Public Strategist

Last week, this blog hit five years and 400 posts, just as it became apparent that blogs are history.

As this momentous milestone approached, there was a flurry of coverage of the latest Pew Internet Project report, on social media and young adults, picking up on the decline of interest in blogging – at least among young Americans.  The Guardian reported that:

Blogging, on the other hand, may become more and more of a side issue. In fact, among all the content creating activities the decline in blogging among teens and young adults is striking as it looks like the youth may be exchanging “macro-blogging” for microblogging with status updates. Since 2006 blogging among teens has dropped from 28% to 14% and among young adults (aged 18 to 29) by 24% to 15%. Some 11% of those aged 30 and over now maintain a personal blog, and 14% of them maintain a personal website.

There is nothing terribly surprising about that:  maintaining a blog is not a trivial undertaking, and it has always been true that a lot more people are consumers of online material than are producers of it. Kathryn Corrick recently picked up on some Forrester analysis (again based on the US) which shows this very clearly:

What has changed, perhaps, is that tools have become better tuned to what it turns out people actually want to do.  As John Scalzi puts it:

For the vast majority of what people (not just teens, but teens also) used blogs for — quick updates on line to friends and family — Facebook and Twitter offer an easier, friendlier and therefore better solution than starting up a blog. If you’re starting out in social media, for most folks it makes sense to go there. Later, if you want the ability for customization and a format beyond 140-character tweets and status updates, you can always start a blog. But I suspect most people don’t need to get to that point, and certainly not most younger users of social media.

Also, you know. Blogs have been social media’s Last Year’s Model for a spell now; heck, they were Last Year’s Model when Friendster hit. And it’s certainly true that when I note that I’ve been blogging since 1998, certain younger folks get that look in their eye that says No! No one was even alive then! That’s when I hit them with the concept of “newsgroups.” Good times, good times.

Or, more pithily:

Great content is really, really hard to make. That’s why so few blogs have it, but that’s not the medium’s fault. The same is true for any other media.

And so back to the discussion of the state of the UK gov blogosphere kicked off by Dave Briggs, continued before and at UK Govcamp.  Now Dave is back with some fresh thoughts (and with a great comment from Steph Gray), most importantly and perceptively that none of this is really about blogs:

I was wrong to mention blogs. A lot of the resultant discussion in the comments of that post and other chats have focused on blogging, which is of course just the medium. It’s the content I am interested in. What we seem to lack is an ecosystem of ideas in public services. Discussions about new ways of doing things, how to change the way things are, how ideas get progressed into prototypes and then into actual delivered services or ways of working. Whether this happens on a blog, in a social network, on a wiki or over a cup of tea is neither here nor there.

I think that’s a good way to approach the question,  not least because the first incarnation of this blog was as the only available tool for the job I really wanted to do.  Its original purpose was to act as an informal knowledge management exchange for me and my team at work.  In the absence of any official way of doing that, a group blog  – with access restricted to members of the group – seemed as good a way forward as any.  For a whole range of reasons, it never quite took off in the way I had hoped, so it fairly quickly became more of a personal notebook of things I had found interesting or thought I might want to remember. That meant I wrote largely for myself – if anybody else found it interesting, that was a bonus, but their absence didn’t stop me (which is just as well).

Large organisations tend to be predominantly inward looking:  there is so much going on and calling for attention on the inside that it can sometimes be hard to remember even that there is an outside, let alone that that is where challenge and innovation is most likely to be found (I read something interesting and thought provoking on that, using the pattern of email usage as the way in to the question, just in the last few days, but now I can’t find it to add a link here – which is itself a measure of one part of the problem).  Blogs are one good way of countering that trend, for readers but perhaps particularly for writers, but its not the only way nor even the best way for many people and many ideas.  As Steph says, there is an existing ecosystem (and set of assumptions) which long predates the world of social media.  The challenge for government – and probably the challenge for any large-ish, non-technology focused organisation – is to recognise and embrace the additional power which comes from widening that ecosystem and, critically, to accept the loss of control which comes with it.

In the meantime, there’s a few more years blogging to be done.

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Social Media and Young Adults | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

Schneier on Security: Security and Function Creep

Security is rarely static. Technology changes both security systems and attackers. But there’s something else that changes security’s cost/benefit trade-off: how the underlying systems being secured are used. Far too often we build security for one purpose, only to find it being used for another purpose — one it wasn’t suited for in the first place. And then the security system has to play catch-up.

IdeaConnection: Interviews with Corporate Innovation Leaders: Co-design of Products and Services

Design is going through a change. Designers are now realizing they can apply their skills to make a positive difference on social issues. Designers design processes like ideas generation, prototyping, and testing, whereas people in public sector organizations might not think about using these processes. Even large private sector organizations may not go through the steps of a design process. steps of a design process.  [h/t @choosenick]

£16bn of benefits go unclaimed every year at linksUK

There are many reasons why people don’t claim everything they’re entitled to – we frequently meet people who just don’t know about them, people who think they could get them but are left baffled by the complexity of the system, and those who want to but don’t know how.

Fraser Speirs – Blog – Future Shock

The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

If the people who read this blog are the sort of people I think read this blog, few will have paused over the title of this post.  For better or worse, people who read this are people who are comfortable in an online world.  They will shop online, bank online, talk to their friends online, rant at their enemies online.

So it it terribly easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what is obvious to us now has always been obvious to everyone, or even that it used to be obvious to our own former selves.

But of course it wasn’t obvious before it became obvious, however obvious it now seems that it must always have been obvious.

Looking at these two examples – the poster above from the 1950s and the still below from a film about how to use ticket barriers made in 1969 (which you can watch on the London Transport Museum site) – two points stand out.

The first is that in both these examples, the people giving the instructions felt that painstaking detail was required (whether those on the receiving end found that useful is, of course, another matter).  The second is how quickly in both cases the self-service model became first accepted, then obvious and finally invisible.

The apparent moral of that is that once most people have been persuaded to change and the new way has become the default, the service provider’s problem is over.  At one level that probably is right, but there is another factor which is also vitally important:  the quality and clarity of the service design customers are being asked to follow.  The post office round the corner from where I work has recently installed a new queuing system.  A screen at the front door offers four service options; choosing one gets you a numbered ticket for the appropriate queue.  The problem is that the options are so completely non-intuitive that somebody has to be employed to stand by the machine, ask customers what they actually want to do, translate that into one of the four options  and then operate the ‘self-service’ machine for them.  The lack of clarity of both purpose and implementation radically inhibits customers’ behavioural change.

So, self-service done well can certainly become easy.  But it won’t actually be easy until it becomes obvious, and that takes time and clarity.  Getting that right requires the early adopters to see through the eyes of those who follow them into the change.  Self-service is only easy if we make it so.

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

A Free Internet, If We Can Keep It | Freedom to Tinker

Given a difficult technology policy problem, lawyers will tend to seek technology solutions and technologists will tend to seek legal solutions.

An open letter to the business – BankerVision

The best thing to do is treat your IT colleagues like glorified order takers. Like, for example, you’re in some really expensive restaurant. You want them to show up, and ask you what you want, and go away and get it. You want them to do it often enough that you never want for anything, but not so often you get annoyed by all the attention. I mean, the best IT person is the one that just does what they’re told, right? Even better if they’re like that perfect waiter in the perfect restaurant that knows what you want without even being told.

The coffee bar and the barcamp « Tom Calver’s musings

It will be hard for people to change their mindset, because it’s not what they’re used to. But if we can show how these less formal- and coincidentally much less costly- events deliver more benefit, then eventually even the hardened cynics will get the message. And what should drive home the message is the sheer enthusiasm of the barcamp attendees. They’ve been visibly  inspired by the event. And I can’t remember the last time I saw that in anyone who attended a traditional, expensive conference. The trick will be converting that enthusiasm into organisational change.

The tough issues in user involvement – Social by Social

While we might believe that it is blindingly obvious that involving the people who use services as early as possible – to make sure we develop the right thing – this may be particularly challenging in a digital context.

SOCIAL MEDIA: Your EIGHT step guide to getting started… « The Dan Slee Blog

You’ve read about social media. You may have thought it was a fad. Now you’ve been waking up at 3am with the gnawing thought that you’ll have to do something. something.

Strategic Plans Lose Favor

“Strategy, as we knew it, is dead,” he contends. “Corporate clients decided that increased flexibility and accelerated decision making are much more important than simply predicting the future.”
[h/t @NickJonesCOI]

Showing a better way – honestlyreal

And as far as I’m aware, the fundamental problem with innovation in public services is this confusion between what constitutes ideas, and what constitutes service implementation. And why I’ve come up with some alternative approaches to crack the innovation problem; more on this later.

And why people so often misunderstand the difference between good ideas and things that actually work. For that you need to build bridges, and remove roadblocks – a metaphor which will be the subject of my next post.

Choosenick! » Great bit of service design from Tesco in this bit of direct marketing…

Great bit of service design from Tesco in this bit of direct marketing that came through my letterbox – linking in-store and online elegantly and easily using a loyalty card. Helps customers move online, makes things easy, great graphics too! Simple. Love it.

My colleague Chris spotted a thread on a web forum about one of our services.  The user was getting confused by a change in the presentation of the search function.  Chris tracked down the people responsible for that bit of the user interface with a couple of detours to pillar and post along the way – and was told that everything was explained in the help text a simple click away.  Chris was – quite rightly – not terribly impressed with that and spotted that the kind of usage the customer wanted could be illustrated very simply by adding it to the list of examples displayed with the search function.  A couple of rounds of gentle persuasion and a week later and the change is done.

None of this has anything whatsoever with what we pay Chris to do – so I am completely delighted that he did it anyway.  But he is left with a question:  should he now post a comment to the forum thread explaining what has happened?  The fact that my answer was an instant and resounding ‘yes!’ is an indication of how far things have come; the fact that he felt the need to ask is an indication of how far we have to go.

At more or less the same time, I was having a slightly odd twitter experience. Crossing Trafalgar Square I noticed my phone had dropped its signal completely. When it recovered, half way down Whitehall, I amused myself with a snarky tweet:

Out of service area says vodafone. In Trafalgar Square. #fail with style

An hour later, up popped a tweet from Vodafone:

Presumably there’s a hope that it will make me feel better about Vodafone, or better informed, or just better. And in a way it did, but in another way it didn’t.  A point to Vodafone for bothering to track and respond to critical comments, though half a point deducted for standing slightly too close.  But the more serious problem is that all they have really told me is that they are listening – but not listening very precisely or to any great effect.  London is a rather bigger place than Trafalgar Square.  Are they acknowledging the existence of a Trafalgar Square problem, recognising a wholesale London problem, or referring to a small outage in Kilburn?  There’s no telling.  They are working hard, which is reassuring, but there’s no commitment to anything actually getting fixed.  Do they have a problem with a mast sited somewhere over the head of the evil CIO of DCMS which can be fixed by a bloke with a screwdriver, or is their network saturated to the extent that they need to re-engineer their backhaul network, digging up half the streets in London as they go?  And does any of that have anything to do with the complete deadspot on my journey to work which didn’t exist until a few weeks ago?

It is transparently unreasonable to expect much, if any, of that to be addressed in 140 characters.  The mistake Vodafone made was not that they didn’t overwhelm me with information, it is that my moan was about my problem, but their response was about their problem.  Maybe there was nothing at all useful they could say about reception in Trafalgar Square at 5.47 yesterday – but if they had nothing to say, they might have been better off not saying it.

And at more or less the same time again, Paul Clarke didn’t want to pay a parking ticket when Camden council rather thought he should, and was then more aggrieved when what was supposed to be a direct link to the relevant web page turned out not to be:

So I tweeted. Although I know some of the Camden guys, I deliberately didn’t point it at them, to see what would happen.

It got picked up.

And now it’s fixed. In less than 24 hours.

So, if you see something that’s easily fixable, do at least have a go at feeding back. It can work.

Recognising problems in customers’ experiences and finding way to fix them is a superb way of demonstrating commitment to good customer service.  I am delighted that Paul got so effective a response.  I am delighted that Chris had the commitment and persistence to ensure that an effective response was given.  And I would still like to know if Vodafone are going to fix their blackspots.

I totally respect the need for caution and propriety, after all I was a civil servant, but you can’t on the one hand champion social media in government and on the other seek to manage and control the agenda. It just cannot work, and it won’t.

Jeremy Gould commenting on a post by Dominic Campbell

Saturday was UK Government Barcamp day.  A day of fast moving fun, filled with energetic and enthusiastic people who thought that giving up their weekend in the cause of better government was a sensible and desirable thing to do.  There was a huge amount of energy on the day, represented and amplified in the twitter traffic (not far short of 2,000 tweets, and it hasn’t stopped yet) and a burst of blog posts appearing through Sunday and Monday, to say nothing of Paul Clarke’s pictures which, as usual, reveal an assorted gaggle of nerds, geeks and oddballs to be the heroes of our age.

Let’s get the basics out of the way first.  A barcamp – or unconference – starts with a blank agenda and invites the participants to suggest sessions.  It’s one of those ideas which sounds utterly crazy until you try it, at which point it becomes apparent that it just works.  So we started the day with forty potential sessions, and by the end of the day forty actual sessions had happened – with the complaints I heard all being about the agony of deciding between the eight sessions going on in any given time slot.  That, by the way, has a consequence which is not always recognised – a choice of eight sessions, five times over gives 32,768 different combinations:   it’s a fairly safe bet that, quite literally, no two people experienced the same event.

Slightly to my own surprise – I hadn’t thought of it until 30 seconds before suggesting it – I proposed a session on how we connect the interaction layer to the transactional layer. It is getting that connection right which is often what actually gets things done for people and which is often (usually?) based on systems which so far pre-date Gov 2.0 that at a rough guess their age profile is not dissimilar to that of the people in the room on Saturday.

It was a good, rich discussion, which really started to fly when Harry Metcalfe linked some of the issues we had been talking about to volunteered personal information and the power of user-controlled data and was boosted further by some splendidly provocative suggestions from Tom Steinberg and Simon Dickson.  Better still, I was able to use one of those thoughts in a piece of work I did on Monday morning – though so thin an edge of the wedge that the crack created is probably not visible to the naked eye.

So I can only put down to my natural perversity the fact that both that session and the equally challenging and creative discussion in Paul Clarke’s excellent session about how to experiment with innovation in the hardwired state left me feeling more than a little uneasy.  It took me the best part of another day to work out why, and I am not sure that I have completely pinned it down even now.

There was a fantastic group of people at barcamp.  Energetic, passionate, generous with time and expertise, eager to make a difference, and in many cases a track record of creative difference making which I can only admire and envy.  My guess is that the two biggest sub-tribes they fell into were those who weave applications out of data (often from outside government) and those whose trade is social media (often from a communications base and from inside public sector organisations). It was hugely refreshing and encouraging to spend time among people for whom the positive power of new media and new technology were recognised as a force for good and who were determined to make government work better, regardless of whether government showed any desire to be made to work better, and it is absolutely right – absolutely essential – that such a group re-energises and encourages itself.

But in calling this event UK Government Barcamp a bigger and bolder ambition was being expressed than that.  I can’t speak for local government – it’s not my background, and I didn’t go to any of the sessions specifically focused on local government issues – but central government was mostly not there.  I found myself in several conversations being the closest thing there was to the voice of a policy civil servant, thought that’s not particularly what I think of myself as being (or what, I suspect, most of my policy colleagues would see me as being).  I found my concerns about personal data and transactions and about government as service provider rather than information broker feeling a bit on the margin (and for more on the sorts of issues I am referring to here, see my recent post on Vogue and the welfare system, the posts linked from that one, and indeed this blog in general).

None of that is to criticise the event which did happen.  I found it stimulating, enjoyable,  challenging – and reassuring.  Those needs won’t go away.  But satisfying just those needs also won’t bring this thinking into the mainstream and won’t unlock the radical and transformational force for good which it could have.

So I think there is a choice to be made.  I am sure there is a place for a UK Government Social Media Barcamp next year – I would sign up for it as I suspect would pretty much everybody who was there on Saturday.  But is there also an appetite for something which is actually a UK Government Barcamp, accepting the breadth and implications that title implies?

To do that would be both harder and easier than I suspect it looks.  The easy bit first: I picked up a slight flavour from some that an unconference format wouldn’t work for a broader group and was a peculiarly geeky thing. That’s understandable given recent usage, but though the first barcamp happened only in 2005, the first unconference I went to was several years before that – and was made up of all the senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office.  The atmosphere was remarkably similar with lots of energy, excitement and creative thinking, which is particularly impressive given that none of us knew what we were letting ourselves in for (and that participation was not exactly voluntary).

But that same Cabinet Office conference also illustrates the hard bit.  Few of the actions and conclusions survived the post-event energy sag, and it didn’t take long before the power of daily pressures and organisational structures reasserted themselves.  Conferences – even unconferences – cannot exist in isolation from the world they are seeking to influence, the event itself can be only one part of a much bigger process.  That should be much easier now than it was, because we have better tools and better awareness, but easier still means hard.

I don’t have any instant answers to that:  we can encourage them to emerge over time. Nor is there the slightest chance of getting there in one great leap.  Perhaps a manageable step for the next event like this would be for every participant to bring a colleague (or a customer) with them who does not have the same shared background and assumptions, as a way of bringing a bit more friction as well as a bit more breadth.  Or perhaps there are other and better ideas.  Holding an unconference might be a good way of teasing them out and letting them grow…

Two conversations, with smart people talking about difficult and interesting things.

The day before yesterday, we were in a pub. It was crowded and noisy, and barely possible to hear from one end of the group to the other. But the discussion was lively and sustained, ideas were shared, thoughts developed.

Last night, a more spontaneous conversation on Twitter among a group which included, by not particularly relevant coincidence,  some of the same people.

The ideas were just as sharp and challenging – if considerably terser.  People overheard and started to join in, and a lively debate developed, only to fragment and fall apart.

The experience really brought home to me how much Twitter is not a conversational medium.  Sustained twittering works in announcement mode – Harry Metcalfe’s superb blow by blow account of yesterday’s data.gov.uk launch, for example – and in simple exchanges, but it doesn’t scale well.  It is hard to track quite who is saying what to whom.  Replies to one point can easily be misunderstood as replies to another, the 140 character limit strips out much of the emotional maturity which it is easy to signal in other channels (“I agree with you about x but think we should pay more attention to y” collapses into “y!”), and final meltdown occurs when the effort to keep track of who is in the conversation leaves no capacity for actually conversing.

That’s not an argument against Twitter, it’s a recognition that it does a few things well and many other things very badly.  That should be unsurprising and uncontroversial, because the same is true of any tool.  All of which is a very roundabout way of getting to the subject of blogs, and in particular of blogging in government.  I am looking forward to a conversation about that tomorrow yet another format at UK govcamp.

Just like everything else, blogs aren’t good for everything or for everyone.  So the suggestion in some of the blog talk in the run up to the event that blogs are a bit passé seems to me slightly to miss the point.  Judging by the state of my feed reader, blogs remain lively and dynamic, so the question of whether blogging from within the public sector is slow and difficult and is failing to attract many new bloggers can’t be answered by generalities about blogs in general.

I think Lucy Toman has put her finger on one of the key issues:

Writing a personal blog about my civil service job is a constant balancing act between being interesting (and I do think my job is interesting, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t blog about it!) and being professional. My blog is suitably festooned with disclaimers but I still frequently self-censor. I’m not at all surprised that most people really can’t be bothered taking the risk.

Lucy deals with that by being very careful about how she writes about her day job.  I deal with it by being very careful not to write about mine at all.  That’s not to say that what I blog about has no connection with my work, quite the contrary.  But it does have two very specific consequences, one limiting and one distorting.  The limitation is that what I write is much more abstract than it might otherwise be, the connections to practical consequences exist but remain invisible and unspoken.  The distortion is that the set of topics which lend themselves to be blogged in that way is skewed towards some aspects of what I do and away from others.

The distortion effect is then further emphasised by the social effects of public sector blogging.  In terms of the typology I invented a few months ago, I belong in category 5 (Everybody else) which is not a crowded place.  But most of the visible interaction in this space is in category 1 (People whose job it is), and I suspect that in a piece of unwitting and unintended social conformity, I write more than I would otherwise do for that audience because it is the one I can most easily detect.

I remain convinced that there can be greater openness, a greater range of category 5 blogging, just as I remain convinced that constraints on that openness are entirely proper as long as we retain the current model of public services. Striking that balance is not easy – tomorrow’s conversation should help us all make a better job of it.

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

Lost technologies « Janet’s Jottings

We are a very careless species, losing skills and knowledge constantly. We forget our past, or it is obliterated through natural disaster or human conflict. We have no or little idea of the technology of a few thousand years ago, and still less of our ancestors’ cultures. We really should not be so surprised, however, that humans in the past demonstrated great skill, ingenuity and the ability to think scientifically.

Memex 1.1 » Blog Archive » The Death of the News Package

In the 1930s Ronald Coase showed that an important determinant of how companies developed was the transaction cost of doing things that were essential to supporting their core businesses. If the transaction costs were low, then companies outsourced the activity. If they were high, then they took it in house — and grew vertically, as it were.

The arrival of the Net radically altered that calculation. In many cases B2B transactions costs reduced, because they could be conducted online — and in many cases automated by software. As a result, vertical integration no longer looked so smart — and outsourcing became much easier to do. Thus was born what Manuel Castells calls the ‘networked enterprise’. The rest is recent history.

Intranet 2.0 in 10 Not-So-Easy Steps – Intranet Blog – ThoughtFarmer

Step 1: Blow up the old intranet.

Why? It’s irrelevant to employees’ day-to-day job. The cumbersome updating process alienates people. It’s out of date, and usage is dismal.

How? Find the intranet server, get to a command prompt, and type >rm –rf *. (That’s a server admin joke.) Alternatively, unplug it. Seriously, it’s not worth trying to fix; you’ve got to start over.

Memex 1.1 » Blog Archive » The banal network

When restaurant chains like this take it for granted that many of their (mainly working-class) clientele have a Facebook account, then you know that something’s happened.

I’m reminded of an observation that Andy Grove, then the CEO of Intel, made in 1999. “In five years’ time”, he said, “companies that aren’t Internet companies won’t be companies at all”. He was widely ridiculed for this prediction…

As it happens, he was a bit optimistic about the time it would take. But this Toby Carvery ad shows how perceptive he was.

Cluetrain Manifesto 10th Anniversary Edition: Still the end of business as usual? Boing Boing

The original, core material stands up remarkably well. Depressingly, the best-weathered stuff is that which describes all the ways that big companies get the net wrong. They’re still making the same mistakes. Some of the more optimistic material dated a little faster. There’s a lesson in there: it’s easier to predict stupidity than cleverness.

Will the citizen model lose out to super-commissioning? The Guardian

Are we going to be consumers of “gifted” public services, designed and provided by other people, elsewhere, or are we citizens who not only shape our own public services but also contribute to the services of family, friends and neighbours?

Welcome to 2010 – But not the future?

In the last 5 years councils have spent large sums on centralising customer contact. This has partly been for “efficiency” and partly to offer a consistent and uniform customer face. Social media threatens to tear that apart. Customers are going to demand fast, 24/7 access to the people delivering their services, without a slick and regimented call centre in the way.

Legal and PR are going to hate it. Many council workers will fear it. Some will adopt it strongly and get into difficulties for saying too much, too soon or in the wrong way. It’s only a matter of time before a stressed-out council worker tells someone to “p**s off” via Twitter. The organisation needs to prepare itself for those things and recognise that social media is a culture, not a technology.
[extract from comment by Tim Hobbs]

Public services – the stakes are high | Matthew Taylor’s blog

Taken overall, these trends see the core role of the state move from service provider to decision maker and strategic enabler. It will not be a smooth process of change ; there will be many pitfalls and dilemmas on the way. A key factor will be the degree of decentralisation. If local leaders are able to experiment then the welfare system as a whole can learn fast about what works (and what doesn’t).

If we get this right we will see wave upon wave of public sector innovation resulting in a smaller but more effective and strategic state alongside a deeper public commitment to collective decision making and social responsibility. If we get it wrong – if, for example, budget reductions are too extreme and too indiscriminate or if Whitehall reacts to tough choices and public concern by centralising control – then we are in for a decade of retrenchment, resentment and a hollowing out of the public sphere.

It’s been a while since I linked to one of Jessica Hagy’s Indexed cards, which neatly capture connections contrasts and overlaps.  This one sets a question for service designers, and perhaps especially public service designers.   Do brilliant ideas have to have polarised responses, or can they be brilliant and inclusive?

If we can do brilliant and unitary, that would be great – and the thought parallels the change in philosophy in web design in recent years away from having an ‘accessible’ site in parallel with the proper site (often more limited and less up to date) and towards designing sites simply to be accessible in the first place.

But there are few – if any – areas where with meaningful choices, everybody chooses the same.  That’s why almost all restaurants offer a choice of food, and even the few which don’t operate in a world with a choice of restaurants.  It’s why, to bring this a little closer to home, the Met Office and the BBC present the weather very differently, though the forecasts and the data used to present them are the same.

In government, though, there is a tendency to uniformity.  We like our single portal approach, even if there are three of them.  And if the eggs are many and the baskets are few, experimentation and innovation are unattractively high risk (honourable exceptions notwithstanding).  That’s not good.  But worse still, this is happening in a world where failure is still not readily tolerated, let alone embraced.  I was talking yersterday to a government CIO who said that one of the key differences between his public and private sector experiences was that in the private sector projects were stopped much more rapidly and much more decisvely once it was apparent that they were not delivering, a thought echoed by Ian Watmore in his valedictory PAC hearing:

An innovative organisation tries a lot of things and sometimes things do not work. I think one of the valid criticisms in the past has been that when things have not worked government has carried on trying to make them work well beyond the point at which they should have been stopped.We are getting better at doing that. (Q4)

But even if we get past that problem, we are still in a world of single solutions, which bring with them overwhelming pressure to design for everybody, and so for nobody.  Open data may be one effective route for applied subversion, but valuable and important though that is, it doesn’t address the question of whether government can create passionate users, it circumvents it.  Can monocultural innovation generate passionate responses?  And if it can’t, or can only do so fortuitously and rarely, how do we get to the top right of the index card?