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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In his post JP shares some thoughts about systems for decision making. The ideas are interesting (and have been debated in other contexts). It is worth remembering that government’s influence on our lives goes far beyond spending from the state wallet. Government sets policy and makes laws too. Thinking about recent anti-terror and surveillance legislation, along with proposals in the Digital Britain report, arguably, policy and law affect our lives the most.

It is possible to build an on-line voting system to provide access to every policy decision, but as Clay noted in his talk, the results aren’t always the utopian ideal we would hope for. Controlling policy directly may not be a good thing. It becomes easy for a well organised minority to ‘out-influence’ a quieter, less galvanised majority. To avoid that problem would require compulsory voting, but do you want people forced to vote on issues they don’t care about or that don’t affect them? 

The same issues exist for social decision making tools used in an organisational context. While “Voting” has become popular for making some decisions, generally we don’t run companies as democracies. Why not? Because we (or more specifically the business owners) prize expert decision making. Some of the larger companies I have worked with do have town hall meetings. These are loose approximations to the early Greek ideas of democracy, soliciting feedback and dialogue, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Businesses are, at least notionally, meritocracies. People gain authority based on their ability to make good decisions and to use authority well.

Several times in his talk, Shirky made the point that the democratic franchise grew up based on the ideal of one person one vote – actually one man one vote, but that’s another issue. Democracy requires a strong grip on identity. I must be sure of who you are before you vote, in order to enforce one person one vote. However, the voter’s opinion itself is afforded anonymity. I know who you are, but not how you voted. In the UK, more so than in US culture, most people’s voting intention is an intensely private matter, expressed in an intensely private ballot. 

The Internet grew up as a very different type of franchise. Via NFSnet and FIDOnet (and communities like The Well) anonymity was accidentally implicit, if not deliberately and explicitly so. The systems had no way of knowing who someone was, in the sense that we would understand identity management. People frequently used synonyms, and even when they used a ‘real name’, verifying they were actually that person was a non-trivial exercise. As a side note, Twitter has been experiencing the same fun and games recently, with people grabbing Twitter accounts and masquerading as celebrities (from Tony Benn to the Dalai Lama).

Back to votes and opinions for a moment. In the on-line world we often know a lot about what someone thinks. There is anonymity of identity, but not of opinion. A mirror to the democratic franchise. Interestingly, from my own work with Wikis and from other academic studies, I have noticed that sites where people can post completely anonymously get significantly more contributions that those that don’t.

So, how can we make companies more democratic, and how can we make government more participative, in the social media sense? The answers come not from technology, but from understanding the nature of democracy itself. The art of an effective democratic system is to defend factions from each other. Tony Benn, articulates it well in this clip from “Big Ideas That Changed The World”, you might not agree with his views, but his argument is an informative one, if you are new to the concepts:

Incidentally, the video is also a good counter to Shirky’s statement that Democracy started in the UK with the Magna Carta, signed just up the road from where I am sitting right now now, in a a field in Runnymede. Democracy has evolved mechanisms to deal with working at scale. I can exchange a little information with a lot of people, or a lot of information with a few people. Information exchange doesn’t scale to both ends at once. Democracy tackles that problem by the use of elected, professional representatives as intermediaries. A vote is a small piece of information from a lot of people. A consultation process is a lot of information exchanged within a smaller group of people. Familiar mechanisms that tackle the problem.

What came before democracy was tribalism, which JP’s post alludes to with the description of the open source community. Projects are often run by a ‘tribal leader’ and rings of followers creating a social structure supporting them (see Dunbar and other anthropological studies). That structure does not work with anonymity of opinions. Visibility of allegiances is required to allow the structure to sustain itself.

Here is an apparent paradox: Anonymity promotes extremes of views, by taking away the moderating effect of social influence. We are compliant creatures by nature, and social pressure pushes us towards moderate, or normative, views. We adapt our views, based on our perception of other people’s views. It is a socially useful behaviour, since it makes it easier to form coherent groups. Johnnie Moore and Mark Earls, author of Herd, gave some great demonstrations of this during their session on social influence at NESTA yesterday, and Mark’s book is probably a good place to study it more.

In designing social decision making systems, one must take account of identity, anonymity and accountability. Systems must also balance the desire to have everyone participate, with the need for informed expert opinion. During the NESTA session, Johnnie Moore made an astute observation about organisational design: business design is about balance the need for efficiency, and the desire for full participation.

These are all thorny issues. In a representational democracy we vote for someone we believe is able to represent us. At least we should. In the workplace this is expressed in the form employee councils and so on. Can we place these things with social software? An old IT/programming adage springs to mind: Don’t mess with something unless you understand why it was that way in the first place. We need to apply new technology, with the benefit of understanding old ideas. Yet another thing to add to the list of important, but non-trivial tasks.

There are usually trade-offs and compromises to be made. No system is perfect. However, experience shows, from systems to products, that it doesn’t take perfection to win. In the early days of Cisco Systems, a group of consulting engineers got in to terrible trouble for having a T-shirt printed that said “Cisco – We suck less”. The positioning goes a little against the grain of modern marketing techniques, but it rings true. As Darwin would have put it, survival of the ones that are the best (least bad) fit for their environment.

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