I’ve started drafting three articles in the last 24 hours for this blog only to find a better one on the same subject written by someone else.

Crowdsourced data visualisations are more useful for the public sector

Firstly, it’s a regular theme here that data visualisations are a huge opportunity for us all because they allow us to break the monopoly that civil servants, sloppy journalists and political parties have in describing the problems that elected representatives are expected to solve.

The rubbish-in-rubbish-out problem. They are, therefore an opportunity to involve more of us in a constructive way in policy making.

According to Public Technology, this is a bigger opportunity than I realised because public sector managers use data visualisations more than the private sector do.

Secondly, Alison Benjamin has a good roundup of the problems that a reliance upon social entrepreneurs and active citizens can bring in the provision of local services.

“…if you live in a neighbourhood where concerned, educated, articulate residents with time on their hands will rise to the challenge. Leaving the fate of, say, the local library in their hands may not be such a bad idea. But what about areas where decades of joblessness and drugs and benefit dependency may have robbed residents of any glimmer of a can-do culture? Here, doesn’t the state have a moral duty to provide a library service where pensioners can read the paper, where schoolchildren can do their homework in peace and discover a world of books not available at home, and where the digitally excluded are able to participate in the wonders of the internet?

If library provision were left to local volunteers, or social enterprises – those not-for-profit organisations run by entrepreneurs much-feted by the cheerleaders of this new settlement – what of the postcode lottery that would no doubt result?”

She’s very restrained. If I’d have been there and got the glib ‘so what’ response that she received, I would have left the room only to return shortly with a flamethrower.

Thirdly, there’s Dave Briggs post on Google Buzz – the reviews I’ve seen are mixed. One side of the argument from Google Reader addicts who carefully select who sends them recommendations is that all of a sudden a tool that was working beautifully is suddenly chucking loads of unrequested information at me.

The other side of the argument is that it will being an awful lot more people into the day-to-day activity of sharing and collaborative authoring of content. This can only be a good thing for everyone, surely?

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib‘s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.

It’s Friday. And it’s nearly hometime. Let’s just pop over to the Glum Councillors tumblr site to see if there’s anything to look at?

Cllr Doherty is a bit glum

Well, there’s Cllr Doherty (pictured):

“If this corner doesn’t qualify as a dangerous bend, I don’t know what does,” said Cllr Doherty standing at the corner … in the road … with his back to the oncoming traffic.

You’ve probably seen the MyDavidCameron site? Whatever you think to the politics of taking the tiddle out of the Tory leader, I like the quality of the site. They’ve not allowed themselves to be overwhelmed with tedious pointscoring and there are quite a few gentle (or even absurd) little digs.

I’m not quite sure why, but I firmly believe that if politicians were gently teased a lot more, the country would be all the better for it.

Oddly, I think it’s a game-changing site. Parties are learning that set-piece political campaigns don’t work any more. Big expensive billboard launches (this one is rumoured to have cost £500,000) can be totally derailed by a bit of mild viral ribbing.

My favourites?

or….

I’ve been working with Mick Fealty over at the Northern Ireland political weblog Slugger O’Toole on a bit of an experiment. We decided to try and convene some free consultancy for all of the political parties in Northern Ireland – starting with the ruling (!) bloc, the DUP.

As with all political weblogs that host antagonistic debates, there is no shortage of name-calling and point-scoring. But if you ask the readers to look at things from a strategic point of view, you may find out something that you didn’t know in the first place.

Mick is no mean political analyst himself, and nor are his regular contributors. But by inviting commenters to look at thing objectively – to spell out what they see as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that the DUP face, commenters from all sides of the spectrum could at least agree on where the DUP stand on the political chessboard.

It provides a useful tool in any materialist analysis of ‘what will happen next’ because, for all that some politics is, as Harold Wilson put it, “a crusade or it is nothing”, the last few weeks in Northern Ireland have shown that political parties rarely do anything unless it allows them to make the best of whatever strategic hole they are in.

So, having attracted lots of comments over the course of one day, deleted the ones that sought to introduce pointless whataboutery and pointscoring, Mick was left with a couple of dozen nuggets of information.

Next step? Let’s visualise them – put them in a fun-to-fiddle-with application like Prezi: (be patient – it takes a while to load…..)

Two things.

This is ‘why pie charts stink’ – a nice programme for visualising data:

Secondly, further to Andrew’s Poblish posts, I’ve just revisited Debatepedia. I met one of the Debatepedia team last year at the WeMedia conference and I had to say at the time that it didn’t seem to be quite there as an idea. The site looks a good deal more useful now – here’s a useful primer on direct v representative democracy for you.

As I’ve spent a lot of time recently banging on about visual representations of policy issues, this post on the GOOD website is something of a feast.

Another day, another step in the right direction. Boris Johnson is opening up around 200 datasets about London along with an offer of from Channel 4′s 4iP fund of up to £200,000 to help developers to create innovative applications that use it.

Why is this exciting to anyone with an interest in local democracy? Well, it allows a large number of people to take existing technologies, adapt them slightly, pour the newly-available information into them and then present them to anyone who is interested. It creates fantastic new research possibilities, and allows developers to visualise the data in a way that may tell us something that we didn’t know already.

Continuing my theme from the other day, this is another way of crowdsourcing intelligence and judgement rather than expressed opinion.I suppose it’s worth putting all of this into the rubric that most of the bloggers on this blog use to define what is good and what is bad though. Creative use of policy-related visualisations are definitely a good thing. Anything that makes it easier for more people to participate in deliberative processes is, again, a good thing – especially if it involves getting lots of people involved in the design of services. Datasets + visualisations should help there.

My one concern would be the ‘arms race’ one. At the moment, government – representing (in theory) the interests of the nation as a whole, has one strong suit in it’s ongoing battle with sectional interests. It has access to large amounts of information and it has a large apparatus of civil servants, think tanks, academics and local politicians that it can use to organise, express and apply that data.

Government enjoys monopoly privileges. From a democratic point of view, this looks quite bad. The flipside of the question is this: If you make data that government previously monopolised open to the public, will it be used by a wide well-meaning group of civic minded individuals? Or is a body of people with a mandate to promote the interests of the nation as a whole handing one of it’s most valuable weapons to a well-financed group of vested interests? The question of institutional capture.

It’s certainly the case in the US that commercial lobbies have been able to supersede governmental bodies as the representatives of the US abroad. As just one example, it was widely acknowledged that the US position at WIPO in the mid 1990s was represented by commercial lobbies within the motion picture and music industries – and not bodies that were being managed from within government.

Like I say, on balance, this is a good thing. But we should be aware of the dangers.

It’s Christmas. That means that you have to indulge bloggers in their little obsessions.

Mine is an interest in the way that data can be presented in a way that changes our perception of an issue and clarifies a problem.

This one, for instance from Good Magazine:

You can zoom around and explore it here. (Via Information is Beautiful)

I’d like to show you this video for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s an interesting talk that I found very instructive. It is worth watching it right to the end.

Secondly, it shows how a creative use of illustrative tools can help to improve policymaking. If all evidence given to elected representatives was of this quality, I suspect that the quality of governance would be a good deal higher. I’m sure that the tools that were used to illustrate these figures have become cheaper and easier to use – I pointed to another example of this – in this case, software that can be used collaboratively.

What stops population growth? from Gapminder Foundation on Vimeo.

Technical developments can make research evidence more accessible. I would argue that this is the most undervalued and under-noted form of e-democracy.

Last week, the Guardian carried a feature on ‘The Coolest Mayor in America‘ – John Fetterman of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Fetterman’s success raises a few slightly trivial aesthetic questions about what it takes to be a successful politician. It also raises bigger, more profound ones as well.

Fetterman doesn’t look like the traditional buttoned up political clone. He looks like he’d fit blend in to the audience of a Slayer gig or a Biker Bar more than a sausage-on-a-stick reception at the civic centre. Even David Cameron has allowed himself to be photographed occassionally without a tie, but somehow I think that even this would be step too far for an ex-member of The Bullingdon Club….

Fetterman is 6’8″. He prefers overalls and work-boots to suits and ties, along with plenty of other signals chosen to communicate a no-nonsense non-superficial approach to problems.

He has tattoos on his arms to signal his commitment to his community (his postcode is on one arm, the dates of a couple of notable deaths that happened ‘on his watch’ appear on the other). It’s a signal of determination in an age in which politicians are seen to belong to a caste that is removed from the day-to-day life of the voters. It also signals an unwillingness to negotiate – perhaps, the acceptance of a mandate from his voters.

It should be noted at this point that very few textbooks on effective representation are very keen on politicians accepting mandates.

In an age where presentation itself has been seen to be self-defeating, one has to question if we’re simply in the kind of spiral that writers such as Douglas Rushkoff have been chronicling for some time now: A bidding war between marketeers and consumers to mask a sales pitch in peer-to-peer authenticity.

In Rushkoff’s Media Virus and Coercion, we see traditional marketing departments replaced by cool hunters – hip adults who position themselves as close to their market as they can in order to shorten the cycle between the street and the mainstream. We may absolutely distrust the big marketing campaigns now in a way that we didn’t – but there’s no evidence that the changes that have effected the marketing industry will ever hit a stable point of happy compromise in which marketeers and their customers trust each other.

This may not ultimately bode well for democracy either.

Fetterman’s politics appear to be reasonably progressive homespun populism. The presentation, though, offers yet another persona that politicians can subscribe to. And for those of us that are generally sceptical of personality politics, Fetterman offers some possible reassurance here.

In recent months, I’ve drawn up a range of personality types for politicians here:

• The judge
• The juror
• The ‘man in the white suit’
• The cleric
• The buccaneer

Fetterman offers us another couple of templates: A cynic would say that he is a ‘cool hunter’. A more charitable option would be that he is a civic social entrepreneur (his approach to climate change has more than a touch of the ‘swords into ploughshares’ about it.

Carbon Caps = Hard Hats

My big question, though, concerns the decline of party politics. We seem to be saying that we don’t want them any more. Does a one-off vote for a single individual mean that our politics is more or less participative?

I’d say it’s the latter.