Mass compromise not mass personalisation

Posted by

3

Politics is about collective decision making.  It’s hard not just because people disagree about the answers to particular questions, but even more so because they disagree about how those questions relate to one another.  The answer you get depends on the question you ask, and politics is about trying to find agreement on the questions as much as it as about trying to find answers to the questions agreed on. It’s why ‘taking the politics out’ of a question’ is never possible (though taking a question out of one political process and putting it into another is entirely possible and frequently done, often with the assertion that the second process is not political)

I had a go at putting that into words a couple of years ago, starting with the question of the shape of the humps in my road, and going all the way through to world peace (not quite, but nearly).  I had another go yesterday, this time starting with the apparently more straightforward question of how to open a door. Neither, I fear, quite gets to the heart of why decision making in political environments can be more than a bit tricky.  Then, thanks to a couple of fortuitous tweets, I came across this presentation by Anthony Zacharzewski of the Democratic Society, which with great economy includes at slide 20 the thought that:

Representative democracy is about mass compromise, not mass personalisation

That’s a really powerful idea.  How we do we best compromise with a nation full of mainly strangers?  With a city, a village, a street – or a world? Politics is the art of finding ways to answer that question.

It’s well worth looking through the whole presentation – there are a lot of slides, but they are all very pithy, and some real gems scattered among them (including a superbly tasteless image of the ineffectiveness of flogging a dead horse). Whether or not you end up being persuaded by their solution, the analysis of the problem is beautifully done.

How to open a door

Posted by

1

Policy development is rarely simple even, or perhaps especially, when the question looks ludicrously simple.

There is a door between the lifts and the working areas of the building I work in.* The door sits at the intersection of three policies, and as a result, cannot satisfy all of them. Of the three, the one it comes closest to satisfying is the one which has least day to day applicability (though it is the one with greatest political salience).

Policy 1: Security Access should be controlled and nobody should be able to move into the working areas unless they have a security pass.

Policy 2: Accessibility Everybody, including wheelchair users, should have full access

Policy 3: Green Unnecessary power consumption should be eliminated

The current solution involves:

  • pass controlled doors…
  • … which are opened by electric motors…
  • … and open wide enough for long enough to allow wheelchair users to pass comfortably.

This theoretically meets the security policy, but fails in practice because for most of the day it is too easy to follow somebody in: passholders can’t close the door manually and won’t wait for as long as the automatic closure takes – even if there were a culture of challenging people, which there isn’t.

It does though make a pretty good job of delivering the accessibility policy: no manual strength is needed, and (as far as I can tell) the door itself is not an obstacle. But having power-operated doors used by people who are overwhelmingly able to open doors themselves then fails miserably to minimise electricity consumption.

For the past few months there has been a de facto alternative approach in effect, while the doors were being upgraded (or perhaps downgraded, depending on how you look at it):

  • unlocked doors
  • on spring closures
  • which open wide enough for wheelchair users, but are somewhere between slightly awkward and quite impossible for some people to operate.

That failed completely to meet the security policy – but then it wasn’t really being met anyway. It supports the green policy, albeit in a small scale way, but fails on accessibility – though how serious that failure is in practice is hard for me to judge.

Which of those two situations is better?

I have no idea.

I know which one I prefer: the second makes my life marginally more straightforward, and saves me several entire seconds every time I go through the door. It has the more subtle advantage of not irritating me with the security theatre of a locked door which in practice doesn’t need a key to get through. And I suspect that that would be the popular choice. But that doesn’t make it inherently the right choice. The accessibility policy clearly should carry some weight. But exactly how much weight should it carry against the green policy? Enhanced security is a good thing not a bad thing, but what was the security problem in the first place, and exactly how much extra security are we buying in exchange for how much extra inconvenience? And if those are both too small or too difficult to measure, which one should take priority and why? And so it could go on.

It tends not to with doors. Somebody makes a not very soundly based decision, the rest of us may mutter but live with it, and the world moves on. But many things are both more complicated and more important than that. If there is no inherently right answer to the question of how a door should open, how much less so how government policies should be designed and delivered?

That’s not an argument for giving up in despair. Quite the contrary, it’s an argument that complexity is unavoidable and needs to be managed. Equally, though, it’s not an argument that decisions of such weight and complexity can be taken only by high-powered mandarins. Quite the contrary again, it’s an argument that where different perspectives exist, they are best artiuculated and resolved by those who hold them. User centred design can start with the very basic.

So what’s the point? Well at one level, no more than that I am a very midly irritated door user (quick: how many mildly irritated service users do you have who will never say anything but whom you could make happier?). But the real point is that complex choices are, well, complicated. What turns out to be the right answer depends heavily on what was decided to be the right question. Or, to quote myself in a slightly different context:

Politics is essentially about finding ways of making complicated and inter-dependent decisions across a wide range of interests. Doing that is inherently hard (which is one reason why it’s so easy to criticise politicans). Doing politics differently may be very attractive, but that doesn’t mean that what is being done is any less political.

*The picture is not of the actual door we are talking about here. You can tell because it doesn’t look as though it complies with Policy 2.

The Guardian pwned my blog

Posted by

2

Update:  Since posting this this morning, I have had two people contact me from the Guardian – one in a comment to this post and one by email.  As a result, I am reassured that what I experienced was a bug they are keen to fix rather than indifference to the context in which Guardian material might find itself.  The email response suggested that the most recent version of the plugin – 0.3 – already fixed the problem.  I am not sure that’s quite right, so continue to advise extreme caution – but the intention is clearly there to make the plugin work as I argued it should.

I am removing the Guardian wordpress plugin which I wrote about a couple of days ago. It has a couple of major flaws, and I would discourage anyone from using it until they are fixed.

The Guardian is perfectly entitled to manage the presentation of its own material. The terms and conditions for the use of its data leave no scope for doubt of their absolutely fixed intention of keeping that control (even if  the language of those terms and conditions feels slightly at odds with the concept of an open platform).  Nowhere in those extensive conditions though does it state that the Guardian claims the right to extend that control to the host blog.  But that is what the plugin does.

As I noted before, embedding a Guardian article brings with it a title for the blog post of which the article forms a part – but only a part – tags and an excerpt.  None of those were what I wanted for the post I wanted to write, so I deleted them all.  Not ideal from my point of view, but it was, I presumed, an attempt to be helpful.  Having set them to what I wanted them to be, I now discover that Guardian plugin has taken it upon itself to change them all back again. I don’t find that acceptable.

It gets worse.  My next act was to deactivate the plugin.  That caused it to remove the Guardian article – which is fair enough. It’s not hard to identify the text which belongs to the Guardian.  It begins:

<!– GUARDIAN WATERMARK –>

and ends:

<!– END GUARDIAN WATERMARK –>

It could hardly be much clearer – but the plugin takes no notice of that, and instead completely deletes the entire post, including all that I had written.

It’s not that the Guardian doesn’t expect bloggers to put their own context and commentary round articles: their own documentation makes clear that that is exactly what they expect.  And the use case of doing nothing more than republishing articles strikes me as an odd and unlikely one. But regardless of that, the entire text is swept away.

I hope there is nothing more here than carelessness either in design or in testing, but I am going back to the old fashioned way of quoting and linking, following the advice in one of the comments on the Guardian page about the plugin:

I really fail to see the point of this plug-in. If I want to post excerpts from Grauniad articles on my wordpress blog, I copy and paste. I can change anything I like; Idon’t need an effing key; I don’t have to put up with any ‘…ads and performance tracking…’; and I decide what gets deleted, not you…

The future, by the book

Posted by

0

There was an interesting article by Marcus du Sautoy in the Guardian on Saturday about the future of the book.

That’s a perfectly straightforward statement – or might have been had it been written a few years ago.  But now ‘article’, ‘in’ and ‘on Saturday’ are all a bit problematic.

On the printed page, it remains an article. It is about how the written word is no longer confined by the limitations of a printed page – not just in terms of interactivity, but branching narratives, the story which may never be experienced by two people in quite the same way. More intriguingly, du Sautoy makes clear that he is most interested in non-fiction (which since he is is a mathematician is hardly surprising):

Non-fiction is different again. What is a footnote, after all, but an attempt to break out of the linear structure of a book? How reference books could change can now begin to be imagined, but I’m particularly interested in apps for non-fiction that are not designed to break up a narrative in a radical way, but rather to augment a storyline – for me, non-fiction works best when it tries to emulate the narrative that drives a reader to the end of a novel.

But this sometime article is itself no longer confined to the printed page. It is, of course, on the Guardian’s website (where it already attracting vigorously critical comments). And as it happens, it’s here too as an irresistible meta-recursive first use of the Guardian’s new wordpress plugin. The text below the line comes from the Guardian, but it’s not in any meaningful sense ‘in’ the Guardian any more and still less is it ‘on Saturday’.

Du Sautoy’s critics are right to observe that the hyping of multimedia has been going on at least since the excitement of the cd-rom – and if that were all this was about, it wouldn’t be about much. I am old enough and old fashioned enough to think that reading a book will carry on being much like reading a book for some time to come.  But not all books and, more pertinently, not other things which still live in linear forms or in the remnants of those forms. We are beginning to see self-navigating forms, a version of techniques used in market research for many years, but self-contextualising help and cross-medium support are still in the near future, as they have been for quite a while now. And just as the piece below can be ‘from’ the Guardian without needing to be ‘in’ the Guardian, so the clear implication of the principles of data transparency is that the same will be true for many services from the government.

[The Guardian article has been removed for reasons explained here, though it is of course still on their website]

Small pieces, joined not quite loosely enough

Posted by

1

Here’s a small cautionary tale of unintended consequences. It explains why the particularly eagle eyed will have seen a post on the blog this morning which quickly disappeared – though not quite quickly enough to stop it propagating round the web.

Over the weekend, I installed the new Guardian wordpress plugin, more out of curiosity than because I thought I had much use for it. But then I came across an article about repurposing and representing text.  The temptation to repurpose and represent it was irresistible, so I wrote a couple of introductory paragraphs and thought no more of it. Then on the bus to work this morning, I remembered that I hadn’t actually posted it, and used my phone to change its status.  So far, so good.

Then I checked on the published version of the post. There it was, on the mobile version of the site (which uses the WPtouch theme) – but although the title was right, the words were not mine – in fact I did not recognise them at all.  They referred to the Guardian article, but did not come from it. I couldn’t work out what had happened and my bus stop was approaching, so I unpublished the post and went to work. But although the post had been live for no more than a minute or two, that was time enough for the RSS feed to have been picked up by the Google Reader account which drives Public Sector Blogs, which generates a tweet which tells the world (or that rather small corner of it which takes an interest in such things).

The strange words turn out not to be quite so mysterious after all.  The version of the article on the Guardian website has an introductory sentence which does not appear in the body text – the words above the byline in the screenshot.  It turns out that the Guardian plugin uses that text to populate the ‘Excerpt’ field – and since that field is one I never use and is collapsed in my normal view of the wordpress dashboard, I had no idea it was there.  The WPtouch plugin uses that short excerpt to populate the home page view of the blog on a small mobile screen.  All perfectly sensible, no harm done, a very minor storm in a very small tea cup.

But there is – I think – something interesting which comes from all of this.  It is that my understanding of what the Guardian is trying to do with its plugin is radically different from their understanding.

From the point of view of the Guardian, I assume, they are seeing a new way of syndicating their articles.  For them, perhaps, the article and thus its metadata are what really matters.  It makes perfect sense to force extract text, tags and a title on to the blog post in which their article is embedded, because the post is essentially the article.  And it makes sense not because they are bullies, but because they are trying to be as helpful as they possibly can be.

From my point of view, I know, I am seeing a new way of illustrating my blog posts.  For me, it is my blog post which really matters – not because of any intrinsic superiority, but because if all I wanted to do was point to articles on the Guardian’s website, pointing to them is all I would do.  So the chances of the preamble to the article being the most appropriate excerpt for the post as a whole are vanishingly small, and the idea that the Guardian has the right to pre-empt my chosen title suggests that they see themselves as rather more important than I do.

The Guardian also requires their article to appear in full, with links, copyright notice, tracking codes and adverts left intact and uninterrupted – in effect to require the blog owner to cede control over the space in which their article is reproduced. I don’t have a problem with that requirement, and for anyone who does, the simple solution is of course to link to articles rather than reproducing them.

But I would like to see the same respect and lack of interference with my content from them as they expect from me.  It’s early days, the version number of the plugin has climbed from 0.1 to 0.3 over the last 48 hours, there is plenty of opportunity – and I don’t doubt plenty of willingness – to tweak and improve.

All of this in the context of being strongly sympathetic to the Guardian Open Platform, partly because it is fascinating watching a newspaper trying to reinvent itself in real time, but even more because, as I wrote last month, the approaches the Guardian is pioneering have much wider implications, not least for public service providers.  Some of these same issues about the syndication of content interests of the different parties involved were behind some of the discussion today at NESTA’s digital disrupters event, for example.

Normal service will now be resumed, with the post which caused all the trouble this morning appearing shortly after this one.

There’s still some way to go

Posted by

0

It is important to note that we will only accept printed forms for registration, please do not return these forms electronically as they will not be processed. The electronic versions are for your convenience and will need to be printed before return.

From an email received today. Not, as it happens, about a government service.

Interesting elsewhere – 1 July 2010

Posted by

0

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • Schneier on Security: Data at Rest vs. Data in Motion In a way, encryption doesn’t reduce the number of secrets that must be stored securely; it just makes them much smaller.
  • “Send us your comments” says new Transparency Board Public data policy and practice will be clearly driven by the public and businesses who want and use the data, including what data is released when and in what form;
    Public data will be published in reusable, machine-readable form;
    Public data will be released under the same open licence which enables free reuse, including commercial reuse;
    Public data will be available and easy to find through a single easy to use online access point
    Public data will be published using open standards and following the recommendations of the W3C;
    Public data underlying the Government’s own websites will be published in reusable form for others to use;
    Public data will be timely and fine grained;
    Release data quickly, and then republish it in linked data form;
    Public data will be freely available to use in any lawful way;
    Public bodies should actively encourage the re-use of their public data; and
    Public bodies should maintain and publish inventories of their data holdings.
  • Could drastic cuts make the public sector more creative? | Society | The Guardian Perhaps cuts will spark a new era of innovation. But the sheer complexity of simultaneously cutting and transforming services on this scale is bewildering. You are not just changing practically overnight the way you do business (on a shrinking budget), but dealing with a recruitment freeze, a pay cap, demoralised (but highly unionised) workers, widespread public anger and huge political uncertainty. In this context, public servants are hardly likely to feel like helping the government identify ways of saving money. And as the commentator and blogger Steven Toft/Flipchart Rick has pointed out, there are not many public managers out there with experience of managing in reverse gear. Is this scale of cutting possible? Yes. Is it possible to do equitably and sustainably? Let’s just say it’s the biggest public management challenge since the creation of the welfare state and the NHS. Except harder.
  • Data is Not Binary Open data isn’t just about re-broadcasting data, but combining it, re-using it and building upon it. It’s about creating new uses, creating new markets and building credibility into the data as it flows.
  • A little social reportage from the LGComms conference « Curiouscatherine’s Blog And this last point is where I end – because my big surprise from the conference was the lack of digital.  At the risk of repeating myself – I just don’t see how the public sector can continue to increase its communications and engagement without making better use of digital and changing the balance in their channel mix between offline and online.

Interesting elsewhere – 23 June 2010

Posted by

0

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

  • Innovation: Who Else Is Doing It? Everyone applauds innovation. At least, they love it in retrospect, after it has worked. Before that, it’s just somebody’s wild idea that competes with every other wild idea for resources and support. What sounds great in the abstract seems risky when translated to a specific unproven idea. For that reason, executives who tell me that they want more innovation sometimes ask, as their first question, “Who else is doing it?” Or they say, “We want more innovation; we just don’t want to be the first.”I hate to point out the irony to them. Guys, innovation means maybe no one else is doing it. You might have to be the first. And that might be a good thing.
  • Maureen Johnson Books » Blog Archive » MANIFESTO Some people don’t get it. They don’t get that the internet is a conversation. They think the message only goes one way—out. Things must be shouted. Things must be thrust in your face. Things must be sold.
  • Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director ” Blog Archive ” Henry V & The Internet I think the key phrase there is ”Ubiquitous Literacy”. The Internet can do this, too. The simple fact of making data available changes its political significance.Just putting information into a language that people understand and so have access to, doubly changes its political significance. It’s what we call data visualisation.
    But here’s the important bit, for a journalist. Letters put that information, written in a widely comprehensible language, into a narrative. Or rather a whole series of plural narratives. This is crucial. As Harriss explains, the 15th century was a multi-platform, multi-source media environment: “passed round, read out, nailed on doors, retained in private collections, or copied into private journals and officials registers”. Those clerks were creators and curators of the information, a medieval precursor of networked journalists.
    Instead of an iPad they had quills and vellum. When paper came that was a bit like moving on to SuperFast broadband.
  • Peeling the apple: the issue with government cutbacks : Tangential Ramblings As the apple gets smaller and tighter over the next few years, there will be less and less room or appetite for innovation.  And people will not be able to stray from what they are doing to try to figure out how they might do it better.  Instead, departments will continue to do what they currently do, only not as well.
    There are people around who can change the status quo here, both within and outside the civil service.  I know a bunch of them and, given the licence, they have both the vision and passion to radically change the way in which the government operates.  But they won’t be given that licence.
    Instead, the apple will continue to be peeled, and what remains will start to turn brown and decay.  I hope I’m wrong.  But given what I’ve seen thus far, it’s looking more and more likely.
  • Why we need to radically join-up public services more than ever The costs of this diversity are difficult to estimate. It seems undeniable that the luxuriant proliferation of public service delivery chains entails extra costs for citizens in coping with complexity, as research on citizen redress has clearly demonstrated. Compare the UK with a country like Denmark, where local governments regularly deliver three quarters of all public services by expenditure to their citizens, including social security on behalf of the central government. It seems clear that by this comparison we are currently buying a set of ‘luxury goods’ in terms of the ramifying complexity of our arrangements for service provision.