The UK Government is inviting feedback from the public to help generate ideas and useful applications for public data. They hope this approach will help to improve the way public information is communicated.The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the UK Government’s behalf, and they have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level.
To show they are serious, the Government is making available gigabytes of new or previously invisible public information especially for people to use in this competition.
The Connected Rebublic is a community website, developed by Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group. The aim is to create a space where people with ideas can meet, share their thinking and link up with each other. The site is open to anyone who wants to get involved.
This from Micah L. Sifry of Techpresident blogging from the Politics Web 2.0 conference at the University of London, Royal Hollaway, here below are some excerpts from Micah’s notes on one of the first keynotes:
Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, is presenting on “Digital-era Governance: Peer production, Co-creation and the Future of Government.”
Her key argument: We are seeing a shift in government management reform. For many years, the benchmark was “new public management,” but this trend is dead or dying, she argues. For the next twenty years, the dominant theme will be around digital technologies.
New Public Management was focused on disaggregation (breaking up large bureacracies into smaller units), competition (more use of markets, outsourcing, deregulation) and incentivization (privatization, public-private partnerships, performance related pay).
Digital Era Governance has three flourishing themes: reintegration (joining up bits of govt, sharing central processes, simplification at the same time), needs-based holism (redesigning processes around the citizen, coproduction, agile govt, client-focused structures), digitalization (open book governance, electronic service delivery, disintermediation, and web 2.0 for govt).
She notes that “we found it very hard to find examples of web 2.0 government” while working on the “Government on the Internet” report for the OII last year. It’s not there yet, but she is pointing towards where things are going. E-govt in the UK lags behind e-commerce: half as many people interacting with govt online compared to commerce sites (about 45% compared to 90%, if I saw the slide right)….
….What kind of management culture is needed for DEG to succeed? She argues that it requires really using transactional information to inform policy making, decoupling information analysis from control, being more oriented around customers, and getting more pro-active and experimental. These all seem like good principles, but I wish she’d give some practical examples to illustrate these points.
The citizen culture DEG implies includes the idea of “isocratic” government–helping citizens do for themselves; co-production, where the public sector provides a frame and citizens help deliver (like eBay enabling a cottage industry of sellers); co-creation of information as well. (Isocratic=personal democracy? I wonder.)
This new model can have positive incomes for social problem solving, she concludes.
Examples of Web 2.0 for government are difficult to find. People in govt have very 1.0 notions, like government shouldn’t be cool, it should be boring. “Our site is not aimed at young people,” she was told while working on the OII report. Only old-fashioned web uses make sense. Also, they were uncomfortable with the notion of partly-authenticated involvement, or para-state involvement–no integrating with society’s networks. Govt is also very text based.
What might it mean, if we overcome these issues?
-rich information, not just text
-deep search to allow people to learn more about their own conditions
-playing back information to users, about what they do and feel
-creating part-finished products
Helen Milner highlights the importance of digital inclusion as she discusses a recent report from the UK Online Centres which found that £2.6 billion can be saved by the British Economy if they could bridge the digital divide.
What price happiness? The question is of course rhetorical. How can you put a price on something so intangible, or calculate the cause and effect of wealth to well-being? How can you, in short, quantify the unquantifiable? But that’s exactly what UK online centres have set out to explore in new research. What price, then, digital inclusion?
When such a question moves from the poetic to the practical, the next questions it inevitably begs are Who pays? followed eventually by Who benefits? We can be fairly certain that, on the whole, technology adds value to our lives and to the economy. How much value it can add is the focus of the research, written by FreshMinds, and due to launch at the end of April. It attempts to break down the benefits and associated costs of digital inclusion for five core groups - individual people, private sector organisations, the government, society and the wider economy.
The flipside of our increasing reliance on ICT - in public, economic and social life - is that the digitally excluded, by default, also become excluded from public services, modern working life and society itself. Digital inclusion is at the heart of the debate not just around skills and the knowledge economy, but around social justice and personal well-being. The new research is a continuation of UK online centres work in this area, and stems from a previous report which examined the links between digital and social exclusion. It found 75% of those counted as being socially excluded were also digitally excluded*. Those already at a social, educational or financial disadvantage are therefore three times more likely to be off-line, and missing out on the potential benefits, conveniences, opportunities and savings computers and the internet can provide….
Cambridge, Maryland recently played host to a panel discussion involving the United States, the U.K., New Zealand and Canada (at the Interagency Resources Management Conference) , countries that it should be apparent from reading this blog, are all leading the way in the adoption of new technologies in improving government and enabling e-democracy.
From the FCW article
“It is Government 2.0, not ‘Web 2.0,’” said John Sullivan, the United Kingdom’s chief information officer, at the conference
The reason to make the distinction, is that the collection of tools that people think of as being part of the Web 2.0 family are tools, he said. Government 2.0 is a business approach revolving around the idea of opening the workings of government more directly to citizen involvement and input. How a government organization accomplishes that might or might not involve Web 2.0 technologies, he said.
All of the countries involved in the discussion have taken significant steps. In the U.K., citizens have the right to petition the prime minister’s office on any issue, Suffolk said. Now they can do it online. In New Zealand, the government created a wiki so that citizens could offer their opinions on the rewriting of a longstanding law, said Laurence Millar, New Zealand’s CIO.
The wiki drew much larger response than earlier efforts to solicit comments on social networks Facebook and MySpace, he added. The ability to build directly on what others have said seemed to make the difference.
Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget, said the overriding goal of Government 2.0 should be “taking government back to the citizens.”
However, there remain some difficult issues, Millar said. One is the trend toward incivility among Internet posters. Shielded by the anonymity of an alias, some people choose to launch profane personal attacks rather than contribute to reasoned debate.
“You can get some fairly vicious comments made,” he said. “We’re seeing maturity on some sites, but we’re still seeing a lot of the infantile invective that bedevils us.”
Top boffins have given economic backing to a campaign to relax access restrictions on government-collected databases, such as the Ordnance Survey’s unrivalled stash of UK mapping information.
The Department for Business, Employment and Regulatory Reform (BERR, formerly DTI) released the analysis, commissioned from a team at the University of Cambridge, last week. It refutes the oft-cited government line that allowing free access and reuse of national data assets would harm the economy.
The Free Our Data campaign has been arguing against that line for two years, and now has the sums to back up its smack talk.
In fact, 147 pages of number-crunching led to the conclusion that opening up the data vaults at the Met Office, Land Registry and a host of other agencies could benefit the economy to the tune of net £164m. The vast majority of that sum would come from the Ordnance Survey, however.Subject to a policy review, charges for accessing and reusing reams of data should therefore be dropped, they argue.
It would mean developers could freely access mapping data to create their own location-dependent apps, rather than be reliant on Google Maps, for example.
It’s the same situation in Ireland with the OSI ‘owning’ all of the governments mapping data and licensing it at substantial cost to other government agencies and to private industries.
One can only imagine the amount of innovation that would be unleashed were this data to be made available free of cost to businesses and entrepreneurs.
Another immediately obvious benefit would be public safety.
In Ireland all Counties have a ‘Major Emergency Plan’ in place (The Plan provides for a co-ordinated response to major emergencies arising, for example, from a major road, train, air or river accident; a serious fire; violent storms; flooding or a dangerous incident) , and for all counties GIS assets and mapping data are an essential element of this plan.
In an emergency the emergency personnel may need relevant map data which also displays things like the location of gas pipes , power cables, water hydrants etc. In addition to basic maps of the area.
At the moment it is not clear if a major emergency occurred on a border between two counties, how this would be handled, as each counties mapping assets (licensed from the OSI) literally stops at the county boundary.
This could give rise to a situation where emergency workers have only half a map or two half maps of the emergency area. There is also the possibility that the two adjacent county councils have different (and incompatible) mapping systems, so there may not even be the possibility of easily creating a compound map.
Were OSI mapping assets readily and cheaply available however, each county could also store relevant mapping of adjacent counties, ensuring that in an emergency mapping resources would be readily available.
The survey focused on public awareness of the Data Protection Act (DPA) and sought to see if people knew its provisions. Individuals were also asked if they had used subject access requests under the DPA, or an internet or credit search to check data held about them, and, if they had, what their experience had been. In spite of a high awareness of the DPA, and that one quarter of people have made internet or credit searches about themselves, only 4% were subject access requests under the DPA.
Yet the most important issue of those raised amongst adults questioned about the DPA was having the automatic right to correct data about oneself if it is incorrect: 77% said this is very important to them. 71% also indicated that it is very important to them to be asked for their consent if other organisations or Government departments want access to their data originally collected for another purpose. While two thirds claimed that it was very important to them to be aware of the names of organisations or Government departments that hold information about them and what it is.
In the wake of recent publicity regarding government held data loss, 57% of British adults indicated that it is very important to them that the handling of data by Government employees should be on a sliding scale of seniority - the more sensitive the information, the more senior the employee should be.
Tom Watson MP Minister for Transformational Government, Cabinet Office
Below is an excerpt from the speech he gave at the Tower ‘08 conference on 10th March 2008.
You are all in this room today because you “get it”.
You know that the way that government configures public services is going to change beyond comprehension in years to come and you want to be part of it.
We all of us in this room understand the possibilities of technological advance.
Our challenge is to use it to make a difference to the lives of people we are all here to serve.
I began to understand the change going on in the world when I set up a political blog five years ago.
At the time it was seen as a radical act. People could not believe that I had opened myself up to such scrutiny and occasional daily abuse. I sometimes still wonder about that bit myself.
But the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me so I persevered.
Yesterday I read with regret the story of an anonymous civil servant blogger by the name of Civil Serf. Her bluntly written blog about life in Whitehall was taken down, after it came to the attention of the national press. Now, I’m not going to say that we should tear up the civil service code it’s very important that civil servants play by the rules, nor do I agree with everything she says, but surely a truly transformed government would be one in which speaking engagingly about life our public services would be far from newsworthy, and far from career wrecking.
When the MySociety people established the theyworkforyou web site, I began to understand how the old order of things was going to change.
Put simply, I began to understand the power of information.
So let me tell you where I stand.
I believe in the power of mass collaboration.
I believe that as James Surowiecki says ‘the many are smarter than the few’.
I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made and crucially for you in this room the way in which it is delivered - are going to change for ever.
People tell me that we are entering a post-bureaucratic age. I don’t accept that. It?s just old thinking - laissez faire ideas with a new badge.
The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice.
And as Kevin Kelly says “the bottom is not enough”.
A post bureaucratic age misunderstands the idea of an enabling state, one that moderates collaborative activity for a shared social good.
The collaborative state still requires leaders and enablers, doers and thinkers. It still requires public services but services with boundaries porous to external ideas.
Interesting Series of blog entries and comments debating as to whether Civil Servant Bloggers in the UK should be governed by a set of blogging guidelines or whether adherence to the UK civil service code should be sufficient. This was all prompted by the recent posts of an anonymous blogger ‘Civil Serf’ known only as a 33-year-old civil servant who attacked the civil service for its lack of innovation and also highlighted incompetences regarding some of the UKs ministers. More on this here..
Tom Watson posted these suggestions on his own blog last Tuesday (11 March 08).
1. Write as yourself
2. Own your own content
3. Be nice
4. Keep secrets
5. No anonymous comments
6. Remember the civil service code
7. Got a problem? Talk to your boss
8. Stop it if we say so
9. Be the authority in your specialist field – provide worthwhile information
10. Think about consequences
11. Media interest? Tell your boss
12. Correct your own mistakes
The CSC is based on values not specifics, and as a result is both rather good and rather flexible. It seems to me that any blogging code should be based on a similar expectation and assumption of trust and professionalism - and should therefore be phrased in similar terms, rather than at a level of “do not use anonymous comments” (which are fine anyway if properly policed and can be beneficial - for example in a discussion of forced marriage).
The meat of the Civil Service Code covers, among other things:
and I prefer those concepts, rather than a great fluff of detailed prescriptions and explanatory notes - whether brief or not. Civil Servants are grown-ups; treat them as such.
So my 10 recommended guidelines are in the next section. The Blogging Code
1. 99.9% of Civil Servants are sensible and professional people of integrity.
2. Civil Serf is an exception in not behaving professionally.
3. Exception control for the 0.1% in this case should be by disciplinary action of the 0.1% under the Civil Service Code, not by creating guidelines for the 99.9%.
4. Blogging guidelines are only an unnecessary result of a need to be seen to take dynamic action.
5. A multiplication of guidelines like rabbits will only serve to generate more boundary quarrels, and waste more time in argument about whether the letter of the guidelines has been breached or not.
6. And then there will have to be a review of the guidelines to identify the weak points.
7. And a policy commission to evaluate the results.
8. And then there will be even more guidelines.
9. And they will have to be put under version control, and distributed to all the Intranets etc etc etc … sod it … go to 5 and continue in circles.
10. In summary - Ockham’s Razor just shredded the guidelines. Or the need for them. Just follow the Civil Service Code.
Required Action
Mr Milliband (or whoever) needs to issue a two sentence policy reminder:
You may write about your work on your blog, but must do so in accordance with the Civil Service Code, the “personal use of office computers” policy, and local policy. Discuss any specifics or questions with your line manager in the usual way.
Job done. Back to work.
And finally (unfortunately?) it seems that Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, is to set out new guidance to civil servants to cover blogging and online social networks following the demise of the “Civil Serf” blogger, The UK Times has learnt…
Sir Gus will shortly issue guidelines to tell officials whether they can start up blogs or use social networking websites such as Facebook and YouTube, and even if they can change details on Wikipedia.
A Cabinet Office spokesman denied that the move was directly linked with the Civil Serf blogger, believed to work for the Department for Work and Pensions, who has embarrassed Westminster with her revelations about officials and ministers.
