This has been brewing for about the last four years but today I feel moved to actually put it down in writing. Might have something to do with the election announcement, or maybe it was triggered by an incident the other week:
I was doing some work with a local council (can’t say which one) helping their elected councillors to think about how they can use the web. We had a great conversation about the passion and commitment of some local residents and there was clearly a deep and enduring love from the councillors towards their home town, where they had lived for decades. THAT’S what politics should be all about. People who live somewhere standing up for their home and getting the best deal for the people that live there. Politicians should work tirelessly to represent their people, their electorate.
But the conversation quickly turned to the councillors’ nervousness about using social media. It wasn’t down to lack of IT confidence, it wasn’t down to scepticism about social media. It was about the petty party politics that is the stragling bindweed of democracy. They were too scared to use the web because the previous week a councillor had been hauled up before Standards Committee by councillors from the opposing party for using the wrong email address. Yes, that’s right. the councillor had inadvertantly sent out an email deemed to be political from his ‘.gov.uk’ account and had subsequently been disciplined for it. When councillors are newly elected they are usually given a laptop, a mobile phone, an email address and a broadband connection in order to carry out their duties. This is A Good Thing because if only people rich enough to afford these things could become politicians we’d have an even more unrepresentative system. But because the kit technically belongs to the council (not the politician or their party) they’re not allowed to use it for ‘political’ purposes. Which is really just ridiculous if you think about it because THEY’RE A POLITICIAN so by default everything they do is political. Every time they speak to a constituent it’s political.
So as a result they don’t do anything to engage online because they might get brought before some committee and have their wrists slapped, which will be reported with glee in the local press and bandied around by the opposing parties come election time. It’s not just one party that does this to another, it’s all of them. The very parties that are the foundation of our political system are basically stifling it with petty, malevolent vendettas that take time away from politicians actually serving the people.
It’s magnified on a national scale – the political digs, the smear campaigns, the bickering and cries of injustice (what social good could you have done instead of whinging at the BBC, Tories? And let’s not forget that Labour isn’t above it either). It’s a pernickity cacophany that has become like white noise to an increasingly disillusioned public. I don’t want to hear your minor complaints against your fellow politicians, I want to hear what you’ve done to represent me. I don’t care if the honourable gentleman has taken a minute longer in his speech than you got. GET OVER IT. The amount of time, not to mention energy, these clowns spend on their little one-upmanships and party skirmishes could be so much better spent building bridges and cooperation. Instead the parties generate a toxic mire of negativity that diverts energy and attention away from the issues that matter.
When will the parties realise that it doesn’t have to be about left and right, but that it should be about solving problems? I don’t think I’m the only voter turned off by politics – the schoolyard games of using the rules of bureaucracy against each other just don’t interest me. I care passionately about democracy and the issues that matter to me, but I don’t give a monkeys about party politics.
The parties have a slow death-grip on our system. They stifle innovation and risk-taking while reinforcing anachronistic rules. ‘Purdah’ is another example. When an election is announced all the public sector organisations grind to a halt. You can’t get anything done. You can’t launch new projects, you can’t make annoucements about cool new stuff, you can’t even arrange a meeting. Why? because the ‘Purdah’ rules state that public sector organisations have to be divorced from politics and can’t be seen to give any party an unfair advantage. So basically if, say, an NHS trust wants to launch an innovative project to address some serious issues on their agenda they have to wait for six weeks until they can do it until all this election business dies down. Because the NHS is run by the government. And the government is Labour, so if you announce that the NHS is doing something in the press then you’ve given Labour an unfair advantage and all the other politicians will bleat about it. It works the same in Conservative and Lib-Dem controlled councils. No party is immune. They can’t help themselves.
It’s shameful and childish and characteristic of people who have no ideas. I think pedantry can be important in some circumstances – pedants are usually the only people that care enough to uncover political scandals and keep things accountable. But a good pedant applies this quality to their own life, something which most politicians fail to do. Moreover, party politics rides roughshod over common sense becuase politicians are devoid of a sense of nuance.
It’s time for a new type of politics. One where people who work hard for their local area can get elected without having to belong to a party. One where local groups can campaign politically without breaking charitable status rules. For ultimately everything is political, just not party political. The sooner we loosen the noose that the out-of-touch, out-of-date parties have on our system the sooner people can have a voice, make a point and improve their lives for themselves. Call it de-regulating politics if you will.
So I saw something on Twitter about the government’s intention to roll-out the Tell Us Once programme nationally. And then someone asked me what I thought about it…
I think it’s a laudable goal to try to simplify the bureaucracy that citizens experience when dealing with the state in all its guises. However I think TUO is problematic for three reasons:
It’s not addressing the real issue, namely that the state is too bureaucratic. TUO is a work-around because the state isn’t organised around actual people. It’s sticking plaster that gives an artificial sense of coherence to a flawed system. And everyone knows that papering over the cracks is unsustainable.
It’s not giving citizens control over their data. It’s channelling data between bits of government and the scope for error is still huge. Accepting that the hideous bureaucracy isn’t going anywhere any time soon, it would be better to make it clear to people who they need to contact with what information and how. Then I can send one email (or better still an RSS feed)* to all the relevant departments and I can be sure that the data they get is accurate and that they actually get it – it’s my data, after all, and I firmly believe that a state employee does not have a role as an intermediary for my data.
The basic principle of the government sharing data between departments is fraught with problems. At best it’s paternalistic and at worse it’s the stuff of Big Brother nightmares. Sure, our current government might not be organised enough to actually make use of the data shared between departments, but it sets us on a dangerous path in which ultimately any information about me can be shared between departments and quangos – I don’t get a say in who gets what and what they do with it. To some that sounds over-dramatic but there are others who have seen the effects of regimes that do this in their lifetime.
In short, Tell Us Once is a shonky fix for a bigger problem. It does not give individuals control of their own data and it has very scary potential.
*Yes, some people don’t have access to email or RSS (though they are few) but we have to start somewhere.
I should have known this event would be a little puzzling when Google’s idea of a great freebie for local government people was a USB stick. A few of us even joked about the irony of getting a free gift you aren’t technically allowed to use, but what the heck, it was nice of them to give us something and besides, it’s a Google USB stick, so it’s obviously made of magic.
Flag number two came when the first thing anyone said was ‘to be clear this isn’t a barcamp event, it’s for google to talk to you about its offer’. Not that I was expecting a barcamp (the rows of chairs with desk arms was my clue there) but more that I was hoping for a bit of a two-way conversation. That plus the ban on photos (oops) just felt, well, a little un-Google.
A few people muttered that I was a bit harsh on Twitter during the day (check out the hashtag) so I’ll try to keep it balanced here – it was an interesting day, which was generously offered for free at Google’s offices, with great hospitality from the super-fast broadband to the great food.
It was a pretty intense day of presentations by various Googlers about their products, much of which was interesting and applicable to local government, though there wasn’t much talk about local government until the end of the session.
First up was Hamish Nicklin [Update 19/8/09: Link removed, see note at the end of the post], Head of Google’s UK Public Sector and Government team (he could do with some more followers on Twitter if you’re so inclined)[Update 19/8/09: See note at the end], who gave some useful stats on web use:
44m people are online in the UK
90% of people said they must have broadband within a month of moving into a new house
17p in every pound is spent online
80% of internet users compare prices and options
1 in 3 consumers post a comment online a week
15 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
British people spend 1.2 billion minutes watching videos and movies online in a month
An average user spends 43 mins per week streaming video vs 14.2 hours per week watching TV (so online video is around 5% of the total time people spend on video)
12% of UK housefulds now rely on mobiles rather than landline
490m mobile internet users in 2008 globally (1b by 2011)
There were 74.2 billion searches in June 2008. That’s 11 per person for every person in one month
iphone users search the web 50 times more than those on traditional movible devices.
Jon Cross [Update 19/8/09: Link removed, see note at end], a Google Pulic Sector Senior Account Manager (also in need of some followers)[Update 19/8/09: see note at end] was next, talking about advertising. Google would like councils to advertise on Google, ensuring that they appear at the top of all search results (AdWords). It was agreed that some of this wouldn’t be relevant to local government (the presentation was tailored for businesses with no repurposing for the local government audience) but there’s a useful case study of how Hillingdon council have used AdWords to publicise their ice rink and Christmas market using geographical targetting – Google, rather freakily, can tell where in the country you are using your IP address (a reference number that every computer has, which sort of acts like your address on the internet) and information from your internet service provider (whoever you get your broadband connection from – Virgin Media, BT, whoever).
The idea is that making a specific service more ‘findable’ in Google increases the chances that someone will find the information they need online, rather than having to call or write to the council, which is more expensive to deal with. As with much of the content of the session, I can’t help thinking that Google are rather behind the times when it comes to the public sector, which was a big surprise to me. I think of Google as a forward-thinking bleeding-edge organisation, but somehow they just haven’t grasped the local government agenda. Maybe it’s because their public sector unit was only set up at the start of 2009, and it’s only been concentrating on central government until now.
Local government is a different kettle, though, and while it might be in the business of advertising ice rinks and tourist attractions at the moment, the financial crunch of 2010 is looming large. Local government can’t carry on as a direct service provider, and the days of leisure and culture provision are numbered. The new local authority role will be as a service enabler – the glue that holds a locality together and supports other organisations to provide services that residents need, as well as helping to create the conditions in which residents can meet their own needs – from neighbourhoods getting together to share the cost of green energy through to social startups and local businesses. It’s a new model for local government and a radical adjustment that I just don’t think Google have got their heads around. It feels like the ‘credit crunch’ has hit their business accounts so they’re looking to the steady income of the public sector to make up the difference.
Cynical, I know, but the fact that none of the presentations we heard were tailored to a local government audience in any way seemed borderline rude. It would have been so easy to have a 15 minute discussion at the start of the session to draw out the problems facing local government, find out where the good bits are and then tailor the whole session to the sectoral landscape. What I still don’t know is how a local council can work with Google to make everything about a local area ‘discoverable’ online – maybe the local council isn’t the direct client of Google, but maybe it has an intermediary role to play, making sure that businesses, startups and local groups have well-structured and findable sites that make them perfect Google customers – of course Google would need to share a cut of the income with the council for that service
We’ll never know if Google is up for that kind of conversation because we never found out what their intentions are towards the local government market – are they just happy if a few councils sign up for AdWords, or do they want a long-lasting and sustainable business relationship with a changing sector facing serious challenges?
Anyway, if you’re interested in paying for a sponsored link on Google there’s this handy rap to explain how it works. Fo’ Shizzle.
After Jon (and some much-needed coffee) we heard from Alex Nurnberg, a Google Account Strategist who talked us through Google Analytics and how to make the most of your site to ‘convert’ users. The presentation was completely made for businesses, so the entire thing was about reducing abandoned shopping carts and ecommerce transactions – we’re all intelligent (*ahem*) so we can see how it can be translated to councils’ online transactions like parking and tax payments, but it would have been nice not to have made the mental leap and to feel like Google understood the relevance of its own products to the market they’re trying to enter. Anyway, it was all useful stuff that every web manager should pay attention to, and I posted Google’s top 10 tips for a good website over on the FutureGov Network.
A slightly poorly Paul Canning gave us a SOCITM view of Google Analytics and then Dominic Miller, Corporate Marketing Manager at Nottingham City Council talked to us about the council’s decision to make money off their website (irritatingly referred to as ‘monetizing’ – yuck) by allowing advertising on the site. Poor Nottingham got slated a bit on Twitter for a) thinking people would be remotely interested in a personalisable council home page and b) thinking it’s a good idea to advertise on a council website. I’m in agreement on the former – I really don’t see the point in an igoogle style interface for a council home page, but on the latter I think it’s a decision each council will make for its own reasons. If bringing in money from the web is a way to fund other innovative web development in a council then I’m all for it. Alas in Nottingham’s case I think it might just be used as a way to justify a bigger headcount – they reckon they’ve made £15,000 from advertising on their site in the last 12 months.
There were lots of audience concerns about inappropriate adverts appearing on a site (e.g. an advert for fast food on a page about local sports facilities) and the answer is that you can block certain adverts by keyword and by category, and you can pick which pages have advertising on them and which don’t. The bottom line is, though, that if an inappropriate advert appears, you can only block it after it’s appeared, by which time the ‘damage’ will already have been done. I do think there’s a bit of an over-reaction to exactly how much ‘damage’ could actually be done – web managers are flattering themselves if they think enough people view council websites to cause borough-wide outrage. Plus stuff like that is par for the course for the web – it’s how you deal with it that matters. Curiously that’s not something that Dominic Miller grasped when he later asked why Google wouldn’t ban a comment criticising one of Nottingham City’s Surestart facilities, which appears on a Google Maps search.
Crashing on, the exotically named Xen Lategan [Update 19/8/09: Link removed, see note at end] talked us through Google Enterprise – the ability to use things like Gmail and Google Docs in your organisation instead of Microsoft Outlook and Word/Excel. It’s pretty nifty and you can do all sorts of cool collaborative things like having a video call in the same screen as the document you’re collaboratively editing so you can all see the changes as they happen. Alas, no amount of nifty is going to convince the head of IT that the whole council (or even part of it) should ditch Microsoft overnight – the talk would have been much better if we could have had a group discussion about some of the barriers to adopting Google Enterprise technology and how we can overcome them in the long term. Just on the off-chance that you happen to be an enlightened IT manager, you should check out Google Enterprise – there are no Data Protection Act issues as all the data stays within the EU and we’re told it even works in Internet Explorer 6.
A welcome boost of energy came in a human form – Matthew ‘Chewy’ Trewhella [Update 19/8/09: Link removed, see note at end], a Google Customer Solutions Engineer (whatever that means) talked about all the cool, creative things you can do with YouTube, and even though a lot of it was business-based, there were some examples of some public sector creativity – check out this video made by the police where you get to pick the direction of the story at various intervals.
There are plenty of local authorities using YouTube (Westminster, Hillingdon, and Barnet to name a few) but the take-home message from this talk was ‘it’s the content, stupid’. If you make a boring, over-produced, corporate-looking video, no one will want to watch it and if you don’t link to it and make it easy for people to find it then they definitely won’t watch it. I.e. if you just embed a video on your homepage you’re not really getting it out there. If you’re making a video to post online then ask yourself if you would actually watch the same thing from your own council. If the answer’s a big fat no, then press delete and go back to the drawing board.
We had a whistle-stop look at Google’s mobile platform, Android (I turned out to be the only one in the room with a Google G1 phone, apart from the Googlers), which has the second-largest number of users of all mobile platforms. Sounds impressive until you realise that the iphone has the largest number at 65% and that Android has only 8% – still the second-largest but somehow that seems like less of an achievement when you see the numbers.
Since few people were really familiar with Android attention started to drift until Open Social and Friend Connect came up. The former lets you access your contacts and friends data across different social networks. As Adriana Lukas has pointed out in the past there are limitations – Open Social still doesn’t allow me to export that data and own it myself, it just opens doors between my various social networks. Friend Connect is an application that works with Open Social that lets you see your friends’ comments when you are on other websites, for example you could see what your friends think of a particular council service while they are on the web page of that service. It doesn’t sound immediately relevant to local government but I could see an example in which some environmental services pages use Open Social and Friend Connect to let you see your friends’ ‘carbon footprint’ and compare it to your own.
A final talk on Google Maps was where the disconnect with the local government audience really started to show outside of the Tweet stream. There was no mention of the role of Geographic Information System teams or tools (presumably due to a lack of research into local government) and the elephant in the room was the relationship with Ordnance Survey or lack thereof. When probed, it turned out that yes, it is in fact illegal for councils to use Google Maps as their mapping software due to a clause in Google’s terms and conditions that the Ordnance Survey takes issue with. I don’t know the details so I’m not going to try to reproduce them here, but there’s a very long discussion on the Google Maps API forum if you’re geeky enough to read through it all. It turns out you can use the paid-for Google Maps ‘Premier’ API, which is intended for companies that use maps as a core part of their business or use them on their intranet. Westminster Council uses the Premier version and they reckon it costs them £7700 per year, which is a tiered licence fee, base on predicted traffic.
Heads weary and batteries running low (metaphorically and practically speaking) the session ended and we were invited to hang around for some much-needed pizza and beer. There was lots of good chat and plenty of connecting and Dave Briggs is doing a good job of rounding-up the post-event write-ups (writes-up?)
In summary (!) the session with Google was a mixture of delight and puzzlement – they were kind enough to invite a bunch of local government geeks to their offices and give us a great insight into some excellent tools and technologies, but a little bit of research or more of a two-way conversation would have made it a constructive session that benefitted both Google and the local government sector. I understand there’s an intention to strike up more of a conversation in the wake of this session, which I hope I’ll be able to join once more details are known.
Phew – a whopper of a post, which will hopefully make up for my lack of blogging during July!
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Update 19/8/09:
Jon Cross from the Google Public Sector UK team has contacted me and asked if I would remove the link to Google staff Twitter accounts as they are ‘personal and not intended for business use’. I’ve deleted the links (although I see that Hamish Nicklin has deleted his Twitter account altogether). I wasn’t asked to remove any other links (e.g. to Xen Lategan’s LinkedIn profile), but I’ve done so for consistency. Jon would prefer people to link to the Google Public Sector UK team’s Twitter account, which you can find above.
When I last posted we were frantically trying to develop the site and pull together a presentation on our ideas, and fewer than 24 hours later it was all over and Mypolice.org was declared the winning idea at Social Innovation Camp 2009.
There’s a sort of overview available on the blog we’ve set up and if you want to be kept updated on how the project progresses over the next few months you can sign up on the website. Oh, and it’s @mypolice on Twitter. Notwithstanding some technical hitches on the day, our presentation was ace as we had some video clips from some actual real Glaswegians talking about their attitudes towards the police. When they’re ready I’ll link to them as they’re really worth a look/laugh.
The prize is some money, plus some free developer days, plus some business mentoring and a strong network of people who are in the know. The idea is quite simple so I don’t think it will take huge amounts of energy to get it up and running nicely, it’s just the inevitable struggle of getting the police to dabble with the site that will need all our patience/tenacity. Let me know if you know any friendly bobbys who might be interested in having a chat about it.
The limits of geography are annoying me – most of the others on the team are based in Glasgow so being down in London while meetings are going on is a bit frustrating. Hopefully I’ll stay involved, perhaps working with the police down here as I get the impression that the Met is a whole other kettle of coppers…
I’m working on MyPolice.org – a website where people can tell each other about their experiences of the police. The idea is that public feedback will help the police to give a better service. Although the idea isn’t exactly social innovation (something similar has worked for PatientOpinion and the NHS) it’s still a really nifty idea that’s fairly simple but potentially powerful.
So far we’ve gone nuts with the flipchart, post-its and whiteboard:
The group I’m in totally rocks – no egos and everyone working well together. Yes, really. The team (8 of us) is really strong on the design side, with about 4 service designers in our midst, so the site has been designed and mocked-up already. It’s being coded as I type, though I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to show at tomorrow’s presentation.
The main thing is going to be showing how we’ll work with the police to help them use the site to improve services. No one thinks the police are going to jump at the idea, but maybe we’ll find a few coppers who are willing to give it a try and get involved. If that does happen it will probably at a local level (Police Community Support Officers etc), though we have chatted it through with Nick Keane from the National Police Improvement Agency.
I’ll post here if we win, but even if we don’t I think the idea is still totally viable. Wish us luck!
I spoke at VRM Hub this week about the implications of VRM on the public sector. If you’re new to the idea of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) then you should check out this nifty explanation by Adriana Lukas.
I thought it would probably be best to start with trying to figure out what I mean by ‘the state’, since we could be talking about a variety of bits of the spaghetti of government. In fact, the full list of all the different bits are on the Direct Gov website. There’s a prize if you can find the weirdest bit of government. I’m also thinking that in some cases charities or voluntary sector organisations could count as ‘the state’ since they are often grant funded by the government and therefore do their bidding.
The big question is why VRM matters for the state – there’s lots of good stuff about how it can help us transact with companies better but not much out there on how it can help us improve the balance in our relationship with government institutions. I think it’s crucial. For a start off, interaction with the state is complex and you can’t take control. We have little choice over how our data is used or kept safe (missing memory stick, anyone?) and we never have a complete picture of all our interactions.
We can be residents, citizens, customers, clients, patients, victims, criminals, volunteers and donors to name just a few, and we can be all of those things simultaneously. In some cases, lives are at stake. If we could understand more about our interactions with the state then we’d become better citizens – more informed people can take better decisions and maybe even provide for themselves, easing pressure on an already burdened system.
I nearly typed ‘broken system’ then because just the thought of introducing the idea of VRM to the public sector is not for the fainthearted. There are lots of hurdles, from the extreme risk aversion (AKA ‘blame aversion’) of officials (‘what if no one shares their data with us????!!’) through to worries about digital inclusion (‘we shouldn’t adopt new ways of engaging digitally when there are still some poor/old/disabled people who don’t have computers or broadband’).
There is also the difficulty of going too fast. I know – fast isn’t usually the problem with government. But I’m very nervous about the rush to ‘scale’ VRM before any tools have been properly built or adopted. We had some debate at the VRM Hub session about how you could authenticate your bits and bobs like your passport, birth certificate, driving licence and soforth in order to make it easier to transact with the government.
While it’s obvious we will need a way to do this, I think it’s too soon to start trying to invent those ways now. I’m more interested in people being able to tell their local council their preferences, ideas, suggestions, needs and views and for the council to really listen to what people are saying and then design services accordingly. Maybe once the state is used to interacting with citizens on their own terms we will start to see entirely new ways of transacting, and only then will we be ready to design solutions to help this more balanced relationship to scale.
While there are undoubtedly challenges to bringing VRM tools to bear on the state, there are also some open doors. I think VRM will save state institutions money – possibly through having less of a need to store data (since we will be the source of our data); probably through deleting many of the pointless consultation teams that exist throughout local authorities and departments; but definitely through more accurate service design.
Another opportunity is the increasing acceptance that the government might actually need to have a relationship of sorts with its citizens – most recently expressed through the delightful ‘duty to involve‘ placed upon councils, which makes talking to people a legal requirement. I tend to think that if you have to rely on a law to make that happen then you’ve already lost the battle, but at least it’s bringing questions of how best to talk to people to the fore – make way for social media and of course, VRM. And with faith in political institutions at an all time low, there’s never been a better opportunity to introduce a radical re-think of the relationship between people and state.
If you’re interested in VRM and want to find out more, you should totally come along to the next VRM Hub meeting in June. They usually happen on the last Thursday of the month in central London, and you will find details and sign-up here nearer the time.
I like this thing. It’s an unofficial place where people can tell the government’s new Digital Engagement Director what they would like his task list to look like.
There’s lots on the list about freeing up data and getting government to be more open – I’d love to say DUH, because I think that’s kind of obvious, but alas we still need to say it. We need to free up the data sets so developers can use them creatively and make sites people will actually use.
If only we could go further, though. I want to see the data that the government has about me – from my medical records through to my CRM record with Camden Council, my Congestion Charge journeys as well as my tube and bus journeys, every image of me on CCTV, even. I could benefit from this information. I could learn stuff about my travel habits, for example, and start to move around the city more efficiently. I could cross refer my medical records with my dietary and exercise information to manage my health. I could find out when and why I have contacted the council over the last few years and start to become a better informed resident, perhaps even pre-empting when the lids of my recycling boxes get stolen to be used as a makeshift sledge during snowy weather so I don’t have to order new ones every year.
Ever hopeful (?!) I’ve stuck my wish on the Digital Engagment Director’s list of Things To Do. Give it a few votes if you fancy.
I just saw this link posted on Twitter about how American gargantuan chain store Target is using a Facebook application to get its customers to vote for which of 10 charities they would like Target to donate some of their profits to.
The link came from a couple of public sector types I follow (like this dude and this fella) with the following question: could we have a Facebook application like this for government (specifically local councils I imagine) to get people involved in ‘participatory budgeting’? Presumably the idea being that the council puts forward a bunch of departments/initiatives (children, community safety, recession help, road repairs etc etc) and we all have a chance to say which of these we’d prefer them to spend our money on and in what proportion. Democracy in action, right?
1. You don’t get to choose who represents the UK in Europe. You think you do because they’ve got that rip-off tele-voting thing but actually you only get to choose between a few acts that have been pre-selected by the production company to spend your money on and they’re all crap. Just like in participatory budgeting in which the council sets the policy areas you can choose to fund with your hard earned money – no space for innovation or alternative services and you have to just pick the least worst option all with the illusion of democracy.
2. You don’t get to pick whether the UK sends an act to the contest or not and you’ll have the same conversation in your living room every year about how we shouldn’t bother taking part in the contest because it’s a fix anyway and what a waste of money it is. But there’s nothing you can do about it, just like you don’t get to pick whether you pay tax or not and you have the same conversation over and over about how your hard earned money is squandered by the government. Thing is, if we were allowed a national debate about whether it’s worth putting some poor sucker up for Eurovision each year we might decide it is worth it because Eurovision is a beloved institution. At least we would have made a positive choice. If we could have an open debate about whether it’s worth paying tax and having a local authority coordinate some of the things we can’t be bothered to do I think a lot of people would decide that on balance it’s worth it, provided we get better value for money.
3. You get blamed if we don’t win. While we’re in our living rooms shouting at the TV about the tactical voting, the official Eurovision position is ‘well you selected your country’s song, so you’ve got no one to blame but yourselves if you picked a dud’. While we’re all saying ‘but we didn’t pick it! We were given a false choice between a bunch of rubbish options – this is not an expression of our collective will!’ So it is with participatory budgeting – say if you pick ‘Children’ as deserving of the larger proportion of your cash, it’s your fault that the pavement outside your house didn’t get fixed – after all they asked you what you wanted and you told them children were more important than pavements. This, we are told, is a ‘policy trade-off’ and it needs to be explained to us that we can’t have our cake and eat it.
Participatory budgeting makes the government feel better about its decisions. It adds a perceived level of accountability and it educates people about the ‘tough choices’ that government has to make so we pity the hard job of councils. Balancing a shrinking budget is undeniably hard, but that shouldn’t be an excuse to trade off essential services, it should be a challenge to introduce innovation. Redesigning (and co-designing) services so that they meet the needs of the people who really need them, letting those who can fix problems themselves get on with it by freeing up data and removing bureaucracy, having an open debate about the value of public services, letting institutions become porous so that good ideas can easily be introduced, giving back individuals’ data so they can become better informed – these are all things the public sector can do today to make sure that we don’t end up with the policy equivalent of this:
I”ve just got round to processing my thoughts on the OpenGov Event which happened on Wednesday. Here’s my synopsis, but the #opengov Twitter feed is worth a read, as are some other write-ups here, here and eventually here.
The keynote was Alex Butler, Director of Transformational Strategy at the Central Office of Information, whose main point was that they movers and shakers in government still don’t get ‘It’ (i.e. the web as a tool for citizen participation). She suggested less talk about technology and more talk about participation to get the big-wigs on board. She also revealed that the COI has set up an R&D budget to be more experimental, meaning more freedom to work with smaller suppliers, news which sent the audience a-twittering.
Stand-out clangers of the day were mostly dropped by Paul Evans, who said ‘active citizens’ (i.e. those that readily participate) are usually wealthy, obsessive and time rich. They are, in Paul’s view, not as useful as passive citizens and their opinions should be disregarded, an opinion which I think is elitist, bureaucratic and a bit dangerous. Paul’s other gem of wisdom was that eavesdropping on people is a good idea so you can find out what people are thinking. Another bit of lunacy there – no one likes being eavesdropped upon. It’s creepy. If you want to know what people are thinking, go to where they’re hanging out online, let them know you’re there and you’d just like to hear their opinions, shut up and listen to them, and participate when it feels right to or you’re invited to comment.
Luckily, other speakers had some useful things to say.
Dave Briggs made the very good point that the perceived ‘digital divide’ is too often used by government to avoid engaging at all. Just because there is a minority of citizens that aren’t on the web, it doesn’t mean the majority should be denied the opportunity online.
I might be Tim Davies‘s newest fan – he made some brilliant points, like reminding us that most people in local authorities can’t access the web tools for citizen participation at work and they don’t have a policy that encourages them to experiment (he’s actually done a big long list of hurdles for local government in this area). He also talked about the need to use creative methods internally as a way to encourage staff to be more creative when engaging externally. I absolutely agree with that as I think role-modelling behaviour is one of the most powerful tools we have (it can also be translated as ‘get your own house in order before you start bossing citizens around’). Another great comment was that officers fear that citizens won’t participate online. Tim pointed out that government has often failed to engage offline (take the woefully small numbers of citizens who go to local area forum meetings) Tim’s point: It’s not new to fail but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Paul Clarke reckoned that the IBMs and KPMGs of this world should be participating in the debate since they’ve got most of the government contracts (there was one attendee from IBM to be fair…) He then incurred the wrath of the back-channel by collectively describing those of us that did attend as ‘fringe’. Maybe that was a bit insensitive but I can see his point. Having worked at one of said big players in the government market until recently, I can say the reason they weren’t at the conference is because THEY DON’T GET IT. What’s more, we don’t need them to get it – we need them to get out of our way.
One of the coolest comments of the day came from Jonathan Akwue, who gave us a lesson in being ‘street’ and reminded us that the development of the web is a bit like the development of hip hop. I’m not as cool as that, but much to my surprise I did seem to get some retweeting of this comment.
One final thought, on a theme I’ll return to in the future. It was once again a mostly male audience at the event, with women making up about 20% of the crowd (notwithstanding the female keynote at this particular event). Women have so much to offer this industry (or whatever we’re calling the social/government/innovation/web ‘space’ these days) but they’re rarely involved and I’ve no idea why. In fact it seems like no one really knows. I went to the London Girl Geek Dinner for the first time this week and joined Silicon Stilettos (which anyone who’s ever seen my trainer collection will find hilarious) so let’s just say I’m investigating and I’ll post my findings on this here blog…
I came across this cool site ages ago, which is about getting people to do small things that would make a big change if enough people did the same.
Not sure I’m convinced that sites like this can ever catch on in a big way – you might end up spending more time trying to convince people to take part than actually making any real change – but I am totally in favour of starting small and embodying the behaviours you’d like to see in others.
It sort of got me thinking about government, and how men and women who work hard as public servants somehow get caught up in the bureaucracy. When you take people outside of their work context and ask them what kind of service they would like to see as a voter and taxpayer, they suddenly realise that they’ve become the thing they hate in their own public services.
I was wondering what kind of small changes could each public servant make that might make a small difference. Here’s my starting list, some of which I wish I had done more of when I worked in a local council:
Book meetings in half-hour slots as the default, rather than hour slots
Don’t call things a strategy when they’re really a plan
Any time you spend any of your budget, calculate how much council tax that is for a resident and whether you’d be happy to see your hard-earned tax money go on that purchase
If you normally work in the back office spend one day working in a registrars office/library/reception
Set up a colleague with an RSS reader and show them how to use it to save time
Thank people when they’ve done a good job and cc their boss
Ask ‘why?’
Do something on time for someone, or better still ahead of the deadline
Have a discussion with people about whether you think the plan you’re writing/implementing will really do the job. If it won’t do the job, change it so it will.
Measure fewer performance indicators and trust your instinct more
@RotaryBarDiner Please please please could u mention on your menu if you fry stuff in breadcrumbs for the gluten avoiders? I just wasted £10 12 hours ago
RT @amandaneylon: Ocado has a Head of Everything We Haven't Done Yet. Love it. Am going to propose that to @ciarandevane as my new job titl… 15 hours ago
