Gordon Brown - photo by Paul Clarke

Well, he didn’t say Gov 2.0, but he may as well have done. This morning UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a sweeping set of changes to the way that technology is used in government. In a speech on Building Britain’s Digital Future, he was talking about digital technology’s role in a plan to secure recovery, growth and jobs in the global marketplace.

A telephone levy has been introduced to support the roll out of 100% broadband, a hotly debated topic here in recent times. Gordon Brown said that we can’t rely on an open market to look after all Britons, but rather the country must depend on an open partnership of business, economics and government. If this sounds like ‘light touch’ regulation, then that is a fair description. “We will support the independence of Ofcom and the BBC to encourage competition and innovation in the digital sector,” he said.

Gordon Brown’s speech touched both on those that do not have Internet access for physical or economic reasons, as well as for challenges in digital literacy. Not much was said about those that simply don’t want to interact with the government on-line, other than the implication that the services will be so good that they will change their minds. The topic of ‘digital exclusion’ will become an even hotter one after today, for reasons that will become clear…

The Prime Minister is seeking a more open and interactive model for the UK’s public services. Today he said that he is prepared to cancel current projects unless they can deliver results, saving huge sums of money. He sees the “Digital Britain” agenda as essential to economic recovery, aiming to place Britain as a world leader in the new age of digital economies. Underpinning this “next generation” of Britain is the next generation of the web – semantic web technology. Sir Tim (Berners-Lee) and his associates have clearly been a strong influence on Gordon Brown’s thinking, and that came across clearly in today’s announcement. £30m of funding is being made available to suport an Institute of Internet Science, headed by Sir Tim and Professor Nigel Shadbolt

A significant percentage of the UK jobs are already IT related, and Gordon Brown believes that the UK is uniquely equipped to lead a digital age. A new “MyGov”  initiative, starting with central government, will expand to local government, to support public engagement at both national and local levels. Brown cited £11bn of savings through using the web, as part of a£20bn of budget savings.

The ‘next stage’ of (UK) Government is an expansion of two-way communication between providers and consumers of government services, Brown mentioned smart energy meters, e-doctors/e-medicine and virtual classrooms. Increased efficiency and transparency will come for the open use of linked data web to provide visibility and access into these new services. Gordon Brown hailed the Internet as a “fundemental freedom” and the “electricity of digital age.”

The Prime Minister believes that opening up government data is central to building a more efficient, open and honest government. A new condition of future franchise partnerships will be that data is open and released (which sounds like a direct knock at TFL who have been slow in providing data for transport applications). From next month, bus stop location data is being published and Ordinance Survey data is coming too. There will be a new tendering portal for all contracts  over £25k. A prize comment on Twitter:

“Gordon almost rapping his speech he’s got so much good news in such a short period of time #gov20 #bbdf” DominicCampbell

Gordon Brown announced that all future government websites must have digital engagement functionality built in, and new websites would not be allowed unless they meet a strict set of criteria. This sounds like a big step forward for communication, and potentially accessibility too. The government will close 500 more .gov websites, as new services are consolidated around the new infrastructure.

“No more one size fits all,” he declared, as he proclaimed an agenda centred around personalisation, transparency, feedback and ease of use, and a potentially radical new model for public service delivery. The aim is that MyGov makes interacting with government as easy as banking and shopping online – co-opting commercial levels of functionality into the government’s infrastructure.

Martha Lane Fox will broaden her existing role and become digital champion for the UK, launching a new digital government department within the cabinet office.  ”The digital net will become the safety net,” said Brown. A clear nod to Martha’s work on digital exclusion. The PM also announced that in the autumn all non-personal government data will be released – a “New Domesday book” – but it isn’t just about the data. The Digital Public Services unit will have a big efficiency emphasis, looking at restructuring government services themselves. Traditional departments have a three part structure including a policy unit, a public facing (transactional) functional, and a back office. Digital technology, in the form of business services, will be used to transform the back office, and also used to open up the policy making function. Gordon Brown talked about breaking down silos and increasing cross-functional working. Make no mistake, these are big changes, with huge challenges.

I did have one “groan” moment during the press conference, when an iPhone app was announced. A bit of overly trendy glitz – a much better investment would have been a mobile friendly portal that works across all smart phones rather than the closed, minority player that is Apple. Other than that, this was government being “with it” in regard to technology.

The Digital Economy Bill came up in the question and answer session, and the Prime Minister offered up the minister responsible for a Q&A session with those interested afterwards – I look forward to the notes from that meeting! – the brief answer to the question was that disconnection, and more generally technical measures, were a last option. However, it did highlight the gap between the backward looking UK Digital Economy Bill, and the forward looking use of open standards and open technology that was a central part of today’s announcement.

What does this all mean? It’s too early to tell. There are clearly aspects of today’s announcement that are re-announcemnets of existing initiatives, but over all the picture is one of a strategic and systematic embracing of digital technology to create a more efficient and more open government here in the UK.

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Advised by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt and others, government are opening up data for reuse. This site seeks to give a way into the wealth of government data and is under constant development. We want to work with you to make it better.

We’re very aware that there are more people like you outside of government who have the skills and abilities to make wonderful things out of public data. These are our first steps in building a collaborative relationship with you.

A Short Long Journey

It feels like a long journey since October (“Set our Data Free and Create a (Digital) Economy“), but it reality it has only been a dozen weeks and some snow. In between-times, civil servants and some very civil technologists have been hard at work making thousands of sets of data accessible. I’ve just glanced back at my email folder – there are a good few thousand messages that have gone backwards and forwards between a large community of developers and the folks in Whitehall who have been making things happen. Amazing stuff.

It Matters Because…

I tuned into Radio 4′s Today program – normally bastion of great Radio – and was very disappointed to hear an odd piece which implied civil servants were battling to avoid releasing the data, and that the ordinance survey data might not get published. While I am sure that there are some who are, it’s the very opposite of what I have seen.

Why does data.gov.uk matter? It matters because:

• Open data encourages transparency in government. I see that as a very-good-thing.
• The datasets will stimulate innovation in services – from mapping accident black spots to finding cross-service opportunities.
• Data.gov.uk will be a nursery for a new generation of semantic-web software developers. If the community isn’t where the next Google comes from (it might well be!), it will at least nurture a pool of developers who will bring great data processing and visualisation skills to business.
• Supporting a digital Britain. The initiative provides a first step in helping to UK catch up and over take countries like Australia and others who are a long way down the track. Knowledge-based services are a big part of the future.

Just the Start

There is a better piece on the BBC website (it might be by Rory Cellan-Jones), talking with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who has been helping to drive the initiative:

…from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use. The target is to kickstart a new wave of services that find novel ways to make use of the information.

The official press release is on the COI site:

“Making public data available for re-use is about increasing accountability and transparency and letting people create new, innovative ways of using it. Government data should be a public resource.  By releasing it, we can unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services. ” Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Conversations are flowing on Twitter under the #opendata hashtag. Sir Tim and Nigel Shadbolt have also written a longer piece in The Guardian and the data.gov.uk site has a list of apps that have been written using the data already. I suspect we’ll see many more in the coming months.

[a couple of additions, post launch event]

There is now a set of resources listed in a blog post on the data.gov.uk site, including some background on SPARQL (the query language used to access the data) and how to list and search the datasets. The site itself is built using open source software – the main stay of what we work with here – under the action plan announced by Tom Watson last year: Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan. There is a brilliant long post by Paul Clarke on his blog, which provides some good context and outlines the next set of challenges

It was interesting to read the US perspectives on the announcement. The US have their own initiative and there is some controversy about who is furthest ahead! The OPSI posted explaining the licensing terms for the data and how these relate to creative commons in the UK. All in all, a great achievement for Professor Shadbolt and Sir Tim.

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by moleitau (cc)

It has taken me a couple of days to write this post, because my brain is still crunching on its contents. It touches on so many different areas of the technology and business areas that I am passionate about, that I’ve had to give up covering them all in one post.

The historic destiny of data (and it’s big parent, knowledge) has been to be locked up; the constant struggle has been to set it free. From the formation of  the university to the API-rich Web 2.0 world, people have postulated ways to make it more available. Of course, not all data is going to be ‘free’ (as in beer), but much of it should at least be accessible and usable (‘free’ as in freedom). The trouble is that much of today’s digital information is trapped in non-portable and hard to process formats.

It’s a vision at the heart of the semantic web, championed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee – particularly under the banner of Web Science, down the M3 from where I am writing, at the University of Southampton (this TED video is a useful primer).

Time to join some dots. Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed Sir Tim to work on opening up government data, and last month Sir Tim talked to the Cabinet about a goal of delivering a single online access point to Government information, similar to the one introduced by the Obama administration in the US, and to what the Australian government has been doing.

Back in August I interrupted the weekend to visit Google’s London office and see a bunch of young folks, with a bit of help from some not-so-young ones, hacking together web-based services under the banner of Young Rewired State. It really was inspiring stuff. There were some familiar faces (including @grantbell) and plenty of new ones, all working on an impressive list of apps, adding to the list of Rewired state projects.

At the end of the weekend, an impressive list of judges (@craigelder @jobsworth @BenHammersley @helenmilner @marxculture and @danielheaf) judged the apps, and there are some good blog posts on what went off, as well as my usual collection of photos:

As a side note, I like the idea of hack days. Development sprints where you focus on one thing are a great thing – every business should have “hack days” – pick some key problems then get everyone together to spend a day working on fixing them. Hack days aren’t just for coders.

Back to that data, or more specifically the mountains of anonymised data that the UK government collects every year. Putting aside the usual “we paid to collect it, so we should have it” argument, so often espoused, there is a much better reason for putting all of that data “out there” – or there is to me at least. There are a thousand creative and useful things that could be done with it, most of which fall under the umbrella of  micro-business or hobbyist. These are things that the government, and most businesses, could never justify funding, but which a sea of enthusiastic developers could make happen – tackling all sorts of problems along the way.

Enter data.gov.uk. A surprise email last week meant, literally a few hours later, I was huddled around a projector looking at one of the most exciting things I’ve seen on the Internet in a very long-time. A very long time. With a very exciting team of people too. The previous day, via the Digital Engagement blog, the Cabinet Office issued a call for help:

From today we are inviting developers to show government how to get the future public data site right – how to find and use public sector information.

The developer community through initiatives such as Show Us a Better Way, the Power of Information Taskforce, MySociety and Rewired State have consistently demonstrated their eagerness and abilities to “Code a Better Country“.  You have given us evidence and examples to help drive this forward within government.

The new site will provide a way to access (eventually and hopefully) most of the UK government’s published data. There are already over a thousand datasets, in differing levels of accessibility from CSVs, to SPARQL end points, as well as XML and JSON. If those sound like alphabet soup, don’t worry, just be as excited as the developers who know what they mean.

The potential result is a wave of new applications, based on government data, that could do a wealth of things, from relating performance with class sizes in your local school to understanding how your local farming community is faring. Data.gov.uk is a very non-trivial project, and there is a long way to go, but what I was a very promising start. The early developer community is already very active, even though the site won’t really be in beta until the end of the year. As Harry Metcalfe puts it, the wraps are off.

There are four aims behind the project and opening up the data: 1) Aid transparency and accountability. 2) Empower citizens to drive public service reform. 3) Unlock the social and economic value in the data. 4) Stimulate the UK’s digital economy, with regard to technology and research in the web domain.

Certainly there are big commercial uses of the data, and I am sure big business will muscle in on the act, but underneath that, what a great opportunity to give a new generation of digital talent something to dig their teeth into. My hope is that the data will provide a platform for an ecosystem of businesses and micro-businesses, as well as non-profit organisations, to create value for UK Plc, both for the public good and for economic good. It will also be a proving ground for a new generation of geeks who can work with massive datasets and produce insights from them. Exactly the kind of folks the knowledge-based business of the future will need.

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