e-government – Page 25

29 Jun 2009

e-government

facebook, powerofinformation, richardallan

Power of Info chairman joins Facebook

Slightly more exciting than the headline might suggest… Richard Allan, the former LibDem MP who chaired the Power Of Information Taskforce has been hired by Facebook. The Guardian reports that he left his job as Cisco’s head of European regulatory affairs ‘to lead [Facebook’s] efforts in lobbying EU governments.’ Allan hasn’t had a lot to say about the move on his own website, apart from a Twitter reference to starting a new job.

As for Facebook itself? – if you try to access the obvious vanity URL, facebook.com/richardallan, you get forwarded to /richard.allan (note the dot), which is someone else entirely. Nice touch, Facebook HR.
25 Jun 2009

e-government, politics

api, conservatives, datastandards, davidcameron, freedata

Cameron pledges to free our data

David Cameron has taken the Conservatives’ promises on availability of public data a few steps further, in principle at least, in a speech at Imperial College on taking ‘broken politics’ into the ‘post-bureaucratic age’.

‘In Britain today, there are over 100,000 public bodies producing a huge amount of information,’ he said; ‘Most of this information is kept locked up by the state. And what is published is mostly released in formats that mean the information can’t be searched or used with other applications… This stands in the way of accountability.’ Now I’m still not convinced that there’s that much deliberate, conscious locking-up of data; but certainly, the formats in which that data is eventually made available often has the same end result.

OK, so we’re broadly agreed on the problem… what’s the solution, Dave?

We’re going to set this data free. In the first year of the next Conservative Government, we will find the most useful information in twenty different areas ranging from information about the NHS to information about schools and road traffic and publish it so people can use it. This information will be published proactively and regularly – and in a standardised format so that it can be ‘mashed up’ and interacted with.

What’s more, because there is no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new ‘right to data’ so that further datasets can be requested by the public. By harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, we can find out what information individuals think will be important in holding the state to account. And to avoid bureaucrats blocking these requests, we will introduce a rule that any request will be successful unless it can be proved that it would lead to overwhelming costs or demonstrable personal privacy or national security concerns.

If we are serious about helping people exert more power over the state, we need to give them the information to do it. And as part of that process, we will review the role of the Information Commissioner to make sure that it is designed to maximise political accountability in our country.

Now don’t get me wrong here, it’s great to have Cameron’s explicit sign-up to the principle of data freedom, standardised formats, the presumed right of availability, and a 12-month timeframe. But it’s not really anything that the other major parties aren’t already talking about – and in the case of the current government, bringing in the Big Guns to actually do something about. OPSI’s data unlocking service, for example, is nearly a year old, and effectively answers the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ idea. Now it hasn’t been a huge hit… but the principle is already established.

And then there’s his unfortunate choice of public sector jobs as an example of what they might do:

Today, many central government and quango job adverts are placed in a select few newspapers. Some national, some regional. Some daily, some weekly. But all of them in a variety of different publications – meaning it’s almost impossible to find out how many vacancies there are across the public sector, what kind of salaries are being offered, how these vary from public sector body to public sector body and whether functions are being duplicated. Remember this is your money being put forward to give someone a job – and you have little way of finding out why, what for and for how much. Now imagine if they were all published online and in a standardised way. Not only could you find out about vacancies for yourself, you could cross-reference what jobs are on offer and make sure your money is being put to proper use.

Er, isn’t Mr C aware of the recently-upgraded Civil Service Jobs website – with its API, allowing individuals and commercial companies to access the data in a standardised format (XML plus a bit of RDF), and republish it freely? The Tories have talked about online job ads since December 2006; maybe it’s time they updated their spiel.

So what does today’s pledge boil down to? On one level it’s just headline-grabbing, bandwagon-jumping, government-bashing, policy-reannouncing rhetoric. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If all the work is going on already, but it isn’t well enough known, or isn’t proving as effective as it could/should be, maybe we should be welcoming any headlines the subject manages to grab. And if Cameron’s Conservatives do take power at the next election, and truly believe in what was said today, it would be the easy fulfilment of a campaign promise to yank these initiatives out of their quiet beta periods and into the limelight.
15 Jun 2009

e-government

coi, timbernerslee, usagedata

Will COI publish its raw! data! now!?

I’ve seen a few ripples of excitement at the news that ABCe is to act ‘as a sole third party to independently validate the figures generated by an audit of government websites, in the largest project of its kind to date’, with ‘COI [to] publish comprehensive figures on the cost quality and use of government websites by June 2010’. Not exactly a surprise though, as this was in the COI document on Improving Government Online, published in March.

The exciting part, I suppose, is the fact that the figures are to be published. I wonder how. If Sir Tim really is to lead a push to make government publish its raw data, wouldn’t this make an excellent ‘best practice example’?
11 Jun 2009

e-government

berr, bis, dius, neilwilliams, stephgray, wordpress

Innovative & skilful: it's The Business

On reflection, if you’re going to put two of the most forward-thinking people in e-government into the same department, great things are probably to be expected. BERR (as was)‘s Neil and DIUS (as was)‘s Steph put their heads together on Monday afternoon, and on Wednesday, they launched a new corporate website for the newly-created Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It’s based on WordPress, with a bit of RSS magic, and the help of a few (free) web-based tools. And it’s brilliant.

Steph documents the work with characteristic modesty:

It won’t win any design awards, and the downside to Heath Robinson web development will no doubt be some quirks in reliability. But happily, we can say we haven’t spent a penny on external web development or licencing costs, and we got something up within 3 days. Compared to the static, hand-coded site DIUS had for the first 18 months of its life, it’s a start, and a little bit innovative too.

Actually, I like the design: it’s forcibly simple, but that’s no bad thing, and is something they should try to maintain in the long run. There may be quirks; but that doesn’t make it any worse than some of the £multi-million CMSes in Whitehall. Yes of course it’s work in progress, but isn’t everything – or rather, shouldn’t it be?

I can’t think of a better case study for the power of open source, web tools, pretty much everything I bang on about here. And if my work for the Wales Office was any kind of inspiration, I’m delighted to have been a part of it.

Oh, and just for the record… that’s now the Prime Minister’s office and the Deputy Prime Minister First Secretary of State’s department running their websites on WordPress. I’m just saying… 😉
11 Jun 2009

e-government, technology

cabinetoffice, datasharing, datastandards, timbernerslee

Tim Berners-Lee: the celebrity we need?

When Andrew Stott was appointed Director of Digital Engagement, I commented that it wasn’t the ‘rock star’ appointment many of us had been led to expect. Well, the ‘rock star’ appointment came through yesterday, with the news that Sir Tim Berners-Lee as the government’s ‘expert advisor on public information delivery’. The Director position required evidence of having ‘run a public facing web site of significant size’: well, I guess TBL qualifies, having run the entire web at one point. 🙂

This is meant to send a loud and clear signal to the civil service: raw data now. And I couldn’t agree more; see this post, for example, from 2008 about ‘API-first publication’, in the context of the 2011 Census. But I think it’s more about how that signal gets sent.

The Cabinet Office press release says:

He will head a panel of experts who will advise the Minister for the Cabinet Office on how government can best use the internet to make non-personal public data as widely available as possible. He will oversee the work to create a single online point of access for government held public data and develop proposals to extend access to data from the wider public sector, including selecting and implementing common standards. He will also help drive the use of the internet to improve government consultation processes.

It reads like a rather hands-off, committee-based kind of role. And whilst that wouldn’t be a bad thing in itself, I wonder if it’s what The Machine really needs from him. What’s the question, to which ‘Sir Tim Berners-Lee’ is the answer?

I don’t think we particularly need the advice on standards; and I don’t know that TBL will be able to tell (checks the post-reshuffle situation) Tessa Jowell how to organise data publication processes inside the typical Whitehall department. But what he will be able to do is intimidate persuade those people who always seem to block the initiatives which have already gone before. He may have more success saying the exact same things many of us have already been saying for some time, because of who he is.

Stuart Bruce, who knows a thing or two about PR / technology / the Labour Party responded thus on Twitter: ‘Opening access to government data YES! Well done. But Tim Berners-Lee? Isn’t that just like Sugar, yet more cult of celebrity.’ Maybe so. Probably so, in fact. But it may be exactly what we need.
26 May 2009

e-government, politics

davidcameron, freeourbills, opensource

Cameron's online promises

The explicit references to the internet in David Cameron’s big speech on ‘fixing broken politics’ this morning don’t come until the end. All MPs’ expenses to be published online; the same will go for ‘all other public servants earning over £150,000’. An Obama-esque pledge to put all national spending over £25,000 online. A commitment to ‘publish all Parliamentary information online in an open-source format’ (whatever that means). An end to the ‘ridiculous ban on parliamentary proceedings being uploaded to YouTube’. All good, on the face of it.

But the underlying message throughout the speech, empowerment of the individual, is really only a reflection of the changes being brought about by the internet revolution. We expect to be able to do things now, in our daily lives, which seemed like science-fiction only a few years ago. It’s really not that long ago that ’28 days for delivery’ was a standard; now we get fidgety if our delivery isn’t here within 2 or 3 days. Your mobile phone has instant access to every fact in the world, within seconds.

So Cameron’s talk of ‘giving people the power to work collectively with their peers to solve common problems’ isn’t really the articulation of a great vision: it’s a reflection of a reality that’s already with (many of) us. Likewise, transparency isn’t really something within his gift. ‘At the length, truth will out,’ Shakespeare wrote as far back as 1600; it’s just that these days, it gets out a heck of a lot quicker.

Having said all that, there are some parts of the speech which make me feel a little uncomfortable. I find it difficult to hear an Old Etonian and Oxbridge-graduate speaking up for ordinary people feeling ‘deprived of opportunities to shape the world around them, and at the mercy of powerful elites that preside over them’. And similarly, when he says ‘we rage at our political system because we feel it is self-serving’, I find my eyebrows raising at the use of the word ‘we’. (A bit like when Five Live presenters talk about ‘the media’ in the third person.)

But the reality is, this is the man who currently seems most likely to be running the country in a year’s time. The power will be in his hands. And whether he’s doing it by choice, or just recognising the way the wind is blowing, he’s talking about diluting that power, boosting transparency, and embracing the web. We like.
26 May 2009

e-government

andrewstott, cabinetoffice, tomwatson

Watson to quit at reshuffle?

A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line from the Sunday Times at the weekend: ‘Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister wrongly accused of involvement in the Damian McBride smear e-mails, will return to the back benches. He has told friends he is exhausted by government and wants to see more of his two children.’ I’ve got no inside track on that story (not for lack of trying, btw); but when you look at recent blog entries and tweets, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising. Even though he got his apology, it’s clear the experience of this Easter wasn’t pleasant. (Plus, being realistic, the Party may prefer him to be spending his time planning for the forthcoming general election.)

Around Easter, I had several conversations with people, all of us concerned at the possible loss of Tom as Minister for e-government / Digital Engagement. It’s been such a wonderful period, having someone in that position who deeply, personally understands it – particularly after two anonymous predecessors, Pat McFadden and Gillian Merron. (Yeah, exactly.)

If true, and I stress if, it would seem to put a slightly different light on the appointment of Andrew Stott as Director of Digital Engagement. With a new Minister arriving at the Cabinet Office front door, with (in all likelihood) little background knowledge, it’ll be up to his/her right hand man to drive the Power Of Information agenda forward. The reshuffle is expected shortly after the European elections on 4 June; Stott starts his new job (formally) on 2 June. Two fresh faces in the same fortnight would not be ideal.

PS: Is that really Tom’s middle name? (not safe for work)
19 May 2009

e-government

engagement, houseoflords, parliament

Lords committee on online engagement

Did you know the House of Lords is currently inviting opinions on how it, and Parliament generally, can relate better to the public? No? Neither did I, which kind of proves something in itself.

It’s the Lords’ Information Committee, it’s called People And Parliament… and it closes in two days. The deadline for full written submissions passed on 5 May. Having bumped into details about it earlier today, I’ve been looking at the transcripts of an April session featuring such luminaries as Ben Hammersley and Tom Loosemore. It was a feisty session at times – listen to it here. I was particularly taken by one contribution by Tom, which I will probably find myself quoting in business meetings to come.

I used to run the BBC’s message boards and forums and it is a thankless task because you end up spending millions of pounds censoring people, and I fear you will do the same, if you are successful. I do not think you will be successful as being the home for those national debates, a genuinely democratic cross-section of the country coming along and discussing issues in a constructive way. I do not think Parliament’s website itself will ever be the home for that debate.

Having said that, what I think the Web does do is open up all sorts of possibilities for you, as representatives in this place, to go out and consult. So if you want to go and find out what people think about immigration, there are many, many places on the Web where there are constructive conversations about immigration and you can go and join in and listen there. You do not have to insist that everybody comes here. That is how the place has always worked. It does not always rely on five people sat in front of a table talking to you.

So I would encourage you as Members and as Lords of this place to go out and use the Web to engage with the different issues and avoid like the plague hosting conversations on your own website. When I left the BBC I left them with a document which said, ‘Do not host conversations on the BBC’s website, link to them instead.’

There’s not a little irony, then, in looking at the forum set up by Parliament to discuss the subject: only to find a handful of responses, whose quality is, to be frank, mixed. Not for the first time then, Tom Loosemore shows he knows what he’s talking about. He also made some fine points about making Parliament’s data easily reusable as a first step towards wider engagement, and handled questions about sustainability with great tact. I heard his name mentioned as a possible Director of Digital Engagement; for the record, I think he’d have been fantastic.

There are two more meetings scheduled: one happens to be tomorrow, and features none other than Tom Watson. It’ll be streamed live online, and archived for later viewing: you’ll find it here.
13 May 2009

e-government

andrewstott, cabinetoffice

'Safe hands' Stott fails to inspire – so far

Well, we didn’t see that one coming, did we? The Cabinet Office ultimately plumped for an internal candidate in its search for a Director of Digital Engagement; Andrew Stott has worked there since September 2004. The new role was ‘created to take forward the Power of Information agenda’, the press release helpfully notes; but in his existing (former?) role, Stott already has/had ‘director-level oversight within the Cabinet Office for the Power of Information work from its inception and was a member of the Minister for Digital Engagement’s Power of Information Taskforce.’ So very much the ‘continuity candidate’, you might say.

The job description for the role (which I’ve reproduced here) called for ‘someone who would be acknowledged by their peer group to be a leader in this field. The successful candidate,’ it said, ‘will have a CV that creates instant credibility and confidence with Ministers, senior officials and digital communicators in Whitehall.’

Sadly, ‘instant credibility’ isn’t the reaction I’ve heard from most of my own contacts. One, on promise of anonymity, called it a ‘spectacular own goal’. Others have been more measured in their language; others much, much less. Several of the responses frankly aren’t printable.

There’s ~~no question~~ general (but for the record, not universal) consensus that Stott will be a ‘safe pair of hands‘. Of course he meets the criteria of having ‘the authority to be credible with Ministers and senior officials’ and ‘experience of the workings of Government’. But there’s little evidence – and I stress, evidence – of his fit with some of the other supposedly essential criteria. If he has ‘run a public facing web site of significant size’, or ‘innovated in web, beyond web publishing’, the web itself doesn’t have much information about it.

I’ve been pointed towards the ‘Information Matters’ strategy published last year by the Knowledge Council, chaired by Stott. Not a document I’ve yet read myself; but Public Sector Forums did, and weren’t impressed – ‘consisting largely as it does of top-down dictums, much reinventing of wheels and what Basil Fawlty would aptly call the bleedin’ obvious.’ (Link for PSF members only)

However, COI’s Andrew Lewin offers grounds for optimism. ‘A new face from the private sector to make a bold splash and shake everything up… wasn’t a very appealing prospect,’ he writes. ‘[Stott is] certainly very familiar with the government scene in the online engagement areas and will be hitting the ground running. This appointment means we should be able to get on with things, but with a high profile person at the head of things to drive it forward still faster.’

And Will Perrin, who knows him from the Power Of Information taskforce, says he is ‘exactly what [the role] needs: responsible, reliable, non political, strong on delivery great with the tech’.

Stott is a brave man, not just because the Daily Mail is against him from day one. If he is to meet the sky-high demands of the role, he needs the active support of the many web-literate civil servants, and the wider ‘gov 2.0’ community. His is not the appointment to win that support instantly, by default. If he is to lead a process of national digital engagement, he first needs to engage with the guys who will actually make it happen.

Oh… and a quick PS: No, I didn’t apply for it. It struck me – rightly, I’d now suggest – as a talking role, rather than a doing role. I’m enjoying the freelance lifestyle too much. I don’t miss the bureaucracy, not in the slightest. I don’t want to be full-time in central London just now. And frankly, there’s too big a political risk attached to the position.
13 May 2009

e-government

cabinetoffice, directorofdigitalengagement

Andrew Stott named as Director of Digital Engagement
Just announced by the Cabinet Office: Cabinet Office man Andrew Stott, Deputy Government CIO and chair of the CTO Council has been announced as the new £120k/yr Director of Digital Engagement. An appointment from the government IT angle, rather than the social media angle. Hmm.

The Cabinet Office press release plays up his Whitehall seniority and experience, but rather neglects the more ‘social web’ aspects of the appointment. So for reference, here are the key elements of the Job Description, sent out in February. I expect there will be plenty of discussion to come on this.
ROLE PROFILE

Background

The Government recognises the widespread use of the internet and in particular a huge increase in the use of digital communities and social media. It also recognises that despite significant advances in Government web, there is now an opportunity to significantly increase the degree to which Government engages with citizens through the web. In recognition of this, the Prime Minister has appointed a Minister for Digital Engagement at the Cabinet Office and we now seek to appoint a highly credible digital communicator to be Director of Digital Engagement.

Job Purpose

The Director of Digital Engagement will be based in Government Communications at the Cabinet Office and will work across Government departments to encourage, support and challenge them in moving from communicating to citizens on the web to conversing and collaborating with them through digital technology.

Job Description

The successful applicant will:
- Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government
- Work with communication, policy and delivery officials in Government departments to embed digital engagement in the day to day working of Government
- Work with Directors of Communication to ensure that digital media are included in the reporting of reaction to Government policy and initiatives
- Work closely with web teams to ensure that digital communications are making the most effective and efficient use of hardware and software
- Act as head of profession for civil servants working on digital engagement
- Ensure that digital engagement is always a leading part of Government consultation
- Introduce new techniques and software for digital engagement, such as ‘jams’ into Government
- Convene an expert advisory group made up of the leading experts on digital engagement to provide advice to Ministers and act as a sounding-board for the Government’s digital engagement strategy
- Work closely with the Ministerial Group on Digital Engagement, delivering the work agreed at Cabinet on digital engagement
You will manage a small team, directly, but will have to manage relationships with a wide group of senior officials across Government. This will require developing working arrangements in which departmental officials feel they are accountable to the Director of Digital Engagement without the benefit of a formal line management arrangement. These relationships will be at Director and Director General level and may well involve five or six departments at any one time. The relationships will be across professions, involving policy and delivery officials as well as communications and IT. Since this is a new role charged with getting Government to work differently, you will have to develop these relationships from scratch in a pressured environment in which Ministerial expectations of delivery are high.

You will have a small budget, but two key purposes of the job are to assist Government in making effective use of current digital spend, which runs into many millions, and to enable departments to save significant sums on their engagement activities through switching from expensive face to face and postal methods to cheaper digital techniques. You will be accountable for leading Government’s new focus on digital engagement, which is central to Government priorities and with significant risk of reputational damage if this does not happen or Government gets it wrong.

You will be accountable to the Permanent Secretary – Government Communications and to the Minister for the Cabinet Office.

Judgement will be crucial in this role. It leads on the future of Government engagement with citizens through digital means. This means that the post will be breaking new ground on a daily basis, across Government. The agenda is politically very high profile and full of complex issues between and within departments that you will have to exercise very sensitive judgement on how to manage and resolve. You will have a level of professional expertise that is likely to mean that you will be unique in your ability to exercise judgement and provide advice to Ministers and Permanent Secretaries/ senior officials on matters within your remit.

Influence is a key aspect of this role. You will be required to exercise influence across departments with Ministers and senior officials to drive forward the future of digital engagement. This will require Government and individual departments to change the way they do business – from consulting citizens to collaborating with them on the development of policy and how public services are delivered to them. It will involve supporting Ministers and senior officials in entering conversations in which Government does not control the message or the dialogue. Giving Ministers and senior officials the confidence to do this will require influencing skills of the highest order. This role has few direct reports and little direct resource at its command. The ability to make change and delivery of challenging objectives happen by negotiation, persuasion and influence will be critical.

This is not a role for a generalist. The professional skills required are formidable. Engagement in the digital space is a young ‘profession’ and the job requires someone who would be acknowledged by their peer group to be a leader in this field. The successful candidate will have a CV that creates instant credibility and confidence with Ministers, senior officials and digital communicators in Whitehall.

Within six months the Director of Digital Engagement will have developed a strategy and implementation plan and be able to show concrete signs of momentum in executing the plan.

Within a year the Director of Digital engagement should be able to point to two departments whose use of digital engagement are recognised in the digital community as being world class

Within two years the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government

In addition [to all the usual senior civil service stuff], there are a number of additional attributes for the role:

Essential
- Is a highly credible individual in digital communications
- Has run a public facing web site of significant size, for example for a broadscaster or newspaper; or has been a leading figure in getting a large organisation to engage through digital channels.
- Has innovated in web, beyond ‘web publishing’ and can demonstrate concrete personal examples of changing how organisations carry out their core functions using digital channels
- Understands the technology and software that enable excellent web development, and has experience of advising on its procurement and deployment
- Has experience of achieving change through influence, especially with policy and delivery officials
- Has the authority to be credible with Ministers and senior officials
Desirable
- Has experience of the workings of Government