24 Sep 2004

Offer accepted! We have a deadline!

We’ve just got a date to present Ideal Government to new government CIO Ian Watmore - an hour on 4 November.

This is terrific, as I imagine everyone is desperate to get into his diary. Vast numbers of business & IT people inside government need to meet him, and every supplier that ever wants to sell anything into the £13bn public sector IT market wants to tell him their story.

So all credit to Ian for still being open to ideas from outside, and thanks to Isobel Jones for diary work. This focusses the mind somewhat on what the Ideal Government brainstorm needs to deliver.

In my presentation I’ll aim to explain the Ideal Government process and who took part. Then to set out by category - staying healthy, engaging in politics, getting welfare and assistance etc the wish list we’ve put together. I think that’s it.

I’ll then upload the presentation to the site, and hope to do a pdf also (8 pages max).

Posted by William Heath on 24/09/04 at 8:10am
Categories · Ideal Goverment - project
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23 Sep 2004

The Ideal Government Project, Part I

William’s question is about outcomes, end products.

I also think we need to address how projects are created and proceed. The two are not unrelated. By modifying how projects are researched, selected, designed and developed, and the people involved and the boundaries of the problem, we can radically alter the nature of what is created.

Take a for instance. Isobel Harding recently described the work being undertaken by the Local e-Democracy National Project. Looking at the Project’s website, I get the distinct impression that the idea is for local authorities to learn from other local authorities. But what about all the exciting projects that have been developed - innovatively and highly cost effectively - in the voluntary sector? Is this self-limiting approach a consequence of those involved in such projects being local authority people themselves, I wonder.

When I asked Isobel about tools - which is what she said they were promoting - she mentioned, amongs other things, avatars. Those in the not-for-profit sector groan. Been there, done that, sounds trendy but is largely a waste of time...Almost inevitably, the public sector seems to be - a few years? - behind the rest of us. There’s perhaps a wish to learn from best practice, but only from public sector practice. What about learning from the mistakes and achievements of the private, or not-for-profit etc. sectors? What about saving money - that can then be spent more productively - by not trying to reinvent the wheel?

I don’t think this is so much a question of ‘not invented here’ (though you do see this in any sector). It’s more that the public sector has not really figured out how to relate to the rest of society: it’s a little trickier, the structures are different, the relationships are not established, and so maybe it’s easier not to.

It has to be said that other-sector initiatives may also seem a little scary to those in government. They Work For You - currently still in beta - has parliamentary proceedings with self-posted comments from ordinary people. How scary is that?! But in this context scary is interesting rather than bad. Risk is something that needs to be taken on board, but with an acceptance that there will be some failures as well as successes (and this is perhaps a good reason why we need to move away from the Public Accounts Committee model of accounting for what the public sector does).

I would encourage people in the public sector to explore what’s going on out there, outside their own walls. There are some very bright people with some very interesting ideas and applications who are already making things happen, and who are largely doing this as a labour of love. They’re not getting the funding they truly deserve. You need them and they need you.

Cross-posted from City of Bits Blog

Posted by Louise Ferguson on 23/09/04 at 10:45pm
Categories · Political engagement · Across the Board
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The Dutch looked at constitutional implications of e-gov

The Dutch seem to be trying to rethink e-government as part of their EU presidency, which is welcome.

Holland is notable in having established a special committee, sort of akin to a Royal Commission in the UK, to examine whether citizens need different constitutional protections in an e-enabled world. By and large they decided it didnt, ie that existing constitutional safeguards were sufficient and carried forward fine.

I suppose that underlying ideal e-enabled government is a really sound constitutional basis, so that we know where we stand, and the code supports the law. Some MPs take the view for example that it’s not appropriate for the UK to have an ID system while people do not have explicit constitutional protection.

Does anyone know a really good constitutional expert who also understands e-government? It would be very good to hear from them, so we could try to set out the underlying principles. We may not have a Royal Commission doing it, but the bloggers can, and afterwards we can all use knighthoods in our email addresses.

Posted by William Heath on 23/09/04 at 5:33pm
Categories · Political engagement · Across the Board
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Tax with Nectar cards?

For hardcore pacifists having to pay for war and for preparations for war is morally indefensible. It’s perfectly rational to believe that peaceful conflict resolution may be the harder path, but that going to war is something we just have to get over, like slavery.

Its one of the strongest arguments for a degree of hypothecation in taxes.

Imagine the opposite - that supermarkets worked like elected government. We’d all elect a food supplier, then - say - have Tesco delivering bags on your doorstep for five years. Inevitably it would be the things other people liked - mushy white bread, plastic sausage tubes filled with mechanically extracted mush, fruit air freighted in from Kenya or misleadingly stamped as grown in Israel. They’d direct debit you arbitrary amounts. They might subject you to a means test, but wouldnt ever enquire if you were vegetarian or if broccoli gave you wind. After five years everyone would be so fed up they’d vote in, say, Sainsbury. We’d get five years of own brand baked beans, oven chips and Sunny Delight instead.

Ideal e-enabled government would make paying tax easier. It could also start to make it more expressive. The ideal Inland Revenue would send you a precompleted tax return, as they do already in Sweden and I think Denmark, with a polite letter.

It might say

“Dear taxpayer, Here, here from our highly confidential and well-protected database, is what we reckon you earned from salary, dividends, share sales, rent etc. We believe you’re entitled to the following allowances for being extra tall, helping probationers and having seven children. This pleasantly low sum is therefore what we believe you owe HM Treasury. If that’s all correct there’s no need to any further action, other than to indicate here how you would like to see the discretionary part of your taxes spent.”

You could then uncheck the spend on things that kill people, and select instead things like public transport, community policing, drug treatment centres, and renewable energy.

Two weeks later the Chancellor takes the management summary to the PM and shows the all too predictable trend.

There might follow a difficult phone call to the White House.

“George, remember we said we were with you all the way on Iraq? Well, the numbers just came in and the taxpayers just won’t buy it.” “Gee, that’s terrible. We were all ready to go. Did you give them the dossier?” “Yes, we had it emailed to everyone but it didnt work. Perhaps they thought it was spam.” “Did you have that fancy tattoo and air show and show them all the new weapons?” “Of course, but they voted to put them straight in the expanded Imperial War Museum.” “Weird.” “Yeah, sorry George.” Clunk.

Obviously we elect people to decide priorities for the nation,and to some extent they make difficult decision based on spooky information that can’t be generally shared. But it is morally objectionable to extort money from people for purposes that in all conscience they find intolerable.

What might be discretionary would be a legitimate area for vigorous public debate. But feedback in the form of diverted flows of money is a lot more expressive than opinion polls and endless chattering and the odd vote. And ideal e-enabled government could make that easy and fun to do.

Posted by William Heath on 23/09/04 at 5:15pm
Categories · "What do we want?" · Across the Board
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Lloyd Davis wish list for ideal e-enalbed government

Lloyd Davis wrote this ages ago and I only just found it by accident.

I want e-gov projects to be right-sized
I want projects to be grown up about risk and unafraid to be imperfect.
I want projects to be open and accountable
I want some assurance that the money is being spent wisely
I want every single project and every single public servant to understand that installing the technology won’t make the change all by itself.....you will have to do the job of government differently, you will have to accept that times have changed and what really open government really means - it’s scary and unpredictable, but much more worthwhile than hiding behind those bomb-proof curtains.
Yes we will moan, yes we will groan, yes we will say you’re wasting our money, yes we will point out the obvious solution that you’ve entirely missed. And yes, we will be wrong too and sometimes rant without good reason - but that’s what people who are paying for a service are entitled to do.

Full text below.

Unfold and continue reading...

Ideal Government Project

The Ideal Government Project says:

“The UK is spending a lot of money and effort computerising government. Let’s get a clear idea what we want it to look like when it’s done. Dream a little, and help set out the wish list. Otherwise we might end up with something we did not want.”

Louise helpfully points out that it would be a good start if the public sector learned a little, and made use of the clever people in other sectors who’ve already been there, and I agree, though I do (naturally ) have some sympathy for the managers (as opposed to the politicians) who are implementing e-government.

It’s a bit annoying with the site as it stands that there’s a hurdle to contributions - it maybe is just my perception and it may be really simple, but it’s simpler for me to blog here and link than to request the ability to post something longer and broader than a comment on something someone else has said.

William Heath tells an interesting story about data use in Finland. My take on government’s use of data about me is this: the problem is not in initial capture and first use, it’s about what happens to it then, how secure it is, how I get to know what it is, how I get to change it if it’s wrong, how I get to change it if it changes, whether I get a choice about whether it’s stored or not, whether I have any control over who else sees it and whether I have any control over what use they put it too - and then the chain of people who might pull it out of the place I put it and so on and so on and so on. My life is too short for me to be carrying out that sort of information management for the benefit of government - and I don’t want to pay for an army of civil servants who will manage it, imperfectly, on my behalf.

Even if this were fixable, I then come to the fact that I know that judgements will be made about me based on an abstraction (some data or combined information drawn from data about me) and that no matter how well managed it is, that sooner or later that judgement will be wrong, and that the wrongness of that judgement may have a wide range of implications for my personal life, by business, my career and my financial security. It matters not whether the judgement is wrong because the data’s wrong or the process for making the judgement is wrong - I want to be judged for who I really am, today, rather than the part of the story that I happened to hand over four years ago, while I was hungover.

So that’s one point!! I don’t want the sort of customer service from Government that I get from NTL, Northern Rock and anyone else who makes business decisions about me based on the numbers, rather than on a personal contact with me.

NEXT. (You shouldn’t have asked, you really shouldn’t)

I want less of a reliance on data to judge organisations (yes, those who know what I’ve done in a previous life will find this hypocritical), I think we had to go too far in order to know we’d gone too far - now it’s time to pull back a bit.

I want e-gov projects to be right-sized and not doing stuff that could be better done by a private concern, with a good balance of bottom-up-ness and top-down-ness - I don’t want everything to be one-size-fits-all and I don’t want it to be entirely “customised” to me (see above) - can we spell “intelligent” and “diverse”?

I want projects to be grown up about risk and unafraid to be imperfect.

I want projects to be open and accountable and I want some assurance that the money is being spent wisely, without auditors sitting on the shoulder of every project manager who then has to jump through a hundred hoops.

And then I want every single project and every single public servant to understand that installing the technology won’t make the change all by itself - you will have to do the job of government differently, you will have to accept that times have changed and what really open government really means - it’s scary and unpredictable, but much more worthwhile than hiding behind those bomb-proof curtains.

Yes we will moan, yes we will groan, yes we will say you’re wasting our money, yes we will point out the obvious solution that you’ve entirely missed. And yes, we will be wrong too and sometimes rant without good reason - but that’s what people who are paying for a service are entitled to do.

So I guess I’d better stop here and get on with my tax return.

Wrap up...

Posted by William Heath on 23/09/04 at 11:24am
Categories
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22 Sep 2004

How like Finland do we want to be?

One of the best presentations we ever saw on the culminating effect of comprehensively e-enabled government was from the head of statistics Finland, Pekka Myrskyla, shortly before he retired.

He showed an array of graphic slides based on data gathered from the Finnish national census. Finland now does the census every year, it takes hours rather than months, there’s ten times as much data and even so the cost of doing it is down 75%.

Instead of sending out forms or people with clipboards, the statistics office census computer simply interrogates the half-dozen official registers of businesses, people, dwellings etc and aggregates the data. This depends on having unique and comprehensive registers. Here Companies House has one for registered businesses in the UK and DVLA one vehicles but the idea of yet another one for people is a bit of an issue.

It seems pretty ideal to be able to measure the effects of government policies (say on job creation, commuting patterns etc) very quickly. Finland is very open with public information (FoI law dates back to 1766) it’s much clearer to people what’s really going on. And it’s good to cut the hassle and cost of doing a census.

But this approach does depend on having single sets of clean and accurate data, and that depends on people trusting goverment to hold their data safely and with proper respect for their dignity and rights.

It seems to me that lots of the things we’re trying to achieve (efficiency, better services etc) become possible when people are happy with government holding vastly rationalised databases. This prospect raises a lot of fears which are all too easy to justify, and certainly have not been effectively allayed.

So it would seem that the very first and most important step on the path to efficiency and better services is to ensure that everyone who asks can be convinced that when government holds sensitive data it is treated as highest priority that it be anonymised and encrypted, access and use heavily circumscribed, with harsh penalties for abuse.

Finland seems oddly different in many ways. People have to report to Maistratti (often located in police stations) to be registered once a year, but trust in government seems to be very high. It’s an open question to me - in our quest for ideal e-enabled public services, how like Finland do we want to become? After all, when the Gulf Stream stops we’ll have pretty much the same weather.

Posted by William Heath on 22/09/04 at 10:14am
Categories · "What do we want?" · Across the Board

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20 Sep 2004

New Zealand e-government RSS ahead

I think RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is one of the best examples of what I called emergent technology. By this I mean technology that has been designed by users for users rather than by a top down process. This is an article by Richard MacManus submitted to Computerworld NZ, based on an interview with Ferry Hendrikx of the NZ E-Government Unit. The target audience is mainstream IT people, so as well as writing about Ferry’s experiences in E-Government, the author decided to also explain what RSS is and put it in the context of everyday IT.

RSS is an XML-based standard for syndication of news and other regularly-updated content. It is being widely adopted as a form of online publishing - The New York Times and Reuters are just two big-name publishers who now offer RSS “feeds”. The New Zealand Government began using RSS feeds in 2003 to publish government news to the public. In July 2003 the New Zealand E-Government Unit released a document entitled “A standard for the publication of government news summaries”, which outlined their vision for RSS in the New Zealand public sector. I interviewed the document’s author Ferry Hendrikx, from the New Zealand E-Government Unit.

Mr MacManus mentions New York Times and Reuters, but closer to home, the Daily Telegraph and the BBC, have been using it for some time now to enable feeds for RSS newsreaders.

The case for RSS rests in one of the components of the New Zealand E-Government strategy, known as ‘publish/subscribe’ on the Web. The E-Government Strategy document published in 2001 declared that the Internet should be the dominant means of enabling ready access to government information, services and processes by June 2004.

The publish/subscribe model is seen as one of a number of ways of making information available and confirms it is one of our key goals. RSS can be used by the government both for distribution of information to the public and as well as internally. Hendrikx asserts that this model is equally useful for making information available for both public and internal consumption. This is what the report recommends:

This standard should be used by all agencies wishing to make their news stories available beyond their own website. Specifically agencies can use this system to avoid the manual and often duplicate entry of news stories onto the government portal.

Agencies implementing this standard and making news feeds available will need to notify the E-government Unit so that the aggregator can be appropriately configured to harvest news feeds from agency web servers.

The rest of the article contains some technical description of RSS, its history and the discussion of the format chosen by the New Zealand government. What is more interesting is that the potential RSS and other XML feeds have for dynamic and often updated formats. This is why most blogs automatically enable their readers to subscribe to updated content via their newsreaders.

Now, once more, without the acronyms:

Having a way to get regular updates from a source you trust and want to follow without remembering to check it regularly is certainly convenient.
Although updates by email can do that, our inboxes are already full of messages that we are not really interested in. The pull nature of syndication feeds puts the receivers of the information in control, as they can remove the feeds from their news aggregators.
Newreaders allow you to aggregate feeds from various blogs and websites, which save much time. You do not have to download each page to read the content and you can avoid reading articles whose headlines do not interest you. This is a major advantage for someone (like me) who follows 60+ blogs that are updated a daily.

In fact, there are two ways to subscribe to updates from Ideal Government. You can either join the mailing list or add Ideal Government feed to your newsreader. Those who wish to learn more about the RSS magic, can email me at adriana at bigblog dot net.

Posted by Adriana Cronin-Lukas on 20/09/04 at 9:23am
Categories · Across the Board · Ideal Goverment - project
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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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24 Sep 2004

Offer accepted! We have a deadline!

23 Sep 2004

The Ideal Government Project, Part I

The Dutch looked at constitutional implications of e-gov

Tax with Nectar cards?

Lloyd Davis wish list for ideal e-enalbed government

22 Sep 2004

How like Finland do we want to be?

20 Sep 2004

New Zealand e-government RSS ahead

Ideal Government

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24 Sep 2004

Offer accepted! We have a deadline!

23 Sep 2004

The Ideal Government Project, Part I

The Dutch looked at constitutional implications of e-gov

Tax with Nectar cards?

Lloyd Davis wish list for ideal e-enalbed government

22 Sep 2004

How like Finland do we want to be?

20 Sep 2004

New Zealand e-government RSS ahead

Ideal Government

Categories

Comment

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