Thanks again for all of the feedback on those open data posts recently.

Just to recap, I’m helping to organise an open data project for some school pupils within the a London borough in the new year. One of the big tasks is to flush out all of the data that may be available.

I’m going to be taking subject areas such as crime, health, education/children’s services separately and posting on each of them, using the  links and a few ideas that have come from different directions.

My first subject, though, will be on voluntary/civil society activity in a particular borough – in this case, Barnet.

This is a good example of a data-set that isn’t generally available yet in any standardised form, but one that may be of interest to school pupils in mapping some aspects of their locality.

In terms of drawing down experience of a local voluntary sector and open data, Jo Ivens in Brighton has pointed me to the Data for Neighbourhoods and Regeneration site here – a very good set of signposts – along with her own Databridge site.

I started to try and summarise a few good points from this site but ended up finding all of it worth reading – it will prove to be an incredibly useful resource for everybody involved in this schools project. As a taster, I’m shamelessly pinching this video, but the whole site is worth a visit.

I’ve also had a helpful conversation with Ruth Mulandi, CEO of Community Barnet – the local voluntary sector hub – and this is what I found out.

Firstly, they hold most of the data that may be useful within their website Content Management System (the tool that they use to maintain their website).

This includes their directory of community organisations called InBarnet. They have over 1,000 community organisations registered within the borough – around 850 of which are active.

Being able to download this would be very useful, and I’m told that it’s possible, subject to a few caveats:

• The database includes information that individual groups have submitted to CommunityBarnet, but of it is on a ‘not for publication’ basis (in some cases individual phone numbers, contact details etc) and it is subject to some data protection rules
• CommunityBarnet don’t have the resources to regularly run bespoke dumps from this database at no cost– they have one person managing all of this and it’s not a full-time job by any means so additional data work needs to be resourced somehow
• It is an ongoing project to get all of the info about all of the groups that they ideally want to provide, such as what each group does, where, when, what type of service they provide and how etc etc, and to keep this up-to-date for all of the 800-odd active groups on the borough
• The database on the website is searchable, but obviously not all of the data is there (if groups have not provided it yet)

However, leaving aside some of the data that cannot be fully shared with third parties their website gives the undertaking that…

We can provide more specific reports , including:

Type of service provided: one to one support, counselling, after school clubs, befriending, advocacy, day care services, mentoring, training, and many more groups and individual needs served: children, adults, carers, parents, mental health, learning difficulties, cultural and faith specific and many more

Some of these groups provide specific services (lunch clubs, advice, day-centres, etc).

My contact at Community Barnet has offered me any reasonable amount of help in extracting this information in a useable form, but I’ll have to bear in mind the constraints that they are under in doing this.

So, what else is there?

In this document, we see some results from a 2009 survey in which 25% of the active organisations  on the database provided a response outlining what they do, who they do it for. Again, Ruth tells me that this is all held within that unified database held within the website management system, so it should be very simple.

I suppose my big question is this: How long before some government agency starts to standardise the collection of data about voluntary sector activity for publication? Mapping these services would surely have some use – not least to the local authorities concerned.

With the ‘Big Society’ as such a priority for the current government, it can’t be too far off, can it?

Through the Political Innovation project, I’m helping to promote a meetup tomorrow evening between people who have experience and interests in gaming, and those of us who are very focussed on political issues.

As I’m one of the hosts, I thought it worth dropping a few conversation-starters in the mix. Issues where politicians seem to have reversed themselves into a cul-de-sac. Issues where a game-change could make a difference.

Like most people, I have prejudices as well as arguments – please take all of these examples (listed in no particular order) in this spirit – I’d like to focus on the gamed nature of politics rather than specific evidence on these issues:

• Sentencing policy: Whatever you think to the way we handle criminal sentencing, it seems to be subject to pressures that don’t have much to do with reducing reoffending. Does the tension between evidence-based approaches, newspaper versions of the problem and electoral horizons and timescales resolve itself well? I don’t think so.
• Immigration policy: A similar problem – moral questions of freedom of movement, economic ones around the flexibility of the economy, sociological ones around social capital and the effect upon communities of the kind of churn that flexible economies bring
• As I was writing this, my friend Tim Davies forwarded this post on gaming and climate change (among other issues) from Duncan Green of Oxfam, so that’s another one to add into the mix.
• Then there’s the related question of participatory budgeting and the potential extensions we can apply to the idea? How can choice-games be used to improve efficiency in public management (a friend working at a local PCT said to me recently that he believed that doctors often find it harder to under-prescribe or under-refer patients to hospitals because of the way their work is structured.

Then I’ve a few personal hobby-horses:

• Participation – how do we strike the balance between getting more people involved in policymaking, but balancing the need to ensure that segments of the population aren’t over/under represented, while ensuring that we get the benefit of expertise, experience, creative thinking and the practical input?
• Representation – how do we incentivise politicians to play their role in a more participative democracy with the public interest as their main focus?
• Journalism – (particularly relevant this week): journalists almost have a constitutional role as well – they refer to themselves as the fourth estate often enough. How do we incentivise them to behave like decent intelligent human beings? How do we strike the balance between the need for diversity and pluralism in the provision of news while recognising the fact that the business model has a lot of uncertainty around it? Good journalism is literally worth billions in terms of the value that it adds to the economy – but no-one’s prepared to pick up the bill.

Also, aside from the potential for positive social change, there’s also the question of education – how far does addressing these problems increase or challenge the legitimacy of the structures that exist to tackle them?

Enough already! Here’s a re-run of a Ted talk that I linked to here a while ago – it makes the case for this approach better than I can.

If you’re coming along tomorrow, please try and think of any games that could be changed?

My friend Mick Phythian picked up a very useful motto/warning for anyone promoting e-government projects a while ago. To government, your time is worth £Zero – and this is why e-government fails.

A good democracy has to value everyone's time properly (click for pic credit)

This explains why a very sharp idea that Dave Briggs has been working on recently – promoting the notion of ‘Microparticipation’ with a dedicated idea-site here – is so important.

We are, after all, being gently forced to comply with other people’s procedures where it is in their interest to invest in this compulsion (or ‘nudging’ as it is gently put).

This is the whole trajectory of the World Wide Web – from the first release of HTML scripts and early browsers in the early 1990s, through the progressive development of website coding and site-building tools, the burgeoning science of Accessibility, Usability and the ‘Semantic Web’ through to the aggressive mainstreaming that it has undergone in recent years as social media has dragged billions of people into compliance with the web. Social media is a conspiracy to dovetail all of our economic activity with the processes of the organisations that invest in online applications.

By ‘compliance’ I don’t just mean the ‘compliant code’ beloved of good web-designers. I mean our social compliance. We go to our local bank or town hall less often these days – we often go to their website, comply with their security procedures and fill out forms that are convenient for them – as suppliers – so that they can reduce ‘avoidable contact’ and thereby be more efficient.

In theory, this benefits shareholders and ratepayers respectively. But I’m waiting for a conspiracy theorist to start kicking up about this. One could take the view that this quote from the 19th Century Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon could apply equally to our relationship with corporations today:

“To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured.

That is government; that is it’s justice; that is it’s morality.”

OK. That’s all probably a bit OTT. But where it matters, the business logic behind usability is very strong. Make it easy and attractive for people to comply and they are more likely to do so.

But in a democracy, this is a double-edged sword. If an organisation or government ask us for our opinion, or evidence, without it being a low-cost exercise for us, they will get hugely unrepresentative responses. They will get responses from…

• the time rich
• commercial lobbies
• individuals with a vested interest in a particular issue (this can be financial, cultural, ideological or faith-based, for example)

Of course democracies can’t afford to pay the public all of the time (though the use of commercial polling firms and focus groups are a well-established way of consulting the public). Increasingly, we are going to be asked to participate in government.

It is for this reason that it is vital that quick light responses are sought. That people seeking feedback are prepared to invest in ways of going to where the public already are and making it quick and easy to comply with their requests.

Last week, I posted a list of attributes that a good democracy could have – attributes that I beleive would be accepted accross the political spectrum – and ones that most liberal democracies could do a lot better on. Of my original 17 points, eight would be directly served if Microparticipation were to become a mainstream idea (no17 in particular). They are…..

1)      Wider participation in policy formation is a good thing – it increases the public stake in collective decision-making

2)      A more diverse polity reflecting a greater panorama of perspectives can only improve democracy

3)      Decision making should not be dominated by people who have more time or wealth than others

6)      People with a vested interest in particular outcomes should never have the capacity to crowd out people with mild preferences

7)      For deliberation to work, doubt and equivocation must be encouraged – and not crowded out by ‘conviction’

10)   Interest groups are good at achieving their aims at the expense of everybody else. These powers must be counterbalanced

11)   Media owners should have no more influence on policymaking than anyone else. Their abuse of this power should be challenged

17) Broad participation requires investment. Those asking questions have a duty to make it very easy and attractive to answer

There is one other factor here: Democratic deliberation is better when people who are uncertain, disinterested and equivocal can dominate the conversation. I’ve argued it a number of times here before [example]. My own most oft-repeated quote at the moment is from Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” – and my favourite Wikipedia link is to this page about the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Shorter version: certainty is a bad thing!)

According to yesterday’s papers, the No10 Petitions website has been canned. I can understand that a lot of the people behind it saw it as a learning experience and it clarified a few things.

My problem with the whole project is that this is one area where politicians let themselves down. Civil Servants go on public management courses and would expect to do their political masters’ bidding on things like this more quickly than they would on areas where politicians can’t be expected to bring native expertise to bear. If they are asked to implement something that is plainly at odds with representative democracy in this way, it’s the politicians’ look-out.

I also understand that not every politician would be able to match the basic knowledge of someone with – say – a first degree in political science. But when a whole government can’t find two such geniuses to rub together (and I suspect that the last Labour government – which I supported – fits this description) you have to worry.

Now here’s the next question: Will local authorities have to continue to impersonate No10 in this folly? (I had a post up here that outlined the various options for local authorities a while ago)

In other news, I was in Belfast at the weekend organising an unconference on Political Innovation and one of the attendees was the policy officer from the Northern Ireland Local Government Association. She was inspired enough by the event to go and set up a new blog called ‘Local Is Beautiful’ - one to add to your RSS feed. Welcome Karen!

Apologies for the light posting here lately – I’ve been busy with the Political Innovation project. There’s a series of posts I’ve added there on ‘What Politicians need to know about social public information.’

I’ll be reviving this blog shortly. In the meantime, here’s something on electronic voting that I found via O’Conall Street.

Here’s Rory Sutherland on the Spectator blog:

“….here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change is often self-defeating, since the only people not defeated by the bureaucratic hurdles are huge organisations like Tesco — while those traditional smaller cafés and shops that traditionalists claim to love cannot summon the energy to clear them.”

He continues by promoting a smart ‘planning permission in return for something’ proposal that I’m sure I’ve seen before somewhere (when you think about it, it’s a locally hypothecated variation on Land Value Tax, isn’t it?), but nevertheless, it’s a good one.

This is a guest cross-post by Tim Davies – originally posted on the Political Innovation site here:

The communication revolution that we’ve undergone in recent years has two big impacts:

• It changes what’s possible. It makes creating networks between people across organisations easier; it opens new ways for communication between citizens and state; it gives everyone who wants it a platform for global communication; and it makes it possible to discover local online dialogue.
• It changes citizen expectations of government. When I can follow news from my neighbour’s blog on my phone, why can’t I get updates on local services on the mobile-web? When I can e-mail someone across the world and be collaborating on a document in minutes, why is it so hard to have a conversation with the council down the road? And when brands and mainstream media are doing interactivity and engagement – why are government departments struggling with it so much?

Right now, government is missing out on significant cost saving and service-enhancing benefits from new forms of communication and collaboration. But the answers are not simply about introducing new technology – they are to be found in intentional culture change: in creating the will and the opportunity for interactive government.

There are three things we need to focus on:

• Culture change. Although there are pockets of interactivity breaking out across the public sector, it’s often counter-cultural and ‘underground’. Most staff feel constrained to work with tools given to them by IT departments, and to focus on official lines more than open conversations. Creating a culture of interactivity needs leadership from the top, and values that everyone can sign up to.
• Removing the barriers. There are literally hundreds of small daily frustrations and barriers that can get in the way of interactive government. It might be the inability of upload a photo to an online forum (interactive government has human faces…), or consent and moderation policies that cover everyone’s backs but don’t allow real voices to be heard. Instead of ignoring these barriers, we need to overcome them – to rethink them within an interactive culture that can make dialogue and change a top priority.
• Solving tough problems. Public service is tough: it has to deal with political, democratic and social pressures that would make most social media start-ups struggle. We need to think hard about how interactive technology and interactive ways of working play out in the tough cases that the public sector deals in every day.

The Interactive Charter is a project to explore how exactly we go about making government into interactive government. It’s got three parts:

• Creating a pledge – The ‘Interactive Charter’ will be a clear statement that any organization (or senior manager within an organization) can sign up to say something along the lines of “I want my organization to get interactivity; and I’ll commit to overcoming the barriers to interactive ways of working”. With a promise and commitment from the top removing the barriers should get a lot easierOf course to just hand down a pledge wouldn’t be very interactive, so we’re drafting it on Mixed Ink.
• Naming the problems…and overcoming them – We’ve already made a start over on the Interactive Charter wiki, but we would love you to join in suggesting practical challenges, and practical solutions, to interactive and digital working in government.
• Putting it into practice – We want to pilot the approach: getting top-level support, and removing the barriers to interactivity from the ground up. Could your organization be part of that?

So, if you’ve got a vision for more interactive government, you can share it by redrafting the current pledge. And if you’ve faced or solved problems around interactive government, help shape the body of knowledge around each of the barriers and their solutions on the wiki. Of course, you could also just drop in comments over on the Political Innovation blog…

About Political Innovation

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by joining our Google Group, subscribing to the blog RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter andFacebook.

When bloggers meet, I often find that old allegiances (be they left right, or Unionist/Republican often dissolve into a different political spilt. Those of us who imagine that we ‘get’ the read-write web against the political colleagues that we have who, we believe, fail to foresee the possibilities or the threats.

I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist bloggers in (non) violent agreement with each other – not about political direction, but about what is possible in harnessing the power of the web. About how a more effective participative political culture can bring about a range of subtle changes – to reverse the broken politico/media relationship out of some of the cul-de-sacs that it appears to have stuck in.

Today, a few of us have come together to launch a project called ‘Political Innovation’. It’s for anyone who has ever asked themselves ‘why is politics still done like this?’

We’ve put a call out through our personal networks for initial contributions and we’ve already had promises of more than ten essays suggesting serious political innovations that are based upon an understanding of what interactive social media and the web can achieve.All of our proposers have been asked to ensure that their proposed innovation is one that could realistically garner support from all sides of the political spectrum.

The project is being managed in conjunction with political blogs of all hues. So from the right our largest media partner, The Telegraph will carry each essay which will be also be carried on Slugger O’Toole, Left Foot Forward, Lib-Dem Voice and SNP Tactical Voter.

Tweetminster will be helping us publicise each essay more widely and we’ll be doing some podcasting with The House of Comments. Other bloggers are welcome to get involved.

The essays will touch on a range of questions, including

• a proposed recasting of the whole FOI-based understanding of open government into something more ‘interactive’,
• a pop at the political problems that underlie dysfunctional government procurement,
• a version of ID cards that may suit both supporters and opponents of ‘the database state’,
• a proposal that could create a serious ‘reputational cost’ to politicians, journalists and campaigners who misuse facts and spin
• a measure to help bloggers get more influence over public policy in their roles as conversation-convenors

…. and a range of other ideas (let’s not spoil the surprises, eh?)

The (short) essays will start appearing on all of these sites shortly. We plan to follow it up with open gatherings in Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin and London in due course – as long as we can find some local partners there who will help us with the get-togethers.

We’d be very interested to hear any ideas that you have for an essay of your own – we’ll need an email and we’ll want to discuss it with you before it goes on the site. All contributions will be archived on www.politicalinnovation.org – along with details of what we’re looking for from essayists and a bunch of FAQs and a guide to how we hope the whole thing will play out.

I hope you’ll get involved in this as a commenter, participant or maybe even as an essayist. Make sure you don’t miss anything by joining our Google Group, subscribing to the blog RSS feed, getting each post emailed to you and, of course, following us on Twitter and Facebook.

Apologies for the light posting around here at the moment – I’ve been very busy with another blog-related project called ‘Political Innovation‘.

It’s really for anyone who has looked at politics and asked themselves “why do we still have to do it this way?” The founding premise is that interactive technology is a game-changer.

On the one hand, it has had a huge impact upon conventional politics and it has compounded many of its minor pre-existing felonies.

On the other, it creates all kinds of possibilities – ones that would be welcomed by people across the political divides – to change the way that democratic politics is done.

For me, the interesting thing is that many of these game-changing ideas are supported by people who have a bit of a track-record of understanding how interactive technologies will change the media landscape, and opposed by the larger group who don’t. That seems like a good reason to go all evangelistic, doesn’t it?

So we’re running a series of essays – at least eight – possibly more – from political innovators with great ideas on how things can be moved on. We’ll be running them over the summer in partnership with some of the leading political blogs from across the spectrum – I’ve seen early drafts of a lot of them already, and they’re really very good.

Once they’re all written, we’re going to be looking for venues in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and – eventually – London to showcase them. (There’s an ambition to do this in the English regions and in the Irish Republic, but more on that later).

More later, but in the meantime, to stay in touch, join the Google Group, get every new posting send to your inbox, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, or just subscribe to the RSS feed. We’ve got some really exciting ideas to share and we hope you’ll be able to get involved.

For some reason, I’ve managed to miss the very-good Bad Conscience blog up until now. It’s worth a visit, if only to read this post on Max Weber’s notion of plebiscitary Caesars. They are, it seems, the kind of political leaders that we yearn for:

Max Weber

“Weber believed that mass democracy held out the promise of ensuring new kinds leaders emerged; not privileged notables or landed gentry, but men with charisma who could carry the trust of the masses and be propelled forward to exercise genuine leadership in the face of state and party bureaucratic nihilism.”

And, while I know that avoiding the global love-in with Obama is both the hip thing to do, and therefore the right thing, I can’t help thinking that he fits this template more than anyone. Not only was Obama charismatic enough to overcome enormous odds over the last few years, he also practically reinvented the notion of the party machine.

He redefined it – attracting large numbers if low-ticket donations rather than the narrow patronage that political parties have come to rely upon.

There’s another thing to pick up here as well. Google the term ‘post-bureaucratic age’ and you will find that it’s something of a common feature in the speeches of senior modernising Conservatives in recent years. Spookily, it has all of the convenient political utility that the notion of ‘The Third Way’ had back in the 1990s.

I suspect that some Conservatives would argue that Obamas ability to almost reinvent a political party in an organic way made him the first post-bureaucratic President? If so, how come Weber  found an Obama-shaped space in his understanding of bureaucratic government?