Public Strategist

Clay Shirky has written a characteristically sharp essay on the future of newspapers, the future of journalism, and how those two things may have nothing to do with each other.  He draws an extended parallel with the disruption caused by the invention of the printing press, making the point that we are simply at too early a stage in the disruptive impact of the ubiquitous internet to know what to expect.

Newspapers in the USA seem in many ways to be more fragile beasts than ours, so the problem looks more immediate and more acute there than here, but the basic issue remains the same:  business models based on printing and distribution being difficult and expensive become unsustainable in a world in which printing is redundant and distribution essentially free.  Those models have many benefits, including positive externalities for those who never buy a newspaper:  the existence of of professional journalism, wilder excesses notwithstanding, is a good thing not a bad one.  It's horribly tempting to slide from that into asking how newspapers can be saved for the greater good.  Shirky's answer is devastatingly simple:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

And so what of government?  If newspapers first aggregate information and then distribute it, and their problems stem from losing control of that process, there's an interesting warning for governments, which are also in the aggregation and distribution business.  To take just one very narrow example, when Hansard and command papers were scarce and expensive, being part of the process was a specialist activity, with the popular views aggregated and expressed by politicians.  Now all of that is not just immediately available, but is already being reconfigured to be more useful and accessible to more people, and that reconfiguration is not under the control of the gatekeepers of the old system.

As long as there is a need for collective decisions, there is a need for effective political processes.  And as long as the hard part of those decisions is very often about trade offs and relative priorities, there is an inherent complexity of those processes.  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 politicians). But the fact that we still need this to be done doesn't in itself guarantee that the existing processes will continue to work to do it, just as the fact that there is great value in journalism does nothing to guarantee a future for newspapers.

One of the consequences of the invention of printing was, of course, the beginnings of the democratisation of reading, the reverberations of which are still being felt.  One of the consequences of the invention of universal self-publication is the democratisation of writing, the reverberations of which are only just beginning to be felt at all.  That is not just one of the big challenges to the conventional model of journalism, but is also a big challenge to the conventional model of politics, which also assumes a sharp divide between producers and consumers.  But as Shirky points out, there was no knowing in advance – or even at the time – how printing would change things:  those living through it did not have our advantage of five hundred years of perspective.  So what was it like to live through the early part of that revolution?

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word.

It is a bit too easy to feel like fair sport, but as an example of the old mindset struggling uncomprehendingly with the new, take a recent column in the Guardian by Marcel Berlins – an ill-informed philippic about the dangers of allowing ill-informed people to address the nation, calmly oblivious to the irony of a columnist in a national newspaper criticising the internet for not having given a voice to everyone.  Ingrid Koehler has done a splendid demolition job (and has since drawn attention to an even more splendid recasting of Berlins' late Victorian ancestor railing against the introduction of the telephone).

The document which prompted Berlins' piece, though he did not trouble to name it, is Public services on your side, published last week.  Chapter 7 (or rather 7.0, in a fit of failed trendiness) includes a commitment in principle to accept the approach of the Power of Information taskforce report.  Despite its being an apparently casual reference on page 67, that's a hugely significant step:  it's an acknowledgment that the revolution is upon us.

By the time I got to Rewired State, the hard work was over – a hundred hacker-days of effort concentrated into a few short hours.  That resulted in 29 presentations, which is too many to keep track of when they are whizzing by at two minutes apiece.  None was a dud, though not all had quite managed working code, and a few more found it impossible to get their laptops to talk to the Guardian’s projectors (one of those irritating little problems which might reasonably be supposed to have been solved years ago, but which is still tripping people up).  But to help keep track, many of the projects are now showing up here, with videos of all the presentations also available -though the sound is a bit variable.

Some of the ideas which particularly stuck in my head were:

• Parlour Tag – producing a tag cloud from MPs’ written questions to show what on their minds and what’s interesting them over time.  Overnight that has gone live as What’s on Their Minds (site, video)
• Companies Open House – pulling basic data on companies from the CH database, giving companies permanent URLs (which CH doesn’t), which apart from being useful in its own right also allows for matching with other sources  (site, video)
• Jobcentre ProPlus – using post codes as the initial way in to the Jobcentre Plus job vacancy database, then displaying just enough about each job to make it easier to tell what they are really about.  More importantly, it sets the data free of the site:  the official version lets you save a search and rerun it on the site when you come back; this version will send you email alerts.  And because there is an API behind it, it also creates the basis for some other fun stuff too – as can be seen on the video. (site, video)
• something which started as Scottish neighbourhood statistics, and then got interesting:  pulling data into an online spreadsheet where every cell has its own address and is therefore individually manipulable, which holds the promise that lesser geeks and even non-geeks can get to play this game too. (video)

Biggest surprise of the day was that sentencing data is more readily available online for 1707 than for 2007 (video).  Best idea which solves a problem which has been irritating me for years:  hacking the DNS so that site.gov.uk actually gets you somewhere, instead of failing gracelessly if you don’t add the www (video).   That’s not a problem limited to government (and to be fair, it’s not quite as prevalent as it used to be) but there are still some very large tax raising departments which fail this simple test.  I would be ready keep those guys in beer for a month if they could also deal with the random hyphen problem:  hm-treasury works, but hmtreasury is not to be found.

Great to have been one of the “govvy people” allowed in to see the show – it was deeply thought provoking at a number of different levels.  I can’t afford to be as cheerfully dismissive of the government (which anyway simply does not exist as a singular noun) as many of the creative minds at the event, but those of us who are in government certainly do need to respond to the challenge.

Holding a mirror up to the inadequacies of government is no bad thing, but there is a risk of marooning this kind of creativity at the level of the user interface.  As one participant cogently argued, doing mashups with Google maps is the easy bit:  the harder bit is working with the fact that the underlying data is separated and combined, and that the rules which then have to run against that data are complicated and inconsistent, have to sit in robust high volume systems and be able to turn on a sixpence.  I wrote a piece just over a year ago, arguing the need to understand the differences between these two domains, concluding that:

We need to apply two different sets of disciplines (in both senses), in two separate domains:

• An approach to the customer experience – both offline and online elements – which is flexible and responsive and which maximises its exposure to customer intelligence in order to do that
• An approach to the supporting processes which is robust, consistent and correctly applies the full set of rules

The collective culture and skills of government are much more geared to the second than the first – and the risk is not just that we don’t do the first as well, but also that we can all too easily fail to spot the need to do it all.  The first is where there is the greatest need for change, flexibility and responsiveness – and where tools and approaches are available to deliver that responsiveness.  The second requires the hard grind of implementing big robust systems which do the transactional heavy lifting as invisibly as possible.

But it’s terribly easy to fall into the trap of being beleaguered.  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.

Two final comment from yesterday which are rattling around in my mind (both paraphrased from memory):

• we have to change government from the outside, because changing it from the inside doesn’t work
• these projects show the power of starting from the technology rather than the customer

I don’t agree with either of them.  But I will be thinking hard about both of them.

Poster by memespring, licensed under creative commons
Picture by psd, licensed under creative commons

Ed Felten spells out the difference between outreach and transparency:

Outreach means government telling us what it wants us to hear; transparency means giving us the information that we, the citizens, want to get. An ideal government provides both outreach and transparency. Outreach lets officials share their knowledge about what is happening, and it lets them argue for particular policy choices — both of which are good. Transparency keeps government honest and responsive by helping us know what government is doing.

Outreach, by its nature, must be directed by government. But transparency, which aims to offer citizens the information they want, is best embodied by vigorous activity outside of government, enabled by government providing free and open access to data. As we argued in our Invisible Hand paper, many things are inherently more difficult to do inside of government, so the key role of government is to enable a marketplace of ideas in the private sector, rather than doing the whole job.

And by pleasing coincidence on this side of the Atlantic, Rewired State tomorrow will be be building a bit more practical transparency:

We expect the output of the day to expose better processes, application and ways of working for better use of public data as well as to expose government officials to the concept of allowing great creative minds to play with the data to provide interesting and creative  solutions.

I have the fun of going along at the end after all the hard work has been done to see what they have come up with. Among the many reasons why that should be interesting, there is the sheer range of data to play with.  That’s not of course to say that everything is rosy – far from it.  But it’s an interestingly different tone and approach from the way things are developing in the States:

Congress has apparently listened to the public’s complaints about lack of convenient access to government data.  The new Omnibus Appropriations Bill includes a section, introduced by Rep. Mike Honda (D-California), that would mark the first tangible move toward making federal legislative data available to the public in bulk, so third parties can mash it up and redistribute it in innovative and accessible ways. 

“In our web 2.0 world, we can empower the public by providing them with raw data that they can remix and reuse in new and innovative ways,” says Honda, who is vice chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch. “With these tools, the public can collaborate on projects that can help legislators to create better policies to address the pressing challenges facing our nation.”

In the meantime, Carl Malamud has launched a public campaign to become head of the US Government Printing Office, with a manifesto based on transparency and resuse.  That’s not quite the way anybody is managing their application to become Director of Digital Engagement – but the agenda is the same, even if the politics is different.

From Robin Goad of Hitwise:

Partly as a result of the economic downturn, and partly because online services have improved, UK Internet traffic to Government websites increased by 13.3% between February 2008 and February 2009. I would expect this trend to continue during 2009, but in the meantime here is a list of the top 10 UK central government websites during 2008.

The table itself isn’t terribly interesting – it hasn’t changed very much since the dawn of time, though with Directgov perhaps embedding its long-coveted spot in second place.  The growth is another matter.  It would be really interesting to be able to distinguish:

• growth from more people doing more stuff online
• growth from more people thinking that doing stuff online is a good way of doing government things
• growth from more people turning to government because there’s a recession on.

As one way of approaching the question, Directgov scores for making its traffic data very easy to find, but then loses points for showing only three months of it and for not having updated the page since November last year.  The numbers there curiously show a fall of 8% in the number of visits between September and November, which appears to contradict both the idea that the downturn is driving traffic to government and Hitwise numbers reporting 21.4% growth in Directgov traffic in the twelve months to January.  January itself may be part of the explanation – there is always a surge as temporary Christmas work comes to an end – an effect showing strongly in the graph for DWP traffic in the same Hitwise post.

But it would still be nice to know whether people’s expectations about the availability of government services online or about their relative attraction compared with getting the same things done through other channels are changing.

The final version of the Power of Information Taskforce report is out, with recommendations in six main areas:

• enhancing Digital Britons’ online experience by providing expert help from the public sector online where people seek it;
• creating a capability for the UK public sector to work with both internal and external innovators;
• improving the way government consults with the public;
• freeing up the UK’s mapping and address data for use in new services;
• ensuring that public sector information is made as simple as possible for people to find and use;
• building capacity in the UK public sector to take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital technologies.

No chance to read it yet, let alone compare it with the original draft (which is still available with all the comments on it), so I am still at the level of first impressions – which of course matter a lot, not least for all those who will never read the whole thing.  On the substance, it looks first rate:  it has a clear and coherent set of recommendations, each of which is cogently and succinctly argued.

The one apparent weakness is the executive summary.  It harks back to a distant time when a summary was exactly that, with none of this 'executive' nonsense tagged on the front:  if you read it, you have a sense of what is in the report.  But it isn't written as a hook to pull in somebody who doesn't already know why they should be interested.  There's an argument for not scaring the horses too much:  the full implementation of all the taskforce recommendations would add up to a radical change in the way government does business.  But the recommendations won't get implemented without communicating a sense of excitement and a sense of why these changes are unavoidably the right things to be doing.

Maybe that needs to be a separate and slightly different document – but I am pretty sure that it is a necessary part of the marketing drive which is needed to make all this work.   As I observed on the draft in a different context, there's a need to get the reading right as well as the writing.

The publication of the advert for the new Director of Digital Engagement has prompted an outburst of commentary, with two of the most interesting contributions both coming from Steph Gray, who is systematically crowdsourcing the real requirements of the job.  And of course that process works both ways:  it makes visible what the crowd thinks about the job, but that then makes visible something about the crowd as well.

Steph’s first contribution looks at what needs to be done, eliciting 21 propositions completing the sentence “I would like the Director of Digital Engagement to…”.  Anybody is free to add to the list and to vote on their own and others’ ideas.  The voting is showing an interesting pattern, with three clear groups:  one idea which has led the voting from the outset, a second group of six ideas with consistent strong support, and a long tail of fourteen ideas with gently declining scores (the lowest score is one vote, meaning that not even the person suggesting it thought it was that good).

The leading idea is Promote the procurement of small, creative suppliers,  addressing the very specific – and very real – problem of how to do quick implementations in a world of cumbersome contracts with large IT providers which were never designed for small guerrilla projects on the cutting edge.  The first idea attempts to solve the problem by changing the rules on procurement; interestingly, the second-ranked idea – Set up an online deliberation platform for government – is aimed at a variant of the same problem through the provision of a platform which means it only needs to be solved once rather than many times.

The second tier of ideas aren’t quite as easily lumped together, and it would be completely unfair to generalise, but I am going to anyway.  Several of them are broadly (very broadly) about how to get the tools into use and get useful things done with them – promoting experimentation, making sure that civil servants are blocked from social media, and more generally and more succinctly, implementing the POIT recommendations.

This is all good – and necessary – stuff, but it’s all a bit technocratic.  I know the frustration of  cumbersome supplier arrangements designed for a different purposes in what feels like a different era – but is it really the single most important barrier we face?  We know there are some great people doing fantastic work but who feel weighed downby the environment in which they have to operate, and there is no question that doing something about that would be very well worth doing.  But doing all of them will do relatively little to ensure that “the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government”.  Owen Barder puts it pretty starkly:

Here is a job I might have applied for if I were in London… But I’m quite glad not to be eligible…

In plain English, the post will have no staff, no budget, no power, and yet Ministers expect you to see to it that within two years the UK Government will make world class use of digital engagement.

Good luck to whoever gets this job!

That neatly brings us to Steph’s second contribution to the debate, focusing this time on the sort of person needed to do digital engagement, rather than on what they should do.  It’s not specifically focused on the Director post – though presumably the implication is that that person should embody elements of all the types Steph identifies:

• Campaign strategist
• Community manager
• Social media developer
• Digital mentor
• Social reporter

A team capable of filling all those roles and the different mixes of skills behind them would be a very powerful one.  It’s notable – and no doubt part of the point being made – that only one of them is a techy role in any normal sense, reinforcing the idea that it’s the engagement which is at the centre of digital engagement.  But there is, I think, something critical missing, at least for organisations where many senior decision makers are somewhere between unfamiliar and uncomfortable with all of thus – which I suspect covers most of the UK public sector.

There are some important lessons from the US presidential transition here.  Mark O’Neill and Paul Canning both report on Thomas Gensemer’s recent visit to the UK, with Paul picking out what I think is the key line:  “None of this is a technology challenge; it’s an organisational challenge, being willing to communicate with people”.  To take that one step further, David Robinson has spotted that the transition allows a before and after comparison:

Barack Obama’s web team is certainly one of the best that has ever been assembled. His staff did a fantastic job on the campaign site, and produced an also excellent, if slightly less dynamic, transition site at Change.gov. On its way to the White House, however, a team comprised of many of the same people seemed to lose its mojo. The complaints about the new Whitehouse.gov site—slow to be updated, lacking in interactivity—are familiar to observers of other .gov sites throughout the government.

What happened? It’s not plausible to suppose that Obama’s staffers have somehow gotten worse as they have moved from campaign to transition to governance. Instead, they have faced an increasingly stringent and burdensome array of regulations as they have become progressively more official. The transition was a sort of intermediate phase in this respect, and the new team now faces the Presidential Records Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and a number of other pre-Internet statutory obligations. This experience teaches that the limitations of the federal web reflect the thicket of rules to which such sites are subject—not the hardworking people who labor under those rules.

Putting all that together, it feels to me that the missing component is a broader sense of change management:  how do government departments (and other public sector organisations) become places where radical, bottom up approaches t0 problem solving flourish?  One approach is to say that that is itself a bottom up process – “the top can’t stay top for the bottom is shifting” as Brecht put it in a rather different context.  That may well be right – but I am not sure that it is going to be right enough quickly enough for the Director of Digital Engagement to meet her targets.  The alternative approach is to put more emphasis on internal change, not primarily as a goal in its own right, but as a way of accelerating the process.  And ‘alternative’ is probably not the right word:  it’s more like a catalyst, a way of accelerating the reaction which we really care about.  Emma Mulqueeny puts that neatly

If you could have two days of a great, proven geek and combine this with three days of someone who knows how government works now, with the empathy to nurture that which has been created or started so far in scattered spaces and the foresight to recognise and develop the skilled civil servants already doing this stuff (no I am not blowing my own trumpet, am not a civil servant); that would be a good thing

So what is the crowd telling us about itself?  A little bit of evidence mixed with a healthy dose of interpretation points me to three indicators of where we have got to:

• For very good reasons, a lot of the change we have seen so far is at the edges – it’s easier, safer, more productive and considerably cheaper to be subversive there than at the core of delivery.  That can lead to more widespread and deeper change – indeed, in the long run it will lead to more widespread and deeper change – but it’s a hard and slow way of doing it.  In the early stages, it’s probably also the only way of doing it.  What we are now seeing is the beginning of the transition to the next stage of change,  a micro-instance of the innovator’s dilemma together with the frustration of slow change.
• Much of the public sector social media conversation is about social media rather than using social media (with the valuable and valid exception of social media bootstrapping – using the practice of social media to enhance and deepen the practice of social media).  Cabinet Office guidelines notwithstanding, it is still far from easy for civil servants to blog the substance of government. Again, those are not signs of weakness or failure; they are indicators of where we have got to in the change process
• This is still a tiny minority. The total number of votes on the 21 propositions implies that about 40 people have voted.  That suggests the existence of a big enough group to make a difference, but one which remains a tiny fraction of the population it is seeking to influence.  To take just one subset of that, there are 4,750 senior civil servants, who form a group which it is critically important to influence but is largely innocent of any understanding.  Most of them won’t be on the leading edge of any of this, but many more have the power either to facilitate or to obstruct and it is critically important which of those they choose to do.  That choice will be based not on whether all this is a good thing or not, but on whether it helps them achieve their objectives – so what they need to know is whether and how it will.

So there is definitely a job to be done.  And this is a job for a generalist – not any random generalist, to be sure.  For both the skills and the positional authority needed to make this work at the next level, she will need the status – and therefore the money – which in the Whitehall pecking order is the quick indicator of who comes where.  Whether such a paragon exists, whether even such a paragon could meet the expectations set in the job description, and whether the job description is written in a way which maximises the chances of the right people applying all for now remain uncertain.

I rang my bank this morning, at their request.  The opening greeting, in full, was:

All our operators are busy.

Please hold.

Do not hang up.

The words do not do justice to the terseness of the tone.  Mack the Knife playing in the background was a curious counterpoint.  Hearing those words eight times before a human being came on the line didn't help.

The human being, when she arrived, was charming.  Then I got to listen to Somethin' Stupid and Do Nothing 'til You Hear From Me (there may be a message in there somewhere) while she delved into the problem of of why my bank card in London was apparently taking cash out of machines in Canada.  Then she was charming all over again.

I was talking to one of our contact centre people recently.  He said that the agents' lives were busier and more stressful than they needed to be, because the first part of so many calls needed time to be spent calming the customer down enough to be able to have a conversation.  Sometimes the customer's stress was a result of their circumstances, but all too often it was about all the things the Government (with a distinctly capital but very amorphous G) had done to them before they even made the call.  Waiting in a call centre queue doesn't come near the top of the list of anybody's favourite experiences, but it doesn't need to be designed to maximise the chances of customers taking out their frustration on the agents.

Two small thoughts come from that.  The first is that getting the small things right can make a big difference.  The second is another reminder that it is not just public services which struggle to maintain customer focus and effective service design.

Update:  The expert sceptics at Light Blue Touchpaper list thirteen things you can do to reduce the risk of card fraud.

 David Weinberger muses on the challenge of supporting the online endeavours of elderly relations:

I’m on a mailing list for former employees of a company, and we’ve been on a track for a day talking about what computer is best for aging parents or grandparents who want to do email and some basic Web browsing. This is from the point of view of the people who are going to be doing support and sysadmin for their relatives.

It’s a problem many of us are familiar with.  One of the problems I used to struggle with was a simple – but sometimes unbridgeable one – of language and terminology:  my parents, even after they had become reasonably accomplished at doing the things that they wanted to do, simply lacked any language to communicate what was going on on their screens when something unexpected happened.  Apart from anything else, they had no powers of discrimination, couldn’t tell what was important and what was merely incidental to what was going on, so it took much longer than it might otherwise have done to pin down problems.  It’s much less of a problem now, partly because of their own greater experience and partly because of the magic of Copilot.

But all that of course is a small part of a much broader problem.  Not every elderly person with a computer has a child able to do system support, and not everybody who could benefit from that support is an elderly person – digital exclusion is a much broader and more pervasive challenge than that.  It’s often seen, though, as essentially a demand side problem, about how people can get the economic and social purchasing power, together with the necessary skills and confidence, to become part of the digital world.  Weinberger, interestingly, is positioning it as much more of a supply side problem:  how can devices be equipped and configured to make them more straightforward to use?

The mobile phone industry appears to be further ahead in some ways, although not everybody is happy with the way it is developing.  The downside of that approach is that it succeeds by taking away much of the functionality, which although fine for some purposes, does close down options for others.  There are no obvious and immediate solutions, but anybody in the business of providing services to the whole population needs to find a way round this.  Throwing our hands in the air and assuming that such people will simply use other channels may be an accurate description of how things work today, but can’t be an adequate response for the longer term.

There are 450 million newspapers sold each day across the world.  There are 850 million subscriptions to cable and satellite television.  There are 1.4 billion internet users.  And there are 4 billion mobile phones.

I have written before about the growing importance of mobile phones, in terms of both their number and of what they can do.  In one sense it’s all self-evident:  the omnipresence of mobiles is an unavoidable feature of daily life.  But in many other ways, we have scarcely begun to think through the implications of what a while ago I called “the transition connected devices are making from being big tethered things to being small wandering things”.

I drew the chart from figures collected together by Tomi Ahonen, and have used only a tiny fragment of the data assembled in his post.  He brings the numbers vividly to life, and it’s well worth reading the whole thing to get a sense of the sheer momentum involved.  A couple of the snippets which particularly caught my eye were:

The typical top-end smartphone of today, becomes a mid-range phone in only three years. Think of your cool new iPhone or N95 or E90 Communicator, in a few years its a hand-me-down phone used as a toy by young kids… The processing power of a top end smartphone of today, such as a Nokia N96, equals the total computing power of all 50,000 computers on the planet that existed just 40 years ago.

SMS text messaging is by far the most widely used data application on the planet. You can reach 2.5 times more people via SMS text messaging than on any fixed landline telephone! Twice as many people send text messages as own a TV set. Almost twice as many people tap on the phone keypad to send text messages, as sign purchases onto credit cards.

Part of the conceptual problem here is calling these things phones in the first place.  Of course that’s part of what they are, but putting the stress on what is being carried forward from the previous technology makes it easy to underestimate the discontinuity they represent.  As Seth Godin has just observed in describing the transition from the telegraph to the telephone,

If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition.

That leaves two big problems for service designers and providers:

• how do you design services which take account of the new possibilities and the preferences of a new generation of customers?
• how do you manage a continuum which runs from people who only ever even turn on a mobile phone if there is an emergency to those Ahonen describes texting every few minutes of every waking hour of every day?

Or, putting those two questions together in a different way, how do we sustain the current delivery model for those who still need it while building the capability of doing things very differently?

The Power of Information Taskforce has published its report.  Or rather it has published a beta version of its report, in a format which not only allows but strongly encourages comments to be made on the draft over the next couple of weeks before it is is formally submitted to Cabinet Office ministers.

That’s a fairly radical approach, and one which is worth a bit of reflection in its own right.  As a way of encouraging engagement it is clearly working:  the comments are building up, questioning everything from the punctuation to the fundamental principles.  More interestingly still, some of the comments are starting to build on one another, creating an engagement which is different in structure to conventional consultation responses as well as in medium.  All of that is made to work through a very finely crafted wordpress theme which makes the process painless and transparent.

All in all, this is a splendid and positive step forward, illustrating how a little bit of imagination coupled with a little bit of ingenuity can create new possibilities.  But there is always room to be better still, and I have a doubt, a reflection, and a couple of niggles.

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