Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

MindtheGap is our competition with thinkpublic's RealWorkExperience to invite people to describe public services then imagine how they could be better. Thus we build a "Wibbipedia": an extensive collection of "Wouldn't it be better if"s about public services

04 Apr 2008

The individual as a business; the citizen as Ministry

Check this out from Alan Mitchell’s “right side up” buyer-centric commerce forum:

The individual as a business

There is a simple question at the heart of person-centric commerce: whose profitability are we trying to improve? In our current organisation-centric world, there is only one answer to this question: the organisation. But now there is another answer: the individual.

Today, big businesses employ armies of advisors, consultants and agents to help them achieve their goals and act on their behalf. They reward these advisors, consultants and agents to the extent and degree that they help the business achieve what it wants to achieve: improved performance, increased profitability etc.

Right Side Up businesses and services bring the same approach to individuals. Individuals pay them to help them achieve their goals more efficiently and more effectively and to act on their behalf – to help them improve their performance and increase their profitability *.

This talk about ‘personal profitability’ is not just metaphorical, it’s literal too. The Right Side Up service addresses each individual as a legitimate business in its own right, because it recognises that individuals do all the things businesses do.

* Of course, one of the big differences between big organisations and individuals is that individuals define ‘performance’ and ‘profitability’ in many different ways. ‘Profit’ may be emotional rather than financial, for example.

Like any business, the individual:

* sets strategies to achieve goal, sources inputs, processes them into outputs or desired outcomes etc.

* has to manage many different departments or functions: my home, my health, my money, my transport, my communications etc. Naturally, the individual wants to run these departments better.

* manages many processes to do this: set goals, make plans, set priorities, make decisions, conduct exchanges and transactions, do work, coordinate activities, oversee logistics, administer things, keep records, and so on.

* invests assets such as time, money, energy and attention in managing these departments and processes – and naturally seeks the best possible return on these investments.

Right Side Up services bring professional expertise and specially designed infrastructure to help individuals improve their performance and profitability on all these fronts. Organisations that view and treat individuals as customers of their particular organisation, buying particular products and services, simply cannot ‘see’ this potential.

That’s a fantastic statement of the sort of “corrective” thinking we need to apply to Transformational Government to make it work and to make public services that are respectful of human dignity.

 

13 Mar 2008

Click here for Mindthegap entry form

Let’s assemble that Wibbipedia.

 

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!

 

20 Feb 2008

The deadly embrace of front-line disempowerment

The central Whitehall switchboard 020 7217 3000 is way way better than it was, and works pretty well generally. But man when it goes wrong it looks bad from the customer end, and it’s a classic case of CRM-disempowered front line staff.

I try to call my friend G, who seems to have moved jobs. I get a delay, then a recorded message which says “Thank you for your call. Please be aware that your call may be recorded for staff-training purposes.” Then a polite and efficient sounding person asks who I want. I explain. They can’t find them listed (G hovers in and out of the more “trusted” parts of government) so they “go to HR” who appear to be a deeper source of wisdom. Then I get put through to a number. It rings for ages, and I’m back at ...

...a recorded message which says “Thank you for your call. Please be aware that your call may be recorded for staff-training purposes.” Then a DIFFERENT polite and efficient sounding person AGAIN asks who I want. I explain AGAIN. They AGAIN can’t find them listed (G STILL hovers in and out of the more “trusted” parts of government) so they AGAIN “go to HR” who STILL appear to be a deeper source of wisdom. Then I get put through to a number. It rings AGAIN for ages, and THEN YET AGAIN I’m back at ...

...a recorded message which says “Thank you for your call. Please be aware that your call may be recorded for staff-training purposes.” Then the same (#2) polite and efficient sounding person asks who I want. I explain that the system isnt working very well. Can I just have the number they keep putting me through to and I’ll try aghain later. Clearly he’s not answering the phone, and doesnt use an answerphone (fair enough; neither do I). This leads to a - perfectly polite - “It’s just not possible/I don’t make the rules” type conversation. The perfectly friendly but enfuriating advice is that I streamline the process in future by asking to go straight through to HR in future, so I can be more efficiently fobbed off by a deeper source of wisdom.

Somewhere in the bowels of some server probably in Plano Texas is a digital recording of an exasperated human being [me]protesting that this would be a perfectly sensible solution if my time were a free and infinite resource, and the polite person saying “I quite understand...I dont make the rules...” etc

Wibbi: the call-centre rulemakers heads appeared on a web site where we could launch custard pies at them.

Wibbi: There were no recorded message. Or if there was it said “Gracious taxpayer; we’ll sort out whatever you’re calling about as fast, efficiently and politely as humanly possible. If you’d like to record this call for service-feedback purposes please do so; just press # at the end.” ...and then again after the call is finished “Just to remind you; if you want this call recorded and checked by our customer satisfaction team, just press hash, and we’ll email you the URL where it can be found.”

Wibbi there was a free searchable civil service yearbook online (fume fume). Oh! Hold the fuming! Here it is! Not bad! But not free: £125/year. Not entirely up to date from what I can see. And it still doesn’t answer today’s question.

 

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!

 

01 Feb 2008

Mindthegap entry from Ivo Gormley

slim-tube.jpg

The Experience…
People on the tube are silent but they get very close to me. Maybe they are very interesting and perhaps they are thinking about the same things as me. We might have an interesting debate, maybe we both want to talk about football… they may even have the answers to my problems?

Wouldn’t it be better if….
people had the chance of connecting to each other on their Journeys. At the moment its difficult to start a conversation, it might be easier if we could some how signify that we wanted to talk and what we wanted to talk about. Perhaps this could be organised by having “talking coaches” that were labeled for different types of conversation. These could change daily due to popular demand. Admittedly rush hour might mean you get stuck in the Amy Whinehouse carriage for half an hour, but for the rest of the time I think it would improve things.

Anyone can enter MindtheGap - you just need to care about public services and be able to express how they could be better. The entry form is here. You can win a Wii or an Asus EEE PC.

 

24 Jan 2008

Re:designing public services - MindtheGap flier/entry form

 

13 Dec 2007

Oh no! and another one

That-paper-which-now-looks-really-heavyweight-in-comparison-to-all -the-freebie-showbiz-gossip-rags reports tonight that the personal details of 160,000 children have been lost at a London hospital in a fresh blunder over confidential information.

A computer disc containing the data was sent to St Leonard’s Hospital in Hackney but failed to reach the right department - even though it was signed for by hospital staff. The disc contained the names, dates of birth and addresses of 160,000 children and there were fears the information could be enough for criminals to create fake identities. The blunder occurred when the disc was sent by courier to the Hackney hospital by BT, which operates the NHS’s IT system, on 14 November. It is believed the courier company used by BT did not check that it was signed for by the correct person and the disc never reached its intended destination in the IT department.

A spokeswoman for City and Hackney Primary Care Trust, which runs St Leonard’s Hospital, said “BT couriered a fully encrypted disc containing patient information to City and Hackney PCT. “It was not received by the named recipient, and attempts by the PCT to find the disc have so far failed. All deliveries of personal information have been suspended in light of the breach.” BT today called for parents to remain calm over the latest incident. A spokesman said: “Patients should not be concerned because BT uses the highest levels of security to safeguard the data in its care.

[Er… short of making sure that it or its representatives only hands over the data to the person who is supposed to receive it?]

“All NHS data sent by disc is fully encrypted to industry standards. We apply stringent controls in managing the complex encryption pass phrases necessary for unlocking the data. In this instance the encryption pass phrase would only have been released after one of two named individuals confirmed receipt. This was not confirmed so the encryption pass phrase has not been issued.

Ah… we can relax then. (Though the Standard worries that even 256-bit encryption has recently been shown by researchers to be crackable in two weeks...)

All this attention on missing data is not unhelpful in drawing ordinary people’s attention to a) the volume and frequency of personal data transfers and b) the potential value of their personal data. That’s not a bad thing - probably more effective than a fancy public service advertising campaign.  Ruth Carnall, chief executive of NHS London, has asked for an independent review of all NHS data transfer in London. WIBBI all these emergency reviews encompassed a really citizen-centric cost-benefit analysis of centralised data systems. 

 

30 Nov 2007

Information: the new public sector battleground?

A different distinguished group met somewhere to consider whether information – its use, management, ownership – is set to be the new battleground for public service transformation. Despite the recent loss of 25m people’s details by HMRC, we agreed that ‘battleground’ might be too provocative a term. But the resignation of a distinguished permanent secretary shows the full implications of responsibility for stewardship of personal information is dawning on Accounting Officers, who are now urgently checking risks and procedures. This information is stored in systems and based on architectural decisions the non-CIO Board members (and their political masters) do not, as a rule, understand.

One argument says that the HMRC episode is not just a deep shock: it’s a predictable and long-overdue wake-up call. Does that leave Transformational Government – a strategy underpinned by the use of large centralized databases – fine, fatally flawed or fixable?

 

29 Nov 2007

Jerry data-sharing icon is as relevant now as when he first posted it

Jerry Fishenden has reproduced his CC-like data-sharing signpost. It’s a classic Wibbi - a way to show what data you’re releasing

… wouldn’t it be better if online government services used a Creative Commons (CC)-style model in making clear to citizens what will be done with the information that they are being asked to provide? Instead of lots of complex small print about terms and conditions

He has a mockup:

Hey. Wibbi if one of the appraisal targets for any public servant involved in technology policy was to prove they talked to and understood Jerry (or at least three critical friends from a list published from time to time by IdealGov)?

 

09 Nov 2007

And from our special correspondent….

Initiatives such as ContactPoint and eCAF to improve sharing of social care information continue to provoke controversy. In light of the fears that surround the use of technology in the public sector, one of our favourite think tanks* today suggests that we should be looking ‘backwards not forwards’ (sorry Tony), for a solution.

The obvious answer is to keep social care records in Latin.

This is already a proven approach. Traditionally doctors wrote prescriptions in Latin, with the advantage that only trained professionals could understand what they meant. The doctor and the pharmacist knew what medication the patient was using, but for the bulk of the population (including the patients themselves) the prescription was pretty meaningless. Exactly the same benefits would apply to latin social care records. Professionals could communicate with each other, but with the exception of lawyers, archaeologists, and priests, few members of the public would be able to understand what they were saying. And if you can’t trust lawyers and priests, who can you trust?

Sadly, the use of latin in prescriptions has largely been overtaken by modern medication and 21st century technology. Today only a few standard abbreviations remain in use. But the solution worked well for about 600 years. We doubt whether eCAFS and ContactPoint will prove as durable.

Of course there will be some objections to this idea. For example, it would involve teaching latin to at least 250,000 social workers (five times the combination of 35,000 family doctors and 16,000 community pharmacists). But this is just a temporary problem. Faced with a limited range of career options there are already 16,000 pupils who obtain a classics GCSE each year (30,000 study social sciences at the same stage). With a wider range of caring professions open to them, the supply of candidates with a GCSE pass would surely increase. In the meantime, we estimate that 250,000 existing social workers could be taught latin for just £1.7bn. This represents just 6% of the annual cost of social services. If the programme was spread over three years it would add a mere 2% to the budget. At first glance, this may look like a large amount of money. It is, we admit, more than 40 times the £40m cost of Contactpoint, but on the other hand it is only a quarter of the cost of the NHS National Programme for IT. Surely a small price to pay for privacy.

In 600 years time, with their privacy intact, a grateful public will have forgotten about the initial cost - or so the argument goes.

So while some may accuse us of being luddites, we commend social care records in latin as the obvious way forward for a durable, and secure solution, that avoids technology risk.

Or I THINK that’s what they said...?

.

 

07 Nov 2007

Obama and others commit to “Google government”

Government, it has occurred to various US think tanks, is far from ideal. Two of them seem to have proposed an

Oath of Presidential Transparency to help taxpayers see where their money is spent.

* By signing the oath, the candidates are promising, should they win the presidency in 2008, that they will issue an executive order instructing the entire executive branch to put into practice the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006.
* That act includes a Google-like search tool that will allow taxpayers to go online and see exactly how their tax dollars are being spent on federal contracts, grants and earmarks.

This sounds like part of Uncle Buck’s plea, all those years ago, that we make government navigable (and nothing else...yet).

 

25 Oct 2007

How we could turn centralisation on its head

“How do we fix CRM?” is a dull-sounding question to which the interesting answer is “By turning it on its head.” I had an fascinating and challenging encounter last week in London with a group exploring Doc Searls’ Harvard project called “vendor relationship management” (VRM).

Don’t worry about the VRM name for now, but consider the “Ideal Government implications of the idea (here’s a transcript of my rough notes).

VRM is a service, accessible to all participating people. I choose to call them agents, since they’re active, not supine, and I want to avoid words like customer, citizen, subject, prisoner etc. I’m not talking about “them”, but about “us”.

VRM helps us agents make better decisions and implement them better. It lets us harness tools and the power of the contemporary net (that which we shall not call Web 2.x)* to manage our lives better. We use it to share information about suppliers and service providers and invite or (as our confidence grows) tell them how to meet our needs better. And we use it to make the transaction, disclosing the bare minimum necessary of the credentials we lodge with it.

It cuts the cost, hassle and intrusion of making and of implementing transaction decisions (whether it’s buying flights frmo the travel agent or changing address).

Sounds good, but the implication for our service providers is huge.

This was explained to me by a group including Adriana, Alan Mitchell and Iain Henderson.

VRM, they explain to me, can be described as added-value buying services, or as “solution assembly” either for ongoing processes (like managing my house, finances, car, or personal mobility) or major events (my partner dies, I move house etc).

The top-down centralisers who bought CRM (or wrote Transformational Government for that matter) can take solace in the idea this whole thing is not anti-CRM, but a way to fix CRM. CRM suggested “Make life easier for customers and they’ll buy more from us” But then it was implemented a a cost reduction, so customers get junk mailed and are held in tedious call-centre queues.

VRM opens up all sorts of new markets as people articulate their requirements. The long tail finds its voice and states its needs. It’s counter-intuitive model, and a fundamental shift in how they do business.

A good CRM system needs perhaps 700 data items about a client to do a proper job, reckons Iain, but in truth holds 300 and patchily at that. (The benighted ID System holds a more modest 60 or so). But the typical person needs perhaps 3500 data items about themselves to get through life. As ever, the people with highest need have least power and least tools. VRM lets them manage and disclose these data items in the manner that best suits them.

People fret about aggregation of data. But aggregation isnt the start point; it’s the end game.

Like “quality”, perhaps mass self-service individualisation will turn out to be cheap and profitable. Averaging out what you provide is wasteful, whether you over-provide or under-provide. Catering to individuals creates larger and more creative markets.

It supports, for example, the concept of the problem-solving community (which we would in public services call co-governance). People at a critical juncture have a finite number of issues they have to deal with. The way to develop the individualised service is to let people ask the question.

Bureaucracy 1.0 stifles the questions. But the FAQ-based approach is being piloted in education under the Teaching Development AgencyTDA with head teachers (grateful for a ref). Head teachers phone up with a problem (bullying, budgets, staff etc). Researchers give them an expensive bespoke answer, which is then available free to others.

The information generated by an individual in the course of their life is the oil of the new economy. You can’t invade the individual like you can invade Iraq.

But government still seems to think it can. If that’s the case, data and services will migrate to countries that are respectful: Canada, New Zealand, Scandinavia.

VRM is therefore an ugly TLA label for a fundamental relationship change which can encompass almost everything. it certainly encompasses public services and government, and effectively turns the assumptions underlying Transformation Government on their head (which is where those assumptions belong).

The two likeliest areas to start, Iain reckons, are health management and wealth management. But these are the two most sensitive also. In the case of health, if Connecting for Health is a sort of Stalinist CRM, then the new Healthvault (ironically form the same Microsoft that we blame for dreaming up CfH on Tony Blair’s sofa in the first place) is the VRM version: it supports the agent in managing the information and resources connected to their own healthcare management.

Other examples are the Wesabi credit checking service, garlik, or the Pledgebank which unites agents in a common cause without any central entity.

Phew. It’s a very different way of looking at the future; a technology architecture that supports the dignity and integrity of the individual agent in his or her transactions with the world. Go, Doc! Thanks Adriana!

 

16 Oct 2007

Fascinating Lessig Danish TV interview (in English)

Prompted by RMS’s free and open-source software, Lawrence Lessig spent 10 years tackling copyright problems by way of the Creative Commons. He says he’ll spend the next 10 tackling far-from-ideal government corruption, misinformation, and the influence of money, whether on global warming or nutrition (or oil or war, we might add). Government finds it hard to understand things when there is a strong interest in misunderstanding. But transparency and what he calls peer production (which we have come to call co-governance) makes it easier to shame and change the system. Fascinating interview from Danish TV (In English).

 

30 Sep 2007

Red-amber-green - STOP?

I’ve been thinking a bit about this issue of whether increasing regulation and control naturally mitigates against the encouragement of what perhaps might be called ‘pro-social’ behaviour (for eg see here, and here). I was therefore interested to read this weekend of a counter-revolution in the seemingly uncontroversial area of traffic lights, led from the unlikely centre of the solidly Conservative council of Kensington and Chelsea.

Taking its lead from recent high-profile experiments in the Netherlands and Germany, the council wants to begin removing traffic lights. It is part of an audacious campaign by the council to forge modern ‘shared streetscapes’ where eye contact between motorists and pedestrians and simple common sense replace a ‘clutter’ of bollards and barriers, traffic lights, street signs and speed cameras. Building on a radical ‘decluttering’ of Kensington High Street - where railings have been taken down, kerbs removed, signs packed away, bicycle islands added, and accident numbers cut - the council now hopes to turn Exhibition Road into an open ‘naked street’ for cars and pedestrians.

It seems as though a similar scheme in the Dutch town of Drachten, which four years ago took down most of its signs and traffic lights as part of a ‘naked streets’ experiment, saw accident numbers drop dramatically. “Natural caution and negotiation between drivers and pedestrians have taken over”.

[The] council insist[s] there are compelling reasons to believe ‘encouraging drivers to make eye contact to make decisions rather than have decisions made for them by a regulated road system’ cuts accidents.

Apparently the Kensington High Street project has drawn plaudits from traffic experts worldwide. Of course, there will always be the anti-revolutionary mob, such as the august Knightsbridge Association residents, who say:

‘We are not persuaded by the merits of the “naked street” concept and are firmly of the view that proper pavements should be retained,’ said a letter to the council last week, according to sources who have seen it. ‘Period 19th-century buildings were designed to sit in streets with pavements.’

But - ha! - in a wonderful nod to wibbi-ism, Deputy Leader Daniel Moylan has stressed last night that he and the council were concerned not only with buildings - there are some 4,000 listed ones in the royal borough - but with PEOPLE!

‘This is about quality of life,’ he said. ‘It’s about recivilising the city, to the benefit of all people who use the roads. We want to stop this top-down system of signs and signals to keep drivers and other road users apart, and give everyone back a sense of shared ownership and responsibility.’

I just wonder whether any of this is pertinent to issues of security, identity management, co-creation of public services, encouragement of ‘the public good’? WIBBI government policy was always to start with the possible - harnessing the capabilities of people, their families, wider communities and Society at large for the greater good - rather than assuming the worst about everyone, and trying to do things for or TO us, missing opportunities and bringing unintended detrimental effects.

 
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