04 Oct 2004

What if the government had built Friends Reunited?

Over the last year I’ve been using this question to challenge people’s thinking and assumptions about what types of things the government could or should be doing on the internet. Friends Reunited is a site both wildly popular and probably more condusive to social cohesion than any specific government intervention in that area.

But why mention it? Well, mainly because this site has created masses of public utility and private wealth using data which the government itself owned and didn’t see the full value of - the names and locations of all the schools in the UK. Just imagine how profoundly different the public’s view of eGovernment would be if it had built this service! It has a relatively low cost base, and works by recycling data that the government holds for one purpose (to know what schools exist) for another. Given its enormous membership, it must be several times more popular and widely used than any UK government site. So whilst I’m not advocating the first e-nationalisation, I would like people to look at Friends Reunited and learn a few lessons.

* Government owns enormous amounts of data which is collected for one reason, but which can provide different and highly attractive services for the public via the internet. I believe that each department should have a ‘data-recycling czar’ who’s job it is to extract hods of value for the public from these under-tapped resources. The way that government passed up the opportunity to buy up UpMyStreet.com shows that this lesson has been terribly misunderstood in the past.

* The best services are sometimes undemanded. No survey in the world would have shown there to be an unmet demand for Friends Reunited.

* Important lesson for the politicians here - ‘Sexy’ services like Friends Reunited are a way of legitimising high expenditure on less glamorous but more essential IT infrastructure services. Show people nothing of real value to people and they’ll start to wonder where their billions are going. But build something like this, or follow Santa Clara, and you change the relationship between a whole population and e-government.

* There is currently no systematic way of assessing whether a site like Friends Reunited is a public service which should be protected, or a private company that be allowed to fail. We need a clear new way of identifying public goods that exist only online.

* Build service of sufficient attractiveness and people will learn how to use the technology to get at it. Friends Reunited doubtless got many people onto the net for the first time, most of them without formal training programmes. The assumption that technology change has to be accompanied by massive corporate change and training programmes is true only of bad technology. We didn’t need national programmes to learn how to use our mobiles, did we?

That’s all for now folks.

Posted by Tom Steinberg on 04/10/04 at 9:59am
Categories

Trackbacks

Permalink

Page 1 of 1 pages

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.

Comment

Anyone is free to comment. Or mail with an article if you want to be an author. I'll post it up and send you a password. This whole thing is supported by Kable.

Authors

Member List

Sign up for new articles

04 Oct 2004

What if the government had built Friends Reunited?

Ideal Government

Categories

Comment

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics

04 Oct 2004

What if the government had built Friends Reunited?

Ideal Government

Categories

Comment

Sponsor

Authors

Sign up for new articles

Copyright

Designed by...

Statistics