22 Mar 2005

Does “Tagging” Really Work?

Gaudy BBC3 TV broadcast a confusing but troubling report last night on the failure of “tagging” and “curfews” to control criminals. These same controls have now been extended to suspected terrorists.

The programme claimed that “tags” could be removed; enforcement staff were overwhelmed; IT did not work and published statistics were unreliable.

Perhaps IT will not solve crime and terrorism, after all?

 

LSE Report Blasts ID Cards

The LSE has published a very thorough Interim Report on the UK Government’s ID Project. It demolishes both the government’s published aims and their proposals.

Should such repeated high profile failures raise questions about the future of the Home Office: Has the current Home Office itself become a major threat to the UK?

 

20 Mar 2005

Hambledon, Waverley and Surrey take their pound of flesh

Just got a gobsmacking council tax bill. Looks like I’ll have to stay single in the eyes of the law.

Two things annoy me.

1. The parish (which I love) costs £35.10. The district which is OK costs £231. I accept we need police - £257. But the county, which indulges in excessive traffic calming measures and serves dodgy school meals charges £1534. And Surrey has the cheek to say how proud they are at keeping the increase down to the cost of two pints of milk a week. Forget milk - I want a weekly rebate worth a joint of beef on the bone.

Worse than any of the above is the cost of national services of course, welfare, war, Punch and Judy etc. But the odd thing is when you go beyond that and look at the entire world, which is the level of greatest need, public spend suddenly becomes negligeable. Why should my compassion be mechanically transformed into welfare for Wigan and bombs for Iraq but nothing for Darfur or the Inuit? 

2. On the subject of beef and the county council bill....pricey Surrey includes a helpful-seeming pie chart breaking down the spend. But the slices are all a similar tone so you can’t tell the difference. And they only break it down into categories you cant argue against (schools, the elderly etc). What we need is a pie chart that breaks it down into good things (teachers, carers school meals) bad things (speed bumps, excessive street lighting) and pointless things (excess admin, bureaucracy, pensions, underemployed staff, junkets, staff travel allowances, phone bills, IT, nuclear bunkers for local dignitaries). If they did that it would be easy to rant about how they should cut out the bad things and the pointless things, and just do the good ones. We could have some good wibbies.

But presenting local government as they do making everything seem as if it has a purpose is just spoilsport.

And what’s with these valuations (see below)? Where can I buy Band A houses (under £40k)? I’ll have half a dozen please. 

 

Tom Fuller mystery shops for a medical prescription

Tom Fuller describes medical prescriptions on his new blog, and decides the encounter could be a happier one. He says the

NHS sets up its arrangements without thinking of me, or of the surgery I visit. I would imagine that they set a quarterly limit for duration of prescriptions sixty years ago for reasons that are not applicable today.
Now, it would appear to me that savings would be significant if this process were automated. Regular information exchanges are exactly the type of transaction that IT is designed to cope with, and using alerts and emails would probably wring about 99% of the costs out of the NHS investment in this particular procedure. Honestly, they could bring about dramatic improvement without IT investment—they could just change my prescription frequency from quarterly to annual. But the true problem with the NHS is that they are blindly following a guideline, slavishly propitiating the forms of bureaucracy without remembering why they are in business. The NPfIT may or may not cause them to wake up and examine why they do what they do. I suspect that if it doesn’t awaken them, the project will fail.
I also suspect that had they awakened 10 years ago, the NpfIT would scarcely have been necessary.

You would think, given how into drugs the NHS is, that it would have an exemplary process for dishing them out. I wonder what would be the right performance indices to compare NHS drug distribution with the model that has emerged on the streets.

 

19 Mar 2005

Companies House: Daft Sign-up Process

Before filing your company’s details online, you have to obtain a special “security code” and an “authentication code.” The security code arrives by email but the authentication code is posted to the company’s registered office. However, the process is both daft and obscure.

The Companies House web site appears aimed more at selling company information rather than at making it easier for companies to file their statutory information:

 

17 Mar 2005

Identity and the burden of moral responsibility

Over at the Identity Corner Stefan Brands is really getting into his stride.

Albert Einstein has said: “In our time, scientists and engineers carry a particularly heavy burden of moral responsibility, because the development of military means of mass destruction is dependent on their work.” As identity architects, I believe we bear a similar responsibility for how we design distributed identity systems that are intended for use well beyond the enterprise. Identification architectures are all about power relations; as such, when we design identity architectures for general societal use we are in effect cementing power relations into our societal fabric. The way we do this has potentially far-reaching implications.

As I have been arguing from time to time on this personal blog (notably here and here), the powers that today’s enterprise identity management systems would give to government when widely adopted to digitally manage and exchange identity information on citizens would be unprecedented. Of particular concern are distributed identity architectures that revolve around all-powerful central organizations that house the capability to electronically track and trace individuals in real time wherever they go. Adopting such panoptical identity architectures for intra-enterprise use may be fine, but for government identity management infrastructures the situation is entirely different.

God bless the blogosphere!

 

14 Mar 2005

Lady + Man = confusing tribal antics

A tribal chief called Stephen Ladyman is claiming credit for the exemplary pregnancy of a young woman called Linda. But it’s not like the Blunkettry, and not a resigning issue. They call it an exemplar, they don’t say what it really is, but it seems a deliberate attempt to create an inspiring new myth, leading to renunciation of smoking and other improvements. - more below -

 

The tribe swells…

The tribe is swelling in numbers. This isn’t about reproductive capacity however, more an unanswerable business model in which sales revenues are simply decreed and there is no competition. Like a tapeworm or fungus, the only limiting factor is the risk of killing off the host organism. 

 

11 Mar 2005

Stevenage Supermarket Shoppers Scorn Scare

So, not everyone is terrified: I’d just reached the checkout of a large supermarket when an especially annoying siren started: No-one, including the staff, knew what it meant. There may also have been a slight smell of burning.

In the absence of instructions, despite the recent tragic fire in a nearby tower-block, shopping continued un-interrupted. Perhaps that helped Ken Follett’s MP wife to decide which way to vote this week?

 

Something which … hardly works!

It’s that time of year: I’ve just renewed my NHS Prescription Pre-payment Certificate, on-line. The process was disappointing.

The NHS “Prescription Pricing Authority” kindly sent me a reminder, offering the option of paying via their web site. I found my old certificate and logged onto their web site, expecting a slick convenient process; but the process was very poor:

 

Where shall we send our first expedition?

If we could do an intense “mystery shop” of one public service, which should we do first?

- making a planning application? My friend Kate says this drives her nuts
- series of queries about council tax - we learned a lot doing this in 1993
- change of address - there was meant to be a one stop shop by now
- planning and making a journey - the transportdirect thang
- having an operation - like that poor shoulder-woman who got dragged into the Punch and Judy show
- social services ie arranging public care for someone being looked after at home - long-term domicilary care. Bit of a hot spot at the moment it seems
- applying for a passport - like we all do once in a while. Going rather better, apparently
- applying for a driving test

Design Council did voting and jury service to good effect. We’re more after an information or transaction service, which could be e-enabled to good effect, which lots of people use, and where there is a wide variety of service providers (difference councils, or Dweep offices or whatever).

Any thoughts or other suggestions - post here or email me. 

 

After a “Sunset” … a new Dawn?

For several decades, discussion of “values,” “responsibilities” and “ethics” has been taboo: Anyone proclaiming the importance of traditional values such as tolerance, mutual respect, responsibility, self-discipline etc. has been ridiculed; sometimes to be pursued until a human failing is discovered and widely publicised. Politicians have sought to impose their beliefs by ever more complex, intrusive and authoritarian laws.

However, the recent debates about the response to terrorism have at last caused the pendulum to start swinging back: The increasingly authoritarian but “valueless” culture of recent years has failed. Recent debates and obituaries like this show that more people are now becoming interested in devising a set of shared values and ethics which could enable us to co-exist on this crowded, fragile planet.

 

Angelic love and loathing in the London Borough of Camden

What is Camden Council like? Should we think of an inept mechanical bureaucracy aggressively hoovering up cash? Or an angelic loving community, helping the needy and dispensing free brownies with a caring smile?

It’s both at the same time.

Last night I drove to Queen Sq WC1 (site of the infamous motorcycle theft - qv) to collect partner and chattels for the weekend. It being after 8pm, I parked unobtrusively on a double yellow line underneath a blackened and illegible sign. Inside the Gallery there was a Camden Council party going on, to launch an initiative to help women start small businesses. They had good food, I hadn’t had supper, and verily they ministered unto me even unto fabulous brownies in an almost angelic manner.

Meanwhile, just yards away, different natives from the very same tribe were mechanically glueing a little plastic envelope on my car with threats and demands for money. Just obeying orders. Not texting me to say “Excuse me; you may have misunderstood our regulations. Might you perhaps move your car?” Just sticking the bill and scurrying into the night, leaving me to face the debt collectors or to argue the toss via endless call centres.

You guessed it - the illegible blackened sign turns out in daylight to bear not the Ideal message “Welcome to Camden. Please park here and join us round the corner for some brownies” nor even the perfectly sensible “No parking here during the busy day, but it’s cool after 7pm” but the fateful “No parking 6am to midnight”.

What next? Argue the toss on grounds of illegible signage? (To be fair, Camden did once relent over my parking at an out-of-use bus stop - I complained, and they lost their paperwork so paid up). Issue an FOIA request for evidence that the residents of Queen Square WC1 want parking restrictions until midnight? An FOIA request to ask who baked the brownies, including if possible the recipe? I’m not sure - glad of suggestions. But £50 buys a lot of brownies I reckon.

 

08 Mar 2005

UK Feedback has a home and some friends

While we wait to hear what JRCT does, Geoff Mulgan has invited UK Feedback to set up in the Young Foundation. The splendid Simon Tucker there runs a service called Launchpad, designed to sense check and kick start new ideas of social value.

That’s exactly what UK Feedback needs, and Simon also seems to like the idea.

So then plan is we have a Founding brainstorm in Bethnal Green on Tuesday 5 April. I’ll set out how I see UK Feedback working, and take comments and suggestions. Then Simon and I will draw up a project plan.

If anyone wants to come please drop me a line.

 

Beard ID Cards!

Today’s Computer Weekly reports Bruce Schneier’s disdain for ID cards and expensive but ineffective airport security checks. Perhaps “bearded ones” will yet save our liberties from assaults by callow youths?

 
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Ideal Government

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