Public Strategist

The 5th National Digital Inclusion Conference kicks off later this morning – with live video available free (though with all three main party leaders appearing in recordings, some will be more live than others).  Their presence – albeit ghostly – is an indicator of how much more visible this has become over the last year,  starting with the Digital Britain report and becoming much more visible with the appointment of Martha Lane Fox as digital inclusion champion and Race Online 2012.

A lot of that – for good reason – focuses on who is digitally excluded and what benefits there might be to them as individuals and to society more generally from getting online.  But there has been less attention that I am aware of on the question of what counts as being included:  at what point can you say that somebody once digitally excluded has switched categories?

That question looks deceptively easy.  Somebody without the means or the skills to access the internet is clearly excluded.  So somebody with the means and the skills must surely be counted as among the included.  But of course it isn’t as simple as that, because neither means nor skills are simple binary states.

A while ago, I was talking to a young man looking for a job, and asked him why he didn’t look online.  Because it’s two buses to get to the public library and you only get half an hour, was his reply.  Or being in a library myself and watching an older man asking a bit tentatively if he could use one of the computers and being firmly told that he could book a slot for three days time.  He turned away looking crestfallen and without making a booking.  It didn’t look as though he would be back.  Remote, uncertain, and limited access is better than none.  But it is hardly inclusion. That’s in part because there is something transformational about the always on internet.  The obvious excitement of broadband access is its speed; the more subtle but, I suspect, at least as important difference is that it is always just there.  Access two bus rides away is not just less convenient, it is a different kind of experience.

But even once access is established, there are skills and confidence.  Surfing web sites or writing an email is not the same as checking a bank balance or booking flight, still less claiming a benefit.  Nor is that scale as linear as it might once have appeared:  being comfortable with bebo or facebook does not necessarily translate into confidence beyond the hedged garden.

All of that shows that the question of who is digitally included is not as easy as it might first look but treats it as essentially pragmatically.  But increasingly the question of digital inclusion is treated not as a practical question but but a moral one:  75% of UK respondents to the BBC survey published this week believe that internet access is a fundamental right, and 87% say that the internet has increased their freedom.

Another piece of research published this week, by the US Social Science Resarch Council (with a summary at Ars Technica) challenges the idea – for the USA at at least – that there are significant groups excluding themselves by pure lack of interest:

When we began our conversations with non-adopters, we expected to hear with some frequency from people who were not interested in the Internet… But we found no such group, even among respondents with profound histories of marginalization—the homeless, people with long-term disabilities, people recently released from lengthy prison sentences, non-English speakers from new immigrant communities, and residents of a rural community without electricity or running water. No one needed to be convinced of the importance of Internet use or of the value of broadband adoption in the home.

Nor was this view based on abstract ideas:

In most cases, non-adopters talk about the Internet as a concrete, immediate need. Non-adopters increasingly must use the Internet in their interactions with employers, schools, and government, as services move online. When people lack adequate access or the necessary skills to navigate critical services, their experience is not typically one of empowerment but of fear and frustration. For this reason, we talk about “drivers” of adoption—positive and negative—rather than the “value” of the Internet to these communities.

Job searches, education, and interactions with e-government services consistently stood out as the most urgent of these needs, and one or more of these figured in every conversation with non-adopters.

The question of who should be seen – or perhaps more importantly, who sees themselves – as digitally included is critically important.  Abstract ambitions will not get translated into reality if we cannot be clear quite what it is we are trying to achieve – and what will count as success.

A digital citizenry isn’t interested in talking to an analogue government

David Eaves 

(h/t Martin Stewart Weeks)

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Social Innovator

We have created Social Innovator to bring together the people, experience and issues involved in designing, developing and growing new ideas that meet pressing unmet needs.

This material is intended to guide and support the practice of all those who can contribute to this social economy: policy makers who can help to create the right conditions; foundations and philanthropists who can fund and support; social organisations trying to meet needs more effectively; and of course entrepreneurs and innovators themselves.

iPhone and Android biggest winners in mobile market in 2009

The good news is all in smartphones, as sales were up a whopping 41.1 percent for the fourth quarter and 23.8 percent overall, according to the latest data from market research firm Gartner. Nokia still commands large but declining chunks of smartphone and overall mobile phone sales, while iPhone and Android devices saw big leaps last year.

Gartner told Ars that Apple doubled its share of the overall market from 1.2 percent in 2008 to 2.1 percent for 2009, though it wasn’t enough to put it in the top five.

Innovation – what prat thought this up? would you take a bullet for your innovation? – John Suffolk – Government CIO

But for people to innovate they need the space to think, to dream, to test ideas, to make mistakes, to be protected, to be trusted. Many processes in a business look to ensure each pound spent is put to good use – how can you tell when you are innovating?

Participle – Ten Points for a Social Renaissance

What should a new government do?

At Participle, we believe that public services must provide new ways for people to shape their lives in a more meaningful way. We work with and for the public to make this happen. The current system isn’t working. It is both failing to support people and failing to address the major issues of modern society. This has little to do with money – most of our solutions are cheaper.

Those who have seen our work have asked, what should a new government do to allow these bottom up, low cost approaches to flourish nationally. Here are our 10 points for a Social Renaissance.

Prison works, or at least, it can do | Matthew Taylor’s blog

A shift in the quality of the public conversation occurs only when we see prisons not just as a way of punishing criminals and assuaging victims but as a vital public service that can benefit us all…

Prisoners want prisons to work, and they usually know what needs to happen inside to help them avoid reoffending outside. From the design of prisons to the content of training and employment programmes, prisoners, like all service users, have the best insights into how services can be modelled to achieve the outcomes we all want.

David Bowie and the Grateful Dead: the web’s real visionaries | Technology | The Observer

Bowie then went on to make one of the most perceptive observations anyone’s ever made about our networked world. Music, he said, “is going to become like running water or electricity”. To appreciate the significance of this, remember that he was speaking in 2002, a year after Apple unleashed the iPod on an unsuspecting world. At the time, millions of people were transfixed by the idea that they could carry their entire music collections around with them in a tiny device. But Bowie perceived that this blissful state might just be transitory– that iPod users were, in fact, the audio equivalent of travellers to primitive countries who carry bottled water because public supplies are unreliable or unsafe.

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote a post about the word we should use for the people who use government services. Its opening paragraph was:

There used to be benefit claimants.  There used to be passengers.  There used to be taxpayers.  Now there are customers (and patients, who seem, so far, to have survived the cull).

Now I discover it may be all over for patients too.

Yesterday, Patient Opinion ran a Yorkshire and Humber Event, and triggered a fascinating twitter conversation between Patient Opinion itself, Stephen Collins in Australia and Justin Kerr-Stevens somewhere between the two.  The blow by blow exchange – as near as I can reconstruct it – is below the fold, but the essence of it was Stephen’s challenge:

Perhaps the notion of patients as “users” is a telling factor. Are they not *people*?

Well of course they are – we are.  And Stephen went on to link to I Am Not a User, a site which proclaims the importance of talking about ‘people’. Its author links in turn to a marvellous polemic by Don Norman:

If we are designing for people, why not call them that: people, a person, or perhaps humans. But no, we distance ourselves from the people for whom we design by giving them descriptive and somewhat degrading names, such as customer, consumer, or user. Customer – you know, someone who pays the bills. Consumer – one who consumes. User, or even worse, end user – the person who pushes the buttons, clicks the mouse, and keeps getting confused. [...]

People are rich, complex beings. They use our devices with specific goals, motives, and agendas. Often they work with – or against – others. A label such as customer, consumer or user ignores this rich structure of abilities, motives, and social structures.

It’s a great challenge, but I am not sure whether to accept it.  My instincts are against linguistic minimalism.  Different words convey different meanings because sometimes there are different things we want to say. Using one word for everything feels as though it must undercut our powers of communication. Describing some people in terms of the thing they are doing or being which distinguish them at that moment from people in general must surely add to understanding rather than detracting from it. But that, of course, presupposes that those distinctions make a difference, and the counter argument must be that, in some important sense, they don’t.

In practical terms, it would take a lot of effort to expunge all those words from our vocabulary and would result in some pretty odd sounding constructions.  So it’s not worth doing – and won’t get done – unless there is an overwhelmingly powerful argument for change.  I am not yet seeing that argument, so I plan to stick with ‘customers’ for a while longer for the reasons  set out in that post two years ago.  But perhaps that’s because I am a dinosaur person.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the 1970s, there were three changes of government.

In the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, there was one.

This is how they did things in 1974 – the combination of constitutional theory, soap opera and gossip column in this account by the prime minister’s private secretary is quite extraordinary. But the two elections of 1974 represented the end of an era in a way which could not have been recognised at the time:  the UK has now had thirty years of stable governments (even the whittling away of John Major’s small majority didn’t really change that).  Directly and indirectly, that fact has done a great deal to shape political institutions, political processes and, more pertinently to the subject matter of this blog, the ways in which the business of government gets done and the ways in which people interact with government as citizens, participants and customers.  It is entirely possible that that environment will continue in the next parliament. It is entirely possible that it won’t.

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Events Leading to the Resignation of Mr Heath’s Administration on 4 March 1974

At 6.25 p.m. the Prime Minister left 10 Downing Street for Buckingham Palace. I went with him; and on the drive we neither of us said a word. There was so much, or nothing, left to say.

[h/t @ePolitix]

Just one. The best – confused of calcutta

People are so busy getting better at fixing problems that they forget the real point, which is to stop doing what causes the problem in the first place.

Improving the speed and quality at which you fix things is a worthwhile objective: that is, if (and only if) things break down less often as a result. So when you look at repair processes, it is more important to look at why things break down, and to prevent them from breaking down, than to focus on getting better at fixing things.

For some time now, we’ve been focused on the customer experience at BT. We looked at the way we dealt with customer requests, how often we delivered what the customer wanted, when the customer wanted it and how the customer wanted it. And we would take a close look at how often we got that right. A very close look. Because it affected what we took home.

The Five Best Government Blogs and The Six Reasons Why They Work | Executive Gov

With the Obama Administration placing a high priority on the goal of transparency in the federal government these days, blogging has become a dynamic, useful tool for agency officials to communicate thoughts, opinions and information directly to the public.  High-ranking federal officials are taking to the web and fueling a communications trend that is rapidly expanding and here to stay.  Here are five of the blogs in government that everyone is – or will be – talking about.

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Silver Bullets: Mapping digital exclusion

If we enclose as many points of social and digital exclusion as we can, by making a very big assumption we can guess where a digital inclusion initiative might have an impact. Let’s take a silver surfers club, a social media surgery or a first steps back to learning group. Where might the impact boundry lie in the large urban borough with some social exclusion and some digital exclusion?

Digital Inclusion Unconference – defining digital inclusion | We Share Stuff

I was surprised that we were all pretty much agreed on what we meant by “digital inclusion” — that it was (and this is my wording, worked out now):

the confidence to use technology when appropriate, and to know where to get help if needed

[h/t Nick Booth]

Memex 1.1 » Blog Archive » Google, Buzz and Gilbert Ryle

The more I think about Buzz the more it reminds me of Gilbert Ryle’s concept of a ‘category mistake’, i.e. a situation where we think of something in terms appropriate only to something of a radically different kind. For me, email is an entirely private tool — for confidential communications with carefully selected individuals. The designers of Buzz, however, seem to have assumed that email is inherently social — i.e. involving communication in public. For me — and I suspect for millions of others — this is emphatically not the case. I’m happy to use social networking tools like this blog and Twitter for public stuff. But email is for private stuff — even when I’m sending a message to multiple recipients.

UKGC10 session four: The future of journalism « Sharon O’Dea

I suggested we borrow the concept of ‘presumed competence’ used by the Foreign Office. Back when an ambassador was sent to Ouagadougou and not heard from for months at a time, their masters back home had to assume they were capable of getting on with it. Social media has the same disconnect between local demands and ability to get sign-off from the centre. We may find it easier to respond to social media if we have a set of agreed ‘lines to take’ that we trust our teams to deliver, and refer upwards only by exception.

Open data is not a panacea – but it is a start by brian hoadley

So who, in reality, will create those digital services? It will be same internal teams, companies and consultancies who currently work for Government.
In practical terms, they are the only ones who have the infrastructure and capital to go through ISO accreditation, PRINCE training, supply account and project directors, planners, technical architects, UCD experts, designers, developers, testers and hosting.
I am not saying there won’t be any applications of importance or use developed. But to make them robust in a way that they will need to be to accommodate the complete shift to online, they will require more thinking and better development than they currently undergo.

Civil Service Live: Digital services minister ’struggles’ with web access

Work and pensions minister Jim Knight, who has recently been appointed the government’s lead on moving public services online, said he had an “ongoing struggle” with officials about web access and called for government to tackle the problem “head on”.

Rewired State has taken another step towards becoming the next generation systems integrator for government.  In a piece of delightful recursion, a Rewired State project becomes the vehicle for accessing the formal status of Rewired State – or as it has been since last Monday, Rewired State Ltd.

In other news, the Rewired State gang has just announced their plans for March 2010.  Last year’s National Hack the Government Day still sticks in my mind as something of a personal turning point.  It was the first time I got a sense of the energy and opportunity represented by that community, and as I summed it up in my account of the day:

The simple fact that lots of smart people thought the best thing they could do with their Saturday was to think really hard about how to make government better is a force for good we cannot afford to lose.

This year, that’s just one of four events being run under the Rewired State banner.  What’s really interesting is what appears to be an entirely non-accidental absence of any sense of groundhog day.  The world has moved on in the last year – for which the Rewired State crew can take some of the credit.  The question is no longer, can bright people do smart things with government data?  That is proven beyond challenge.  The question now is how those ideas can break through from demonstrator and prototype to robust and scalable service, and from services which are available and potentially useful to services which are used and celebrated.  So it is really interesting to see that two of the four events involve paying developers to tackle specific problems while still leaving plenty of space for the more anarchic hack day itself.

I have got a longer post I had been writing over the last few days on some of these issues before any of this was announced, which should see the light of day imminently.  But since I am absolutely unqualified actually to take part in Rewired State (the last time I did anything which looked at all like coding was in 1987, and it wasn’t many years before that that I learned error correction by hand punching paper tape…), it can’t be too soon to start blagging for a seat at the presentations.

Listening looks easy, but it’s not simple. Every head is a world

Lauren Currie

In a world of increasingly open government data, who is going to create the services?

Brian Hoadley has a powerful go at the answer:

Those who campaign for the release of Government data seem to fall into a few major camps:

• Those who want more access to information because it will inform their work – e.g. the press via MP Expenses
• Rights activists who once the data is free will move onto another cause – because that’s what they do
• Those individuals who encircle Government who continually talk about how they could produce far better ‘Services’ than Government, at a fraction of the cost and time

Better access to data for those who monitor Government and then report on its activities will have certain benefits. We can all agree that some portion of the expenses scandal was beneficial and could lead to positive change in Government spending policy. We should also acknowledge the reality – that probably 80+ percent of the scandal was merely spectacle to earn revenue for news organisations.

I will admit that the efforts of rights activists will help groups 1 and 3 above by fighting a meticulous battle to gain access to what many term as Public data in any case.

But what about those ‘Services’?

To understand the drive behind this, we need to understand that with the Government in a precarious position due to over-extension of resources during the Recession, anything that could lead to a reduction of costs will look attractive. Take, for example, the appointment of a Digital Inclusion Champion to get the remainder of the UK population online.

Why would the Government do this?

Because long-term, the consumption of digital services, that can accommodate millions in the way a physical location cannot, will result in cost savings through the reduction of said facilities and staff to run them.

My instincts on this are very much like Brian’s:  industrial strength systems require some form of industrial strength management.  But it doesn’t at all follow that nothing has changed or will change (and I don’t imagine that Brian is suggesting otherwise).  There are several important forks in the path, which separately or cumulatively could lead to our ending up in quite a range of different places.

1.  Personal and impersonal

The focus of open data is very much on impersonal and aggregate data:  postcodes, mapping, crime statistics, school performance and a whole very long list more.  What all of that data has in common is that it can all just be handed over for people to play with and build new things.  Leaving aside the surprising ability of impersonal data to become personal in slightly unexpected ways, that can all be open and straightforward.  The issues suddenly get very different once personal data comes into the picture, because the same spirit of playful openness is simply not an option.  That’s not at all to say that personal data can only be handled inside government organisations but rather, as some of the points below start to explore, that different approaches and tools are needed to building services which deliver personal outcomes.

2. Front end and back end

Front ends can and should be simple, back ends often need to be complicated.  That doesn’t make either one inherently easier; it means that they are different kinds of problems.  Achieving elegant simplicity at the front requires hard work, but very different hard work from that required to achieve robust completion at the back end.  Brian goes on to talk about FixMyStreet, the inspired genius of which is that it doesn’t make the slightest attempt to solve the back end problem, it simply presents information to local authorities to do with what they will.  The LA then needs to diagnose what kind of problem it is and whose responsibility it is to solve it, identify and allocate resources, integrate with existing plans, schedule activity, undertake task, record completion and, ideally, somewhere along the way consider whether the problem could have been avoided in the first place.  I can see no obvious sign that systems to support that set of activities are going to come from anywhere other than their current sources (which is not to say that they will continue to be designed and built in anything like the same way).

That’s not at all an argument for government doing everything. Even big, complex, sensitive systems don’t have to sit wholly within government.  A large majority of tax returns reach government as structured data without having touched a government front end, because a whole lot of third party providers have found it in their interest to create front ends.

3.  Inside and outside

The question of how to do all this still tends to be framed round the assumption that it is government which holds personal information, that it has an obligation to limit access to and use of that information and that issues such as joining up services and sharing the data necessary to do so are problems which need to be solved and which only government can solve. Shifting the primary data store away from government (and other service providers) altogether – the volunteered personal information model – is one way of reframing the question.  But even that doesn’t take away the government big systems problem:  the piece of information you chose to share will often (but certainly not always) itself need to be stored in order to provide the service, to smooth future service provision and to provide assurance that the right things have been done.

4.  Facebook and Prince 2

Choices on those first three dimensions between them open up a huge range of futures, with no reason to suppose that any one of them will become the single universal model.  But unless we do something even more radical, they all still need there to be big transactional, personal systems (though they don’t necessarily require those systems to be owned or operated by government).  Brian’s answer is simple and, I suspect, right:

So who, in reality, will create those digital services? It will be same internal teams, companies and consultancies who currently work for Government.

In practical terms, they are the only ones who have the infrastructure and capital to go through ISO accreditation, PRINCE training, supply account and project directors, planners, technical architects, UCD experts, designers, developers, testers and hosting.

The argument in the past has been that those techniques are the only reliable way of delivering systems with the scale and resilience needed.  But the critical question now is not whether big complex systems are needed, but whether there is only one way of building them.  I have written before about the Facebook example, which is one of several which challenges the idea that robust large scale systems supporting high volumes of rapidly fluctuating personal data can only be managed in one way

None of that means that we will ever stop needing fast moving and often small scale innovation.  There are far too many examples of attempts to build big things in one go where either it proved too big to succeed, or got finished only when the rest of the world had moved on to something else -  or both.  But it does make the big challenge of the next few years look more about turning ideas and prototypes into boringly robust services than about generating new ideas – which is not to say that we won’t still need new ideas, just that it’s pretty clear that they will continue to come.

That’s why I was so encouraged to see Rewired State taking a step in this direction when I wrote about it earlier this week.  They are moving in from one end of the spectrum.  Now we need to get some movement from the other end.