious of all, it won’t be independent at all. The idea is we voluntarily voice our feedback via NHS Choices into a crown copyright publi-private partnership, so future secretaries of state can use our data to make politicised editorials and some outfit like Dr Fosters can mine it as intellectual property. Je pense pas; non, noooooon, non! Geklauten Daten? Nein Danke!

Wibbi: we applied all three core IdealGov principles in one go here. We score a quick win, we use a process of co-creation, and dig deep to build gov 2.0 on a foundation of trust. All we have to do is use the money we’re going to waste on some arm-manufacturing contractor writing a £multi-million Transport-Direct/DirectGov/BusinessLink type EU-rules procured NHS Choices/Voices clunketerium web site. Instead we could use a fifth the money to promote and roll out the creative-commons and not-for-profit Patient Opinion faster. At the very least we could remove the “planning blight” NHS Chioices/Voices casts on Patient Opinion, which works nationally already with simple clean design, exemplary tagging, moderation and flexible feedback options.

JFDDI! Desist! The senior officials know it makes sense. I think the Minister in charge is Dawn Primarolo (not Ben Bradshaw. Or Alan Johnson is top dog at health.) Gordon - have a word would you? [Thought: perhaps we could install an IdealGov-branded Middlesboro’-style talking CCTV camera in #10, so we can keep an eye on the PM and also offer him some top tips at convenient moments 24/7]

Posted by William Heath on 03/04/08 at 10:57pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: Co-creation · Foundation of Trust · Save Time and Money · Power of Information
Comments (1) Permalink

02 Apr 2008

Government rebranding disease spreads to URLs

It’s all very well Cab-in-a-Toffice renaming itself Dburr or Deafferer rebranding as Office of the deputy Prime Minister’s ego. What’s a few new brass plates and a corporate redesign between taxpayers? But this sort of thing is wholly unnecessary:

Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:49:46 +0100
From: Adam Bahadoor
To: varioussubjectsdetained@hermajestyspleasure.com
Subject: Government News Network
Message-ID: <47F372DA.363A.00C8.0@coi.gsi.gov.uk>

Dear Detainee

I am writing to you from the Central Office of Information News Distribution Service.

On 1 April 2008 the Government News Network (GNN) and the News Distribution Service (NDS) will become part of COIs News and PR Group. The look and branding of this site have therefore changed, although the services remain the same.

From 1 April 2008 the link - http://www.gnn.gov.uk will no longer exists. You will be re-directed to our new page on http://nds.coi.gov.uk . This will have affect eventually to subscriber of your RSS feed, unless you make the necessary changes.

Happy to discuss further

Adam

Adam Bahadoor
Business Development Manager
News Distribution Service
Hercules House
Hercules Road
London
SE1 7DU

Email: adam.bahadoor[at]gnn.gsi.gov.uk

But Adam...but...but...but

As Sir Bonar would say: “Desist, whippersnappers! And give us back our streams of data!”

WIBBI people thought about the URLs that they wanted people to use…

Unfold and continue reading...

Posted by William Heath on 02/04/08 at 1:53pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Power of Information
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What’s so difficult about updating government web-sites?

Not having received my new biometric bus-pass, I checked the local council’s web-site. This confirmed that the council had already dispatched them and that they should arrive before the end March 2008.

Concerned that my application or “passport quality” photos had been lost, but not knowing which department was responsible, I couldn’t use the council’s online enquiry form or enquire by email.

So, I phoned the council, to be greeted immediately by a recorded announcement that dispatch had been delayed by at least another week. When I asked, the call-centre staff said that it would take more than a week to correct this information on their web-site.

Wibbi: Government and “officialdom” kept their web-sites up to date: So often in recent crises, broadcast announcements have directed concerned people to 0845 or 0870 phone numbers rather than to official web-sites. Surely, a good web-site can handle far more enquiries, far more efficiently than a human call-centre?

Wibbi: These new bus-passes did not require “biometric grade” photos: Many users of bus-passes wear spectacles, but photos usually have to be taken without – presumably to help the digitization process. This means that few users will match their new photos.

Posted by Richard S on 02/04/08 at 11:16am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Save Time and Money · Power of Information
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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

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.

Posted by William Heath on 01/04/08 at 9:27am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Power of Information · "Transformational Government"
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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.

Posted by William Heath on 17/03/08 at 4:26pm
Categories · Power of Information · "Transformational Government"
Comments (2) Permalink

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.

Posted by William Heath on 12/03/08 at 12:42am
Categories · Power of Information · "Transformational Government"
Comments (1) Permalink

09 Mar 2008

Civil Serf: another one bites the dust

*Sigh* Civil Serf is down, after a piece in the Sunday Times. Could just be traffic, but I reckon she cant keep up the blog and hold down her job.

Posted by William Heath on 09/03/08 at 3:35pm
Categories · Power of Information
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04 Mar 2008

David Cameron “mash-up” speech to Tory councillors in Warwickshire

Look what Her Majesty’s loyal opposition came up with last week

The second announcement I want to make today is about information. For decades, information, power and control have been monopolised by well meaning public officials.

Now, because of the internet and dynamic change in our broader culture, we can consign this top-down model to history. We’re entering a post-bureaucratic age, where true freedom of information is making possible a new world of people power, responsibility, citizenship, choice and local control.

One of the best examples is crime mapping. In cities all over America, police forces regularly publish information about crimes in their area. What type of crime, when it happened, and where. Anyone can take this information and overlay it on an online map. This gives the public unprecedented information about crimes in their local area. And it gives social entrepreneurs, drugs charities, and a whole host of organisations to pick out hotspots, see what needs doing and transform neighbourhoods.

But look at our Government at home. It’s still bureaucratic, still top-down and still old-world. It still thinks it knows best and that it should keep all the information.

If you don’t believe me, try getting a supposed freedom of information request on important issues like exactly how taxpayers’ money is being spent. It’s next to impossible.; this is bad for democratic accountability....

Now, if the actual government (die Regierung an sich) were to pinch these ideas (which are already in its fredom of Information report) we’d be starting to get back on the right track. Hey; it would almost be Ideal

Unfold and continue reading...

Posted by William Heath on 04/03/08 at 5:32pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: Co-creation · Online Maps · Power of Information
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23 Feb 2008

Arise Sir Francis: MySociety FoI service

Oh wow. Oh wow. Every bit as exciting - and this is saying something - as the Viva Obama Mariachi is the long-awaited first public sighting of the MySociety FoI service. So what does it do?

It makes it easy to make FoI requests.

It lists central and local government FoI officers, and you can update the list.

It shares the meandering correspondence and the results obtained under FoI (such as a full listing of all the one-man protests outside Parliament). I hope this avoids the absurd ”yes I gave it to you but it’s still crown copyright so if you put it on your website we’ll sue you” insulting waste of taxpayers’ money.

If we all use it, gradually we’ll accumulate an open resource of government data using unfussy contempory web design, managed by people we trust because they perform and don’t have a control-phreak or commercial agenda.

My suggestion is we ask if Cabinet Office wouldn’t mind pointing the now unused domain name “open.gov.uk” at the new MySociety site. Because that says exactly what it does - beautifully designed, no editorial, no nonsense, no absurd Ts&Cs and at no cost to the taxpayer. The site is dedicated to the late Chris Lightfoot, who died almost exactly a year ago.

It’s ethnography in action, it’s open, it’s legal and respectful. It’s efficient (because it’s free and becase each request needs only be made once). It’s transparent, democratic and helps build the foundation of trust (on open source Rails, as it happens). So far there’s only one user - Julian Todd. Let us make it tens of thousands. The potential is immense.

Francis: you’re a legend. Go MySoc!

Posted by William Heath on 23/02/08 at 6:59pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Wibbipedia/MindtheGap · Design: Co-creation · Foundation of Trust · Save Time and Money · Power of Information
Comments (1) Permalink

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!

Posted by William Heath on 18/02/08 at 12:33pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Wibbipedia/MindtheGap · Save Time and Money · Power of Information · "Transformational Government"
Comments (2) Permalink

31 Jan 2008

User feedback on HMRC’s online tax return

So, it’s 31 Jan. In our heady customer-oriented 24/7 world how is the service of paying tax online treating customers?

Not too well, suggests the author of last year’s Downing Street Power of Information review:

Today is the 31st January 2008. That means all around the UK millions of people will be trying to pay their tax - it’s the last day before you start having to pay the government interest.

Where do you go if you want to pay your tax then? How about the HM Revenue and Customs Website?

Brilliant, there it is. Right…. now, erm…. hang on. How do I actually pay my tax? There’s no obvious button! In fact, the link to help you pay is below the fold on my browser, is in about 3 point text, being link number 8 in one of no fewer than 5 lists of links on the homepage. Once you click through the experience becomes even more unforgivably awful. In fact, I can’t actually bring myself to write it up.

Hilariously, there IS a great big homepage link to apply for online tax returns “In time to do it”, even though it’s now too late to apply. Genius - why not warn your users with menaces only to show your own ineptitude in the process: that way they’ll love you more!

This sort of incompetence isn’t as high profile as the loss of those two famous CDs, but it drives people away from the more efficient online services towards more costly phone and paper based transactions, and inconveniences millions of people at the same time.

I can’t add anything first hand. I hate the complexity of the process, and disagree with what is done with my money in my name so much I have to pay an accountant to have all direct dealings with the tribe.

PS: How do you locate the power of Information review? Need you ask?

Posted by William Heath on 31/01/08 at 8:24pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: Co-creation · Design: user-oriented · Power of Information
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25 Jun 2007

Government Response to the Power of Information

"The Government” has responded to Ed and Tom’s “Power of
Information” review. While accepting most of the (with additional work required on 3 of them), they do note
that:

The Government believes that the Reviewers could have painted a more positive picture of the
Government’s progress to date. (link)

While the Government is doing good work, that doesn’t mean that there’s not significant scope for improvement across the huge swathes of government. acceptance of most of the recommendations seems to suggest they get that, and now we have to hope that they will be implemented as well as accepted.

You can leave your comments on the Response.

Posted by Sam Smith on 25/06/07 at 5:14pm
Categories · Power of Information
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08 Jun 2007

Tom and Ed set out their stall: The Power of Information

Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo launched their advice to the government about The Power of Information on Wednesday. It is, in executive summary, pretty cool. It’s written in plain English with no political or Web 2.0 jargon, very expert, and matches a high level of wisdom about what is realistic and achievable with good and ambitious intentions.

Hilary Armstrong, the Minister who commissioned it, was pretty cool at the launch:

There’s a whole world out there growing faster than anything we’ve ever seen before. It’s a fascinating challenge for government, I won’t deny that, and we have to think our way through it more carefully...we can’t put up brick walls or determine the framework.

They show how user-created content helps for example with managing medical conditions, food safety and in local communities.

This report argues that government could now grasp the opportunities that are emerging in terms of the creation, consumption and re-use of information. Current policy and action is not yet adequate to grasp these opportunities. To this end, the report recommends a strategy in which government:
- welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
- supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
- protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage.

it’s probably the first policy report to government written by people comfortable with the contetmpory Internet.It’s certainly the first report to government that has gone up on day one with a CommentonThis version

Look at the “hot words” in The Power of Information (information, government, public, online, services, user
) compared to the hot words in Transformational Government review (government, services, public, shared, information people).

As the Minister (my good pal Hilary) said

We have creative thinkers in this country, innovators driving this forward in ways we can hardly imagine

Posted by William Heath on 08/06/07 at 12:45pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: Co-creation · Save Time and Money · Power of Information
Comments (1) Trackbacks (2) Permalink

02 Jun 2007

London’s history proves the public benefit of public data

The power of shared open access to government date was proved 150 ago with the case of the cholera outbreak and the Broad Street pump. Sam points me to this on John Udell’s blog:

If you’re an Edward Tufte fan, like me, you’ll know the story of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, and of John Snow’s map which showed deaths clustered around the Broad Street pump and which proved that the cause was bad water, not bad air (miasma). That story plays a central in Steven’s current book, and in his talk he points out that Snow was part of a larger cast of characters. One important but neglected figure was Henry Whitehead, a local vicar who collaborated with Snow. Another was William Farr, a government statistician. Although he initially favored the incorrect miasma theory, Farr had the good sense to publish the data that enabled others to find the right answer.

if you won the facts you may not necessarily see the answer. Someone else might make better use of it. They’ll definitely make different use of it.

There’s also a nice Stewart Brand summary of Steven Johnson’s talk about thinking on multiple scales of both time and space. Part of the Long Now lecture series), I think that’s was kicked off this whole thread off (which I haven’t really unravelled - I’ve got what I want and it’s a sunny day outside).

Posted by Ideal Gov administrator on 02/06/07 at 8:27am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Design: Co-creation · Online Maps · Power of Information
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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.

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Power of Information

16 May 2008

CRM turned upside down and inside out

03 Apr 2008

Patient Opinion: you can’t fool a good SRO

02 Apr 2008

Government rebranding disease spreads to URLs

What’s so difficult about updating government web-sites?

01 Apr 2008

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

17 Mar 2008

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

12 Mar 2008

Blogging Minister blogs his Ministerial speech

09 Mar 2008

Civil Serf: another one bites the dust

04 Mar 2008

David Cameron “mash-up” speech to Tory councillors in Warwickshire

23 Feb 2008

Arise Sir Francis: MySociety FoI service

18 Feb 2008

DirectGov, The Economist, and the big IdealGov Wibbi…

31 Jan 2008

User feedback on HMRC’s online tax return

25 Jun 2007

Government Response to the Power of Information

08 Jun 2007

Tom and Ed set out their stall: The Power of Information

02 Jun 2007

London’s history proves the public benefit of public data

Ideal Government

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Power of Information

16 May 2008

CRM turned upside down and inside out

03 Apr 2008

Patient Opinion: you can’t fool a good SRO

02 Apr 2008

Government rebranding disease spreads to URLs

What’s so difficult about updating government web-sites?

01 Apr 2008

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

17 Mar 2008

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

12 Mar 2008

Blogging Minister blogs his Ministerial speech

09 Mar 2008

Civil Serf: another one bites the dust

04 Mar 2008

David Cameron “mash-up” speech to Tory councillors in Warwickshire

23 Feb 2008

Arise Sir Francis: MySociety FoI service

18 Feb 2008

DirectGov, The Economist, and the big IdealGov Wibbi…

31 Jan 2008

User feedback on HMRC’s online tax return

25 Jun 2007

Government Response to the Power of Information

08 Jun 2007

Tom and Ed set out their stall: The Power of Information

02 Jun 2007

London’s history proves the public benefit of public data

Ideal Government

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