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• The database includes information that individual groups have submitted to CommunityBarnet, but of it is on a ‘not for publication’ basis (in some cases individual phone numbers, contact details etc) and it is subject to some data protection rules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?

But here’s an overarching question to start with: If we’re planning to ask school pupils to find data, tidy it up and find new ways to visualise it, it’s obviously useful to ask; Who this is intended to benefit? I think that answering this question can, in itself, tell us a lot about how participation works. It can help us understanding the negotiation that is needed to get the right sort of broadly-based participation that democratic processes need.

We may have reasons that we want people to engage, but we only get access to their cognitive surplus if we can incentivise people (in this case, school pupils) to play along.

In the next few posts, I’ll be signposting useful data. But why would school pupils manipulate and visualise it in the first place?

The obvious beneficiaries could be the pupils themselves. Are we asking them to pull together information that is practically useful to them or that tells them something that benefits them? It could be something that they learn from or that has some utility for them, or something where the collection and preparation of the data is particularly rewarding?

A number of my respondents here and elsewhere have been saying that this is an opportunity to promote coding for kids and / or to get some useful tools built that could have a practical use for somebody. Simon Burall pointed me to the Code Academy site that provides an addictive step-by-step introduction and to Emma Mulqueeny’s work at The Guardian, including links to the new Coding For Kids wiki. Alternatively, there’s the fairly self-explanatory Apps for Good project.

We’re talking about visualisation here, so there are plenty of educational opportunities around maths or design/technology.

Or would we get away with asking for a more selfless contribution? Are we appealing to a civic and democratic sensibility by asking them to “tell us something interesting and useful that we don’t know using information that is freely / easily available”? Essentially, providing unsolicited social research to the local council and other bodies? I suppose they’d learn something about citizenship and sociology from that, but…

Perhaps we’re asking them to do something voluntary? There are 850 active local voluntary sector bodies in the London Borough of Barnet, many of whom don’t have the resources to do research, publicise their work effectively or get their work more effectively on the map – avoiding duplication of effort and maximising take-up or funding opportunities. Could school pupils help their local voluntary sector somehow by crunching data?

Alternatively, we could be asking them to provide information. They could develop an app of some sort, or – more simply – gather information in a spreadsheet (mobile smartphone + Google Docs forms anyone?) One suggestion that came my way was something around personal safety matched to geographical locations. Noel Hatch suggested ideas around behaviour change – even looking at information from their own social networks.

Simon Burall (again!) pointed me to this deciphermydata site from Gallomanor – a really nice project to crowdsource information about flu from schools. The pupils learn a lot around collecting and using data, and scientists learn a lot about instances of flu in schools.

We could be asking pupils to manually gather local geographical data, information about services or local features, information about education provision or….

That paragraph could go on for a long time.  I can think of lots of things that seem good ideas to me, but I’d be really interested to hear the much better ideas that everyone else has.

There are strong democratic arguments for doing this – ones that aren’t immediately obvious. There are also good ‘transparency’ arguments (but I’d make my usual point here about transparency and democracy not always pulling in the same direction).

Local Ward Atlas data - click to explore it

There are two other reasons why this is worth doing:

1. It’ll be fun to do. School pupils, doing all kinds of things with data that their older neighbours wouldn’t value just for the hell of it. Anyone watching this will learn a lot and probably have a laugh while doing it
2. It will be a good thought experiment for everyone involved. In my experience, most people who work in or with local authorities don’t really understand the potential to do good things here.

I’ve never seen anyone try to pull together a good index of all of the relevant and interesting data that is available within one local authority area with the aim of giving school pupils something to work with, so over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing exactly that.

In this case, I’ll be looking at what data we can find on the area covered by the London Borough of Barnet (I live there, and the council have expressed an interest in this anyway) from a variety of different sources.

I’ll be writing a short article here on each of them outlining what they have and how it could be used, and hopefully sharing a few of them on the London Data Store blog. I should add here that a lot of what follows has resulted from conversations with friends, too numerous to credit here, but I was give a good initial steer by Emer Coleman at the London Data Store who has a strong local authority background.

I’d really welcome your feedback on any of this.

So, my first question; Are there any obvious omissions from this list of sources (below) that I’m going to go to for data that we can use with school pupils at a data-hack event?

• The council themselves – for demographics, expenditure, service provision and take-up, revenue and other relevant data. There is currently a Maps Facts & Figures page on their site, but I think that there could be more ‘machine readable’ data that we could get from them with a bit of help
• The data behind the police crime-mapping services
• The London Data store - loads of information from a wide variety of different subject areas
• The local Primary Care Trust /NHS
• The local voluntary service council

There’s one further area that has been suggested to me. School pupils are likely to be very interested in Children’s issues anyway, and every local authority commissions some research that doesn’t fit into national frameworks. So I’m going to be having a conversation with the Children’s Services office if I get the chance. In addition, any information I can get on schools will be particularly useful for the same reasons.

If my own children are anything to go by, I suspect that they will want to move quickly beyond the data that we provide them with and start creating their own information. There’s a huge wealth of information that children could provide about their local area – data that could be crowd-sourced with a bit of creative thinking.

We will need to ask them – or even encourage them to do the asking. This is, of course, the holy grail of democratic data-use – participation and co-design. But for now, I’d like to explore the limits of the data that adults have provided. At the moment, many adults don’t really understand that a huge variety of data-types + analysis can be very valuable.

We can walk now. Running comes later.

In the meantime, here’s a quick stop-gap while IA while ago, I posted something here on the common misconception that many of us have about consensuses (consensii?).

I think that this is important for democracy, as one of the harshest charges that politicians face is that they are out of touch or that they don’t listen to us.

Now, in a week where the ‘We are the 99%’ meme is doing the rounds, here’s a nice post about the False Consensus Effect….

“which states that individuals view their own preferences, behaviours and judgements as being typical, normal and common within a broader context; it also suggests we find alternative characteristics as being more deviant and atypical than they actually are.”

Worth bearing in mind.

Over the next few weeks, my MP (a newly-elected Tory) will go through the parliamentary lobby in support of a range of bills that he knows little about.

@tom_watson - a pin-up for networked politics? (click for pic credit)

Sure. He may have a few reflexive opinions on the general subject matter, but beyond that, like most MPs, he’ll focus upon a handful of issues that he stays on top of: Personal bugbears, issues raised my his more persistent constituents, areas in which he’s been allocated a Parliamentary or Party role.

And however he casts his vote, the letters pages of the local newspapers will regularly castigate him. He’ll often respond by topping-and-tailing cut-and-paste letters provided by someone else in his party.

In this respect, my MP is quite like Tom Watson – the pin-up of the networked politics. I’m sure Tom toes The Party Line when he’s not sure. In other words, my MP and Tom conspire in the fakery that sustains Party politics.

I say that my local MP quite like Tom. But he’s also not quite the same. Earlier this summer, for instance, Tom attained a status that very few politicians have ever held. He could have walked into a bi-partisan pub and had drinks bought for him from all sides because he behaved in a way that most people think good MPs should.

But was Tom really a one-man force of nature – a campaigning multi-tasking up-all-night political polymath, on top of the details with carefully phrased rapier-like questions?

I yield to no-one in my admiration for him, but I really don’t think he was this superman. I say this because he did something a bit cleverer than that: He rode the network into battle. His 3,225 Facebook friends and 51,984 Twitter followers gave him extra eyes, ears, hands and brains. They allowed him to stretch his Parliamentary Allowance and give him all kinds of resources that he won’t need to claim for on annoying IPSA forms.

Sure – he worked hard and picked his fights well. But his real talent was in finding help – and not just of a material kind.

Where his followers weren’t slipping him data, they were chewing over the evidence, road-testing a few ways of describing developments giving him phrases that were useful when the cameras were on. When they were doing none of those things, he got feedback – encouragement and reassurance.

When you know you’re onto something, it gives you that extra bounce. His self-image here didn’t need to develop that self-loathing edge that sustains fake indignation. A politician as exposed as Tom would never get away with that these days.

By embedding himself in the network, he had little choice but to apply high standards of self-criticism. Either be a genuinely good guy, or act his socks off every day.

Now contrast Tom with Sir Stuart Bell – the unobtainable member for Middlesbrough.

Sir Stuart hasn’t held a constituency surgery for 14 years. He is made even harder to contact by the fact he doesn’t have a constituency office.

According to the paper, his response to questions about this has been to point out that he meets with members of the public by appointment instead, and people can reach him by telephone at any time.

So reporter Neil Macfarlane set about trying to find out how easy or otherwise it was to get in contact with the MP. Over several months, the Gazette rang Sir Stuart’s Westminster office and his home number over 100 times. No-one ever answered. That’s despite claiming staffing costs of £82,896 last year. Contrast that with Teesside’s four other MPs, all of who have their phones answered at the first attempt.

Sir Stuart isn’t on Facebook or Twitter either as far as I can see. And – when we find out what he thinks – I doubt if it’s ever as nuanced or road-tested as Tom’s positions. The contrast in self-awareness as well as political competence will be eye-watering.

So there’s a heirarchy here: On the top, Tom Watson, the go-to example of the networked politician.

Somewhat below him is my MP (no slouch with social media by the way, but as guarded as most MPs) who is in a marginal seat and is accordingly, visibly, busy.

Then, a long way further down, there’s Sir Stuart, who has managed to hide way for 14 years without hosting a surgery because, in Middlesbrough, they’d probably elect a Donkey if was wearing a red rosette (Tory equivalents are undoubtely available folks!).

I’m sorry it’s taken me to get to it, but here’s my question:

If you’re good at networking, are political parties as important to you as they were? Does Tom need to get his cut-and-paste replies from Labour HQ as often? Does he need to rely upon the whips to guide him through issues he doesn’t understand as often? Does he need to scour local committee rooms get find local canvassers who will knock on doors for him at the next election?

And most importantly, Tom has created a situation where he has to behave publically like an honest human being. In being well networked, has he redefined what representation is?

And should we be voting for people on the basis of their personal network more than their party rosette?

Update: More on lazy politicians here.

Chad. High disease prevalence and not much democracy

Amartya Sen has powerfully made the case that democracy brings with it guarantees of social justice.

Summarising for speed, Sen has argued that democracies don’t have famines, that they provide regulatory minimum standards that ensure that earthquakes don’t result in huge death-tolls as poorly-built structures collapse, and so on.

In a democracy, we are very likely to have better, universal services compared to non-democracies.

It’s a familliar argument, but one that was recently subject to a fascinating twist. In a recent New Scientist [£] article, evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill makes the case that democracy only emerges in societies in which there is a relative absense of infectious disease.

In summary, societies with a high prevalence of infectious diseases tend to an understandable level of xenophobia. Epidemics, after all, are often the consequence of population movements, therefore, outsiders are treated with a good deal more suspicion.In addition, class structures in such societies are likely to be more impermeable as people who are wealthy or powerful enough to be able to afford it, distance themselves from the wider population to protect themselves.

There’s a fair bit of tangential evidence cited here as well: For instance, a 2006 study by Carlos Navarette shows that – when prompted to think about disgusting objects such as spoiled food, people tend to express more nationalistic values. I also recall (from elsewhere – can’t find it now) that there was research showing more ethnocentrism among women at vulnerable stages in their pregnancies.

However, digging further into the article, there’s a lot to argue with in Thornhill’s conclusions. The New Scientist raises questions that this is less a function of disease than it is of general instability and fear.

Also, there’s lots to argue with in his definition of ‘democratisation’ (apparently lots of referendums is one plus-point!).

There’s a spectrum that he uses that has collectivist societies on one end (people placing the overall good of society ahead of of the freedom of action of individuals within it). Such a society, according to Thornhill, tends to be more respectful of authority, more xenophobic and more conformist. On the other end of the scale, there’s individualist societies where there’s more emphasis on openness and individual freedom.

Again, I’d like to see more digging into this particular question (and I’m sure it’s out there somewhere) but how does this capture Scandinavian models of government? I’ve heard arguments that Scandinavian social democracy was largely made possible by the relative lack of racial outsiders and that the dramatic emergence of xenophobic parties in these countries has been more pronounced than in societies more accustomed to population movements.

Particularly, given the terrible calamity that befell Norway last week, this is a pressing and uncomfortable question. Norway is at once, both a very democratic country, and one in which an established General Will leads to a good deal of conformity.

This is a country where thousands of teenagers will attend an alcohol-free open-air summer camp organised by the dominant political party! Try that in the UK!

It’s also one of the countries that has faced a dramatic political jolt from emerging populist anti-immigation parties who often treat their social settlements as values that need to be protected from outsiders. How does this democratic ideal address the potential challenge to its values in an age of large-scale population movements?

So. Do democrats have a strategy for defending democratic advances in a time of social upheaval? I’d be interested in any thoughts that this posting provokes from readers?

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?

Click pic for credit

It seems that the big worry is less that Councillor’s iPads will cost/save money or have any productivity/accountability gains, than that Councillors will spend council meetings futzing with their new toys instead of paying attention to procedings properly.

A few quick thoughts on this:

• Are we worried that tweeting councillors will be interacting with the public when they should be focussing only upon the views of other elected members? And aren’t the more savvy ones doing this already with their phones?
• Is there an upside to Councillors being able to do quick lookups and on-the-hoof research during council meetings? Will the quality of deliberation go up?
• Are there small-c constitutional issues here? An elected councillor has legitimacy that unelected interlopers don’t have. Should it be that the only evidence that could/should be considered at a council meeting should be tabled by – or through – an elected councillor? Do councillors have a quasi-jurist role (not a new suggestion around here)?

Either way, I’d suggest that a revolution has happened in the last fifteen years – not just in how we communicate but in how we think. I think that the parable of declining spam illustrates this perfectly, and we need to start thinking about the whole question of representation in the light of it.

It’s not that small a question, but one that has profound implications for our governance.

Here’s Douglas Rushkoff – one of the most established commentators on interactive communcations explaining the cost of transparency. It’s liberating stuff – yet a lot of it seems so straightforward in Rushkoff’s hands. It often reads like the bleedin’ obvious. A lot of it is aimed at the individual, discussing their rights and the way they are manipulated and exploited.

Douglas Rushkoff: The Future of Transparency from Applied Brilliance on Vimeo.

There’s not much in here that seems directly aimed at a local government audience (indeed, nothing expressly) yet I’d suggest that it’s hugely important to grasp the power-relations that effect us all – and Rushkoff is great for that.

One possible lesson though: how important it is to engage all council employees more in engaging with local people.

The London Borough of Havering are doing it, and the argument for this is that it will cut printing costs. The good people at one of my favourite blogs We Love Local Government have done some sums:

“…over that four month period, on average, the Council spent £398.48 per month to provide 17 printed copies of the Cabinet Agenda to the Councillors. This, I think, means that in a year the Council could be spending £4383.28 on Cabinet agendas”

So. For the sake of argument, with no bulk discounts, 17 iPads at £400 a pop (the lowest priced option with only WiFi & no 3G – lets assume that there’s one or two WiFi signals available in the Council chamber!) comes to £6,800. The £500 option (with 3G)? No problem – that’s £8500 for 17.

So assuming they don’t all lose or break them, and assuming they can all actually get them to work in the first place, we’re looking at an idea that will be in the black after six months or so.

This also assumes no productivity savings and no efficiency gains. It assumes that there is going to be no positive cultural shift and that using a new medium will add nothing to the capacity of councillors to use a new medium in new ways – to improve their representative skills. I’ve spent long periods of time working with Councillors on their use of online communications tools and the two biggest obstacles we kept hitting were this utilitarian approach to kit and training, and (or course) the outdated rules on use of communications tools for political purposes.

For me, it’s a slam-dunk. Place the order now! However, WLLG still aren’t totally comfortable with the idea and have four observations at the end of the post:

• These tools should never become a perk of being a Councillor. So to ensure they are tools, a business case for why Councillors need them should be put forward that shows how they can be used as tools to further the Councillor’s work.
• Use some procurement sense. As with a contract, work out your options and find the model that offers value for money for the Council.  So would another tablet Computer be able to do the required job, instead of the fancy and fashionable I-pad?
• If the Councillor breaks it, through misuse by them, then they cover the costs. At the end of the day its the Council’s property not theirs.
• This one is not a rule, more a suggestion/question. I’m not sure it would work but could the Council do a similar thing with I-pads that the Cycle to work scheme does? So the Council buys the I-pad and slowly the Councillor buys off the Council, if they want it.  Though I suppose it wouldn’t be tax-free like the cycle scheme.

I’d suggest that this represents a triumph of a grumpy anti-politics that ultimately diminishes the legitimacy of local government itself. It’s a populist starting point that negates so many other important considerations. It’s almost as though we can’t clear our throats without acknowledging the Tax Payers Alliance agenda.

I’m not blaming the good bloggers at WLLG here – it is, after all, endemic. It’s largely unchallenged by any of the main political parties that all claim ownership of the term ‘localism’.

There’s a two way compact between us voters and Councillors (as with all elected representatives): They strive for the highest standards in terms of civic representation (the stuff this blog bores on about all the time) and, in return, we give them a high social status and reasonable compensation to cover the opportunity cost of being a Councillor.

I don’t think either side of this compact is being met – I’d be interested to see how many councillors would be able to write a half-decent A-Level essay on what good representation entails – but I do think it’s time to put a bit of dignity back into local government. Someone has to make the first move.

Where I live, the council is no longer based in a granite monument to municipal values (the Town Hall), it’s on some campus in a part of the borough that’s awkward to get to without a car. I’m sure there’s an excellent business case for this, but there’s no way you can build a case for political decentralisation on the back of an institution that has a purely utilitarian approach to it’s democratic and administrative functions.

Decentralisation doesn’t happen because of some localism agenda that is dreamed up in the the think-tanks of That London. It happens because the core tensions that diminish the legitimacy of local democracy are being addressed. I see no sign of this happening any time soon.