01 Apr 2008

What’s this about Sir Bonar and NODISS?

Oh Lord. Our very own Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom, first blogging permanent secretary, seems to have led the team drafting the secret agenda for creating a surveillance society in the UK according to The Reg which claims to have seen the 2001 document. What on earth was he thinking? I’ve asked him to clarify. 

 

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.

 

Halo Britain: an MP takes a stroll among the electorate

The Leader of the House of Commons takes a stroll in her own constituency.


Merely “to praise her own neighborhood police team”, just as she would wear a hard hat on a building site, or a hair net if she were visiting a cake factory, she says, she wears a bullet-prof, stab-proof vest to visit the streets of her own constituency Peckham “as a courtesy”. But she’s not scared, she says. She’s very sorry the Daily Mail reported it and that Sir Johannes Humphrissimus Maximus Inetrromptor gave it any credence by mentioning it (even though it’s also on her own web site). Hey - Humphrissimus Maximus Interromptor is working with Evan Davies today: my mate! Hurrah.

Update: Wibbies: 1. The Daily Mail stopped hating everyone and everything for a living; 2. Johannes Humphrissimus Maximus Interromptor stopped interrupting people and 3. that our political leaders showed no physical fear and made a virtue out being relaxed, confident and safe amongst the British public. 

 

31 Mar 2008

How Would ID Cards Improve This?

I’ve written before about the importance of verifying a person’s “role” rather than their “identity.”

Today, someone wearing a baseball cap arrived “to read the meter.” Although he wasn’t wearing the usual Siemens uniform or driving a Siemens van, he claimed to be from Siemens. Eventually, he agreed to show his ID but it was from a different company, with something about Siemens written on the back. He then tried to push past me into the house.

We’re warned that “bogus officials” are operating in our area and that we should check callers. Any genuine meter reader should know that in this street, the electricity meters are not actually inside the houses! Becoming ever more suspicious, I was about to ask for his “office phone number” but he made a hasty exit.

So, how would the government’s proposed ID card scheme help with this type of everyday need for individuals to check the credentials of “officials.”

- Would a biometric ID card help verify someone’s official “role” or would it only show their name?
- Would a biometric ID card be any use in this situation or would “officials” still need separate “credentials” issued by their employer or sponsor?
- How could any government ID scheme be adjusted to help with this?

Story continues…

 

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? 

 

25 Mar 2008

Sign up to Free our Bills

MySociety is collecting signatures to get Parliamentary bills published in a more open format. You can sign here.

 

18 Mar 2008

Restoring the computational balance

Sir Bonar writes:

I think there is a balance in society which has been lost, and I believe we can use technology to restore it. 

If we think back 50 years, what we knew about ourselves as a country was held centrally on a single computer installation owned by the Central Computer Agency. Housewives who wished to calculate their weekly expenditure on groceries would use the back of an envelope. Accountants would calculate taxation for small businesses using a comptometer

The “processing balance”, as I call it, lay very much at the centre of society. And perhaps it is no coincidence that these were stable and happy times, when Britain punched above its weight, the police were generally trusted and youth well behaved.

Now, of course, every Tom, Dick and Harry has a device no larger than a ladies’ powder puff which can forecast weather, play poker and map speed cameras while working out new ways to avoid tax. I’ve seen children play illicit simulation games on their mobile telephones. Drug dealers use Blackberries and Twittering to evade law enforcement.

The balance, as it were, has been lost.

Much as we might like to turn the clock back, none of us can do that. To restore the status quo ante, we must go forward.

At the heart of government in the golden era we used to have three secret Lyons Electronic Offices with 8kb of store each. At that time the average man on the Clapham Omnibus (a Routemaster, I might add) had at most a slide rule in his top pocket. In simple computational terms, to restore that balance of power we at the heart of government would now need several thousand times the computational power of 50 million personal computers.

By my reckoning, the technical specification would be a 256 terahertz computer with 512 petabytes of RAM offering 170 teraflops of processing power. Of course it would need no more than 505,000 keyboards and a similar number of VDUs attached (given that Civil Service numbers have dropped so sharply in recent years) and also 505,000 mice. These devices would be attached to the central processor by means of 1,515,000 wires of varying length.

We had a most encouraging meeting with our suppliers over a champagne reception at Somerset House. They’re very positive about the plan, and assure me it is entirely feasible. They’ve just constructed what they call a computational smelter large enough to simulate the various wars the US is now contemplating. And the whole thing would fit into a space no larger than MoD Main Building.

If we were simply to make this one investment, we would then have the only computer government would need. We could replace the chaos of all the different computers in one go. We would invest now, in order to save for years to come. It made an awful lot of sense to me.

Above all I think it would go a long way, by restoring the computational balance in society, to restoring social harmony and cohesion. I predict it would restore trust and deference to properly accountable authority.

I wonder what others think?

 

17 Mar 2008

Sage of Omaha on public-sector pensions

Wise words from Warren Buffett:

Whatever pension-cost surprises are in store for shareholders down the road, these jolts will be surpassed many times over by those experienced by taxpayers.  Public pension promises are huge and, in many cases, funding is woefully inadequate.  Because the fuse on this time bomb is long, politicians flinch from inflicting tax pain, given that problems will only become apparent long after these officials have departed.  Promises involving very early retirement – sometimes to those in their low 40s – and generous cost-of-living adjustments are easy for these officials to make.  In a world where people are living longer and inflation is certain, those promises will be anything but easy to keep.

 

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.

 

You Can Get It If You Really Want

I heard last week of the local authority contact centre which is putting a new spin on what it means to offer customers personalised services responding to citizens’ needs. Yes, all local authorities share the new Service Transformation Agreement target to reduce avoidable contact. But when local residents ring to ask what films the Odeon Cinema across the road from the call centre is showing, call-handlers are absolutely delighted to look out the window and provide an information service which swiftly delivers 100% customer satisfaction.

Hey, this “let’s be responsive to citizens’ needs” thing needs unpacking a bit, doesn’t it?!

 

16 Mar 2008

The birds and the Sullen Ladies work their refreshing effect

A wet Palm Sunday weekend among the spring flowers and birdsong has quite washed away the irritations of last week. Perhaps I was intemperate, dear readers, in my final Blog Cast of the previous week. Perhaps it was the celebratory glass of sherry (we also had some terrific DirectGov stats in: we scored 8071!).

My conscience was pricked by a note from Walter (copied, I fear, to Gus and Jeremy)

Calm down, Bonar. Let’s not have undignified language from a fellow Wednesday Morning group member. There’s no need to panic.

We can take out this Web 2.0 threat with the precision of a Jamie Noon tackle or, indeed, of one of those devices made by our corporate event sponsors Lockheed Martin. Let the propellerheads and Public House geeks waste their weekends changing the fount on our word processors or remixing the data on our government web sites.

The rest of the world is absolutely uninterested. People want government to tell the what to do and think - vide Ben’s latest poll: 93% say things would be better if the government was more in control. The 2007 Big Conversation told us to spend serious amounts of money just sorting our traditional IT out.

Nobody asks for these Web 2.0 developments. If they want any Web at all it’s strictly Web 1.0 for now, thank you. And that is precisely what our transformative strategy will do, with pin-point precision. All we need do is identify who everyone is and what they’re like, then we can channel things at them. Our messages will be clearer than ever before.

Now we’ve completed Modernising Government (see Cabinet Office press release PR08-731) we can relax a little. After all, the pressure for eye-catching initiatives has gone now, hasn’t it?

Among the wet daffodils, the helibores, and early flush of my beloved Sullen Ladies I can see Wally is right. This problem will go away, all its googlings and twitterings with it. I can’t think how I let that little fellow irritate me so much. Whippersnapper.

 

14 Mar 2008

Desist! And give me my data back!

Just in from Patricia in Sir Bonar’s office:

I did promise I’d do a Blog Cast today but I’m afraid I’m dictating this to Patricia in something of a rage.

That IT manager fellow - the one we’re going to blame when everything goes wrong, and sack - arranged a small symposium. It was just DitPol, Affteck (3) and young Nick from my private office. Gus dropped by, and Walter. Brian said he’d try but I dont think he’s going to head his head around this stuff, poor chap.

Anyway, after we’d heard from Gus and Alexis they put up this...I can only say: student, with no apparent qualifications, CV, job or understanding of authority. Apparently he’d written a system which stole all our data about government consultations and made them obvious and easy to respond to. We weren’t able actually to see it because out Internet connection wasn’t working. I know there are lot of consultations under way but I must say I found the whole thing most unimpressive. I mean, if we wanted to make consultations transparent and obvious it wouldn’t have been hard for us to do so ourselves in the first place.

He then made some derogatory and frankly disrespectful remarks about DirectGov. I believe someone sniggered. People are quite heedless of the morale of the 100-odd Civil Servants we have working on our flagship Web Site. He chirped that his friends had knocked up a better search service in 45 minutes in the pub. Then - if I caught this right - that his eleven-year-old sister Ruby had rewritten our £50m TransportDirect service so it ran on rails.

Whippersnapper! I told him to give us our data back immediately, and to desist.

My own Nick then first started wittering about mashing upwards. Whoever heard of such a thing? Then he claimed he could make all our pictures flicker, which sounds pointless, indeed undignified. None of this sounds to me like progress at all. Nick never even pretended to wear a tie in the office on Fridays, and now he’s even been spotted wearing Lycra. I think the time is fast approaching when we shall have to sack him as a Gershon efficiency measure. Patricia tells me he’s been secretly Blog-casting. Well, he never asked my permission, so we have our cast-iron pretext.

I must say, all this clever easy-to-use Web 2.0 and facial networking activity is all very well for propellerheads who want to lose their jobs. Mercifully such people, like the civil liberties fanatics, make up a tiny fraction of the population.

I have no doubt that the man on the (probably now bendy, heaven forfend) Clapham omnibus expects us to spend proper resources with our most trusted suppliers to deliver proper traditional IT-based word-processed services. They expect a table of contents and a jolly good index.

What on earth is the use of a Web Site which just does one thing? There are only so many hours in the day, and it’s not as if we can make our machines read these things for us. What is the purpose of having a government communications service if everything is made so obvious nobody needs to be told what to do? Above all, which would you rather trust: a Web Site properly procured under EU rules from the likes of British Aerospace and Deloitte, or something knocked by by a Polytechnic student after a late night out at the pub? There you have it.

Really, these symposia where one meets little smartarses in T-shirts make my blood boil. To think I cancelled four perfectly good whole-person review meetings to make space in the diary for it.

At times such as this it is an immense relief to leave the office and to dwell on the prospect of a long weekend in the garden. (dictated by Sir Bonar and transmitted without sight)

 

Muddled Messages?

Yesterday, the Chancellor stressed the importance of meeting ever more stringent emissions and environmental targets; Tonight I peddled to an exhibition of proposed plans for thousands of new houses which will mean many thousands of extra car journeys.

Apparently, Whitehall ordered the “regional assembly” to order our “district council” to allocate sites for housing. But, that was before the current fears over “climate change.”

However, there seems to be no mechanism for re-examining whether the original targets are “sustainable” in an era of ever tighter controls on emissions and the increasing need to grow more of our food.

The brief online consultation is about the fine detail rather than the overall concept. There’s no mechanism for influencing or re-examining the original decision.

 

13 Mar 2008

Click here for Mindthegap entry form

Let’s assemble that Wibbipedia.

 

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.

 
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