politics – Page 5

3 Feb 2010

e-government, politics

datagovuk, freedata

Don't go comparing

There’s a bit of a spat at the moment over Conservative (mis)use of crime stats to suggest a doubling or trebling of violent crime. The BBC’s Mark Easton has an excellent summary of the situation, which ultimately boils down to a change in how the numbers were put together:

Before 2002 the decision as to whether an incident was a violent crime had been taken by police. After 2002, officers were obliged to record all incidents as violent crimes if the alleged victim said that is what it was. The aim was to stop police fiddling the figures and to get a better picture of violence. The obvious consequence was to send the raw numbers shooting up.

Statisticians therefore warn that ‘figures before and after that date are not directly comparable’ – however, that doesn’t seem to have stopped either the Tories or, to some extent at least, the Labour government making precisely such comparisons.

Not that that’s any kind of justification, as Tory spokesman Chris Grayling attempted on the Today programme this morning:

I know there’s been a change; I also know that the Home Office has continued to use the same comparators. … As an opposition party, we don’t make the statistics. We can only use what the Home Office publishes.

My point isn’t the party politics of the situation: it’s the reminder of the pitfalls of playing with data. The launch of data.gov.uk is rightly being hailed as a triumph: but it hands highly explosive material to eager amateurs. Some won’t notice the caveats; some won’t understand them; some may actively choose to ignore them. And some will say, ‘what does it matter, we’re all at it.’

If statistics are kept to a small clique of experts, then it’s fine to tinker with the calculations – safe in the knowledge that all the users are expert enough to understand and factor in the changes. But stats aren’t kept to the cliques any more, if ever they really were – and data.gov.uk takes this to a whole new level.

The decision to offer the data was absolutely right in my view: in time, it should be an antidote to this. But it will come under fire at some point: and we need to have a defence ready.
26 Jan 2010

politics

language, ukgovcamp10

Language matters

I’m still gathering my thoughts from Saturday’s UK GovCamp: not sure what I can or should say. Several people told me fascinating things, on condition I didn’t write them up here. Several things I would truly love to blog about, but I know I shouldn’t. I’ll piece together the rest in due course.

But one thing which has already hit home numerous times is this slide by Anthony Zacharzewski, during his (sub)session ‘Making the political sell‘:

Anthony’s point was that politicians from the two leading parties respond differently to different (apparently synonymous) words. Depending on which party your interlocutor represents, you may need to alter your vocabulary if you’re going to get your proposal passed.

A fascinating idea, not something I’d ever thought about before – but on reflection, spot on. Worth printing out this sheet and keeping it handy for the next few months, maybe.

Anthony’s full slide set is here. Follow this guy, he knows his stuff.
4 Jan 2010

e-government, politics

conservatives, consultation, jeremyhunt, wordpress

Wanted: consultation platform, £1m reward

I’m glad my former Microsoft colleague John McGarvey reminded me of Conservative shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s proposal of a £1m prize to develop ‘the best new technology platform that helps people come together to solve the problems that matter to them’. That’s what happens when you announce things over the Christmas holidays.

The plan is for a future Conservative government to use it ‘to throw open the policy making process to the public, and harness the wisdom of the crowd so that the public can collaborate to improve government policy. For example, a Conservative government would publish all government Green Papers on this platform, so that everyone can have their say on government policies, and feed in their ideas to make them better.’ Why does that sound so familiar? ‘There are currently no technological platforms that enable in-depth online collaboration on the scale required by Government,’ says Mr Hunt; ‘this prize is a good and cost-effective way of getting one.’

Now I don’t know what kind of ‘scale’ or ‘depth’ Mr Hunt thinks he requires. If there’s a formal brief, I’ve yet to find it – and I’d be delighted if someone could point me in the right direction.

Because I’ve been building websites allowing the public to input their views on government green and white papers for some time now. Steph Gray’s Commentariat theme kickstarted the process: and I’ve since gone on to build reusable WordPress MU-based platforms for two Whitehall departments, for a few grand each. We’ve proven WordPress can handle (literally) thousands of responses – and in the only case so far where it’s wobbled, that was because of ISP throttling rather than the ability of WordPress to handle it.

Then on the academic side, you’ve got the work that’s been done by Joss Winn and Tony Hirst et al on JISCPress / digress.it / writetoreply.org. Their focus has been on the technical side, including some early steps towards community-building. It’s a bit lacking in terms of aesthetics, and it hasn’t yet been tested with huge volumes, but it’s doing some very interesting things.

And of course, barely a month ago, you had Mr Hunt’s own people at Tory central office proving the point by turning the government’s draft IT strategy into a consultation document using WordPress. Cheap and quick, showing signs of inexperience with the platform – but good enough to receive nearly 400 contributions.

So you have several independent operations in the (wide) UK public sector, already proving in the real world that WordPress is perfectly capable of supporting such ‘user feedback’ websites, and delivering some pretty sophisticated functionality and user experience. BuddyPress, meanwhile, continues to improve, and could certainly form the bedrock of a government-backed policy development community.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the technology is ready. And there are enough good people who have built up enough experience to collaborate on building something pretty special. For a slice of that £1m, I’m sure I could find time in my own schedule.

But the big question is… is Mr Hunt ready? What does it mean to receive large volumes of contributions from the general public? When do you ask for them? How do you deal with them? How do you ensure they’re representative? And what if you don’t like the consensus of the opinions expressed?

I’m all for the kind of revolution in policy development he seems to be proposing; and I’d be happy to play a part in it. But it isn’t the lack of a technical platform that will hold this vision back. If anything, that’s the easiest part.

PS Just a thought… whither Tom Steinberg?
21 Dec 2009

politics

atheistbus, donations

The puzzle of political donations
Just over a year ago, we had the startling success of the Atheist Bus Campaign, which raised over £150,000 to put the message ‘There’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life‘ on the side of London buses. And, given the surplus funds, buses up and down Great Britain. An online-orchestrated grassroots campaign, with individuals chipping in a few quid for a political gesture.

Fast-forward to this weekend, and the least festive Christmas Number One Single ever, with Rage Against The Machine’s foul-mouthed tirade seeing off a sweet Geordie teenager – solely on the back of download sales. Again, a large number of people, orchestrated online, chipping in their 29-99p for a political gesture. Of sorts. Well, political in the widest possible sense.

I’m talking to a few MPs at the moment about improving their websites ahead of next year’s election, and one recurring subject is political donations. On the face of it, they’re being most optimistic. The biggest news story of the year has been the way MPs have fleeced the public purse to fund their moat-cleaning and duck-houses. I don’t see queues of people outside constituency offices, all eager to hand in their campaign contributions.

But it seems it can work. Iain Dale observed at the weekend that Tory candidate for Bristol East Adeela Shafi is successfully raising funds through the MyConservatives.com site: over £1,000 towards her notional target of £1,500, apparently within 3 days. How? Iain suggests:

I suspect most of the donations were in the £5-£20 bracket. If you make it easy to donate, people will do so, if you give them a reason to.

…which is probably true; but he also hints at the significance of #kerryout, a Twitter-orchestrated attempt to unsettle, if not unseat, Labour’s ‘Twitter tsar‘ Kerry McCarthy. It’s supposedly independent; but that’s somewhat hard to justify when its hastily produced website includes a huge link to Adeela Shafi’s MyConservatives page for donations. And I wonder how the concealment of the domain name’s ownership sits with election imprint rules.

So anyway, what can we learn from this?

Getting detailed data on RATM’s sales breakdown or MyConservatives donations wasn’t going to be easy; but helpfully, virtually all the donations to the Atheist Bus Campaign were listed on the JustGiving website: so I did some hasty number-crunching. And here’s what I found:
- The campaign raised just over £148,000 from 9,744 individual online donations.
- Two £3,000 donations accounted for 4% of the total; 12 of £1,000+ accounted for 14.4%.
- 162 donations of £100+ – or 1.7% of the donations – accounted for 30.8% of the total sum raised.
- Half the money was raised by just 10% of the donors.
- Roughly 76.6% of the donations were in Iain’s £5-20 range: but they accounted for less than half (49.7%) of the amount raised.
- 14.5% of donations were £5 or less, making up just 10.6% of the total raised.
- 81% of donations were £10 or less, representing 35% of the total contributed.
- The mean donation was £15.19; the mode and median were both £10.
- 36% gave exactly £10; 26% gave £5; 12% gave the minimum £2; 11.5% gave exactly £20.
- 49 people gave exactly £6.66. Very amusing.
So that’s a very small number of very large contributions representing a high proportion of the total raised; but still, over a third – that’s well over £50,000 – coming from donations of £10 or less. (Not that it’s any kind of sensible comparison: but the Obama campaign raised 38% of its funds from donations of $200 or less; the Atheist Bus raised 78%.)

But for me, the two uniting factors across these three success stories are as follows:
- they were negative campaigns – in the sense that they were based around someone or something that people didn’t like: religious advertising, Simon Cowell, Kerry McCarthy; and
- there was a specific, measurable outcome: the sight of a bus with a poster on it, the announcement of the Christmas chart, the result from Bristol East on election night. If enough of you support me, we will get ‘X‘ – and we will know if/when we have won.
If you were hoping for any tangible conclusions, I’m sorry to disappoint. But there’s definitely food for thought in there.
1 Dec 2009

e-government, politics

conservatives, leak, opensource, wordpress

Tories publish leaked Govt IT strategy with WordPress

You might have seen coverage in the last few days of the Government’s forthcoming ICT strategy – ‘New world, new challenges, new opportunities’ – which leaked out last week, and is due to be published next week to coincide with the Pre Budget Report. The first I saw of it was at UKAuthority.com, with follow-up coverage in places like Kable and Silicon.com. The key elements seem to be a move to cloud-based computing, a common desktop and common applications (known as the ‘Government Applications Store’, not a label I’m especially keen on); plus a restatement of policy on things like Open Source.

But here’s where it gets interesting. One of the recipients of the leaked document was the Conservative Party. And they’ve taken it upon themselves to republish it, in full, on a commentable web platform. (Which happens to be WordPress. Just thought I’d mention that.)

I’m not going to offer any comment on the strategy itself just yet: there’s something slightly uncomfortable about it being a leaked document, still apparently ‘work in progress’. But it’s a fascinating development nonetheless. We’ve seen academics and activists opening up documents like this: never a political party – although the only indication of the site’s origins is the obligatory reference in the footer. No logos, no explicit definition of who ‘we’ are, when it says on its homepage:

We have built this website to share with you a leaked copy of Labour’s report on public sector IT, which was scheduled to be published in the days ahead. … We think there’s a better way. … we believe that crowdsourcing and collaborative design can help us to make better policies – and we think this approach should begin now. This website allows you to post your comments and suggestions on this leaked Government report. We want to hear your ideas – and we will be responding to your thoughts in the weeks ahead.

The makeitbetter.org.uk domain was only registered on Friday last week; and it looks like the content was copied-and-pasted into the site during Saturday afternoon. It’s a modest build, using a plain off-the-shelf theme, and to be honest it lacks a certain finesse: no ‘pretty permalinks’, no mention of RSS, no subscribe-to-comments, etc. But it’s up there, in double-quick time, whether or not the Cabinet Office wanted it up there. And it’s a case study for how negligible-cost hosting plus free software, specifically WordPress, can change the game. As I may have mentioned here before.

It’ll be fascinating to see what kind of comments it attracts. (Here’s the site’s comment feed, if you want to follow it.)
26 Nov 2009

e-government, politics

lynnefeatherstone, postcodes

LibDem tech chief backs free postcodes

Delighted to see LibDem MP (and client) Lynne Featherstone write the following:

As Chair of the Liberal Democrat Technology Board – and an MP who believes that the internet should be used to strengthen democracy – I want to declare my support for the Free our Data campaign. We need postcodes to be owned by the public – not sold to the public. Postcodes are the basic pre-requisite for allowing services to be developed that support democratic accountability. This is an issue that cuts across parties […] and so it should, because it’s about how the data about us can help us all.

I wonder where she got the idea originally? Can’t have been this, surely.
24 Nov 2009

politics

bnp, buddypress, social, socialnetworking, wordpress

BNP's BuddyPress-based social network

The Conservatives won plaudits for the MyConservatives social networking platform they launched at their annual conference; and now the LibDems are slowly getting their own Act together (ho ho). Labourspace remains a bit of a joke. But one UK political party has been quietly developing its own social network for a few months now, with a membership now well in excess of 4,000 – and impressive open-source technology to boot. It’s the BNP.

There was some amusement across the political divide a couple of weeks back, when the BNP unveiled a new website design bearing more than a mild resemblance to BarackObama.com. But I haven’t seen any reference to the addition (or perhaps more accurately, the increased visibility) of its social networking functions based on BuddyPress, the free WordPress add-on often described as ‘Facebook in a box’.

To date, the site has attracted 4370 members – not necessarily party members, as it’s an option (defaulting to ‘no’) on the sign-up form. And as its RSS feed shows, it’s a fairly busy site. Once you’ve joined, you can sign up to any of the 225 groups which attract your interest, many of which have memberships in the hundreds. You can fill out your member profile, as site admin Simon Bennett has done. And just like Facebook, you can look at his friends, the groups he’s joined, and what else he’s been up to on the site. (There’s also a live chat widget on the profile page, if you want to watch site members conversing in real time.)

Looking beyond their politics, if you can, it’s impressive stuff. The BNP’s web activity has long been cited as several times more popular than the other mainstream parties; and if you put any faith in Alexa rankings, it still leaves them for dead. Indeed, Alexa currently ranks the BNP’s site as the 753rd most popular in the UK. There are many possible reasons for this – the BNP’s lack of mainstream media exposure, the inclusion of those social functions within the main party site, possibly also deliberate efforts by party members to boost their rankings. But that doesn’t take away from the achievement.

The fact is, they’re building and nurturing an active online following, which will inevitably help them mobilise – and raise money – come the election. If the mainstream parties could boast such statistics, we’d be talking about a new media revolution in politics.
18 Nov 2009

politics

libdems, myconservatives, ning

LibDems' Ning-based social network

When the new LibDems website was launched a week or so ago, there was also mention of ‘a new social action network site called ACT’, which promised the ability to ‘join groups, organise events, watch videos, talk politics and join in campaigns… to mobilize an online community that reaches beyond the boundaries of formal party membership’.

It didn’t take a lot of guesswork to find the site, at act.libdems.org.uk: and it turns out, it’s just a Ning site with paid-for options to use your own domain name, remove any mention of Ning, and hide third-party adverts.

Here’s the video intro to what it can do:

It’s certainly a cost-effective solution: those ‘pro’ options are costing them £33/month at a guess, and make for a pretty rich social network. Ning also implements the OpenSocial protocols, so in theory there are ways to access and play with the underlying data – although they don’t make it easy, at first glance. So although it’s the cheap option, that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad one.

But they may hit problems due to the inability to really customise the platform. Where you’d love to offer dropdown lists, for example a list of Westminster constituencies for event locations, all you get is a free text field for location: and searching isn’t all that clever, so you’ll need a lot of discipline to ensure consistent tagging.

Of course, it looks like what it is: a generic Ning site with a few LibDem logos stuck on it. So in that sense, it doesn’t measure up to the Tories’ custom-built MyConservatives.com. But if the site connects people, and those people go out and do things, it will have served its purpose, for a tiny amount of money.
13 Nov 2009

politics

jedward, labourparty, xfactor

Labour's cheap X-Factor dig

If the many series of Have I Got News For You have taught us anything, it’s that if a joke is topical, it doesn’t actually have to be funny.

With that in mind, here’s Labour’s latest online campaigning masterstroke. A badly Photoshopped picture of the two senior Opposition politicians, mocked up to look like John and Edward off the X-Factor, slapped on a page on their website. No attempt to make a deeper political point; just a stupid joke. Childish, amateur, pathetic. But it made me smile. And now I’m writing about it here.

It’s worked.
11 Nov 2009

e-government, politics, technology

bis, generalelection, sitecore

Time marches on

It’s been formally announced that BIS (the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) is to move its corporate website over to Sitecore by March next year. Of course, it’ll be a shame to see them moving away from WordPress for the ‘shop window’: but I can say with some certainty that there will still be plenty of WordPress-based activity after the move. 😉

But that March launch date? As you may have noticed, there’s going to have to be a general election in the first half of next year. There are local elections scheduled for 6 May, making it the obvious date to pick for a national poll; although it could be as late as 3 June, and there have been rumours of a date as early as 25 March.

Check your calendars, folks: we’re now into territory where the election date is a factor in even medium-sized web projects. The Cabinet Office’s election guidance isn’t specific about website redesigns, but the thrust of all their advice is to reduce communication activity to a bare minimum during the ‘purdah’ period immediately before polling day. So in the admittedly unlikely event of them calling the election for March, the BIS Sitecore site might have to be mothballed until after Election Day – even if it’s bang on schedule. And then you’re into awkward questions as to whether the behemothic BIS would survive in its current form. It might never see the light of day..?