WRITTEN ON August 24th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Uncategorized

A rational approach to personal-data logistics in education would not simply rely on centrally held databses. It would also build on the individual’s personal portable education record.

Like other services, education needs an online bridge between the individual and the service provider. But to date we’ve only built the organisation’s end of the bridge.

The learner needs to be equipped with this from the first moment they deal with educational organisations in the outside world. It would be unambiguously under the learner’s control. Their parents would use it to appy for school places. It would store educational achievements and qualifications. As the learner grows up and takes responsibility for their own affairs they would take charge of their own digital, personal, portable education record and use it for university and job applications.

It wouldn’t just be a record of your reports and GCSEs though. It would also have any other experience the learner deemed suitable and relevant. Since it’s personal, not institutional, it would integrate across other aspects of your life. It would then help support your search for jobs, or for education or training. A small subset of it would morph into your living CV which you might choose to broadcast pseudonymously with those seeking employees or to share as a whole when applying for a specific job.

There’s a noble intention behind every existing and planned central educaitonal database whether it’s the National Pupil Database, the Learner Registration Database with its unique 10-digit reference numbers, school censuses, the centrally-held Learner Record or related databases on attendance, obesity or predicting child offenders. There are probably many more – glad to hear of them.

But taken together, without any structured participation on the side of the individual, they’re ineffective, a waste of money, probably unlawful, disempowering and intrusive.

The noble Managing Information Across Partners (MIAP) rhetoric about each learner being in control of their own record is perfectly achievable, but that’s not what MIPA does. Better actually to see the individual in local control of their data, their record of achievement and their destiny, offering them third-party validation of claims (such as exam results or degrees) and helping them to accumulate trust. The qualification issuing authorities need to concentrate on issuing digital certificates to individuals who present themselves suitable verified online.

Let’s stop pretending that a series of interconnected central databases can respond to the infinite variety of people’s lifelong learning needs. Let’s start to equip people with personal portable education records as part of their wider personal data store. Let’s stand by to receive structured information from people’s personal portable education records. And let’s offer them online authentication and verification of their education-related claims.
+++
Footnote/credits:
For a more detailed understanding about organisational implications of this see Ctrl-Shift
For one platform which makes this possible see Mydex
Disclaimer: I work for both Ctrl-Shift and Mydex.

WRITTEN ON August 8th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Foundation of Trust, Power of Information, Save Time and Money, We told you so...

The closure of ContactPoint and the onset of the Databankendämmerung is – let’s say it again – cause for celebration. It’s also cause for congratulation to those who campaigned long and hard, with negligeable resources, against the brick wall of prevailing wisdom to get rid of it.

That’s not to say the underlying problems ContactPoint was meant to help with – caused by poorly co-ordinated and overstretched childrens’ services – have gone away; they haven’t.

The question of how technology best supports front line professionals, without disproportionate and unwarranted intrusion remains unanswered. It’s part of the scope of the Munro review, which provides first feeback in September, and a final report in April 2011. I suspect we’re in good hands here. I’d hazard a guess that Dr Munro will focus relentlessly on the crucial matter of protection of the relatively small number of children at real risk, and not attempt to boil the ocean of the welfare, diet, propensity to obesity and general wellbeing and conformance to social norms of every child. And I also bet that the role she recommends for ICT in helping child-protection professionals will be conformant to data protection and human rights law in a way that ContactPoint was not.

The Databankendämmerung must spread, just as we must escape the limitations of the Accentureweltanschauung. There are other ill-advised and intrusive central databases on which we should call time: eCaf; NHS SCR; the NHS Detailed Care Record; NHS Secondary Uses Service; long term comms data retention generally and the Intercept Modernisation Programme in particular. Kind friends won’t let me forget that I’ve promised to do a special celebration to mark the end of the Benighted ID Scheme and its lavish quantities of nugatory PA consulting.

The LibDems always opposed the “Database State”. The Tories were quick to spot that the last administration had taken a wrong turn and were politically vulnerable. But when Labour Ministers stopped listening exclusively to Cheltenham and Whitehall and resumed listening to the outside world (about eight weeks before the last election) they too quickly came to their senses as well.

It’s best not to see this in political terms, because really it’s a question of information logistics. Remember Troubleshooter? If John Harvey-Jones could revisit us and contemplate the dozens, hundreds of databases which public and private organisations run each trying to scrape, grab and update their versions of us, and then looked at the average householder spending a week and a half updating the different customer service systems of every entity we ever have to deal with (through episodes from moving house to losing a wallet) recording and sharing the same data over and over again, filling out endless forms with different callcentres and web sites and usernames and passwords, ….he would just laugh his vast laugh, wouldn’t he? And as he laughed he’d start to calculate the waste and loss of value, and huge tears would roll down his generous cheeks.

The Database State is an issue of civil liberties, justice and equality, of course. But there more than that: it’s been clear for a good year that the country heading for bankruptcy. It has been clear for a decade we need radical reform of public services. It has been clear ever since people started chipping in their ideas to IdealGov that the role of technology in this radical reform is about user participation, about quick wins and creating a foundation of trust.

The radical money-saving reforms have to be based on accurate personal data. They have to be built with tech systems that work. They have to draw on people’s supportive, active participation.

Some databases are valid and unobjectionable of course: DVLA, TV licensing, the electoral roll. Many public-sector databases can be fixed. The point about the Databankendämmerung isn’t that all databases are evil. It’s that the state can’t fix society’s complex human problems with giant databases.

Weirdly enough, however, the opposite will turn out to be true. Even the worthwhile databases are still plagued with errors, omissions and duplications, They need our help. Databases can’t fix society. But, given the tools, society can start to fix the databases. That’s a much more promising way forward.

WRITTEN ON August 5th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Uncategorized

Tomorrow 6 Aug sees the shutting down of the ill-advised ContactPoint database.

Why was it such a dumb idea? Because you dont need a database of 12m children to focus on the relatively small number of children at real risk. Because you can’t keep the data on a huge database which is accessible to hundreds of thousands of officials secure. Because a database accessible to so many which makes clear that a vulnerable child is linked to sensitive services creates risk. Because it’s unjust to hold the records of children of mere mortals in this system but to “screen” the records of politicians and pop stars. Because consent procedures were unsatisfactory and there was no effective opt-out. Because, as the late Roger Needham used to say, “if you think technology is the solution to your complex human problem then you don’t understand technology and you dont understand your problem either.”

ContactPoint is but one of the 11 out of 46 government databases examined in the JRRT Database State report (link: pdf) which we flagged “red” . That was our shorthand for “almost certainly ilegal under human rights or data protection law: should be scrapped or substantially redesigned”. We since added NHS SCR to the “red” list.

So 6 August is a day for rejoicing, for celebrating the success on negligeable resources of wonderful campaigners notably Terri Dowty at ARCH, No2ID and FIPR. I know the officials who supported ContactPoint believed they were doing a good thing, but the “groupthink” was total and the spin deeply unattractive. Thank heavens it’s over.

Let’s cut with the negative waves. Yes, there are still plenty of databases that offend human rights and data protection laws. Yes, the deep state remains implacable. But the country is broke. There’s a mood for radical reform of public services. And central to this is Martha’s plan to get the whole country online.

It’s time to challenge the unthinking assumption that efficiency, effective public services, personalisation, security and justice can all be delivered by giant centralised databases and removing awkward barriers to data sharing. It doesn’t work in theory and it’s not working in practice.

We’ve got to build the other half of this bridge. We’ve got to bring the individual into the picture. We’ve got to let people accumulate and prove trust in online relationships. Phone users and Internet users need to be able to store, verify and share their personal data with organisations they have a relationship with. (Say it again!)

Instead of being on ContactPoint, the National Pupil Database, eCAF, the Integrated Children’s System, MIAP and the National Obesity Database (not to mention for those with the odd peccadillo to their name the profiles on YOIS, RAISE, UMIS, Asset and Onset) children need a personal portable education record they can carry through lifelong learning.

This would let them, initially with their parents’ or guardians’ help, track their own achievements and prove qualifications from formal education and other sources. They could model this against work or higher education opportunities available, and use it as the basis to apply for jobs online. Ctrl-Shift has researched this in detail for Nesta, including the business model and critical path for all affected parties. Suppliers are keen and ready to participate. The technology is there. They just need a bit of market demand to get this party started.

Despite the steady trickle of scepticism and the gargantuan human and structural inertia behind a purely organisation-centric model of personal data management I’m persuaded by the VRM/buyer-centric-commerce/customer-managed relationships view that the imminent emergence of a person-centric model promises huge savings of money for organisations and reduction in hassle for people. The interaction of a person-centric with the organisation-centric model will restore dignity, control and choice for the individual, and create immense new value from which individuals and many organisations will benefit.

There every manner of detail to be worked out: legal, technical, commercial, usability. And of course, there are spheres of life for which this will work and places it won’t.

Education records will be an easier use case than child protection. It’ll be easier to have individuals giving the NHS their admin details than their health records (but even cleaning up the admin details would deliver the NHS huge benefits) . Job-seeking is an easier use case than welfare benefit applications, and census submissions easier than border control.

But it’s high time to make a start with the easier stuff and see where we get.

Mydex CIC (the JFDI social enterprise creating a VRM platform) is doing this from September. E&OE, fingers crossed, subject to contract and if the creek don’t rise we’ll have individuals sharing verified change of (non-financial) circumstances from a personal data store under the control of the individual with up to three councils, Whitehall services and a large social network, with strong independent verification and the capability to do selective disclosure.

It’s a start. It’ll just have several relying parties out of the potential hundreds. It’ll just use a couple of dozen fields from the thousands we need to describe our lives t those we deal with in health, travel, finance, education, shopping.

But I think of it as immensely significant, like the moment we start to build the other half of the bridge.

So if you’re an entrepreneur with a VRM idea, a relying party which would welcome verified flows of change of circumstance data from individuals or an individual keen to regain control over your personal data and to start to realise its real value drop me a line or register interest at Mydex. (Note: Mydex has never to date ever yet contacted anyone who has signed up in this way, but will when it has something substantial to say. This may be soon.)

And if you’re an organisation that needs to work out what all this means for you, or need professional evidence and advice to make some smart strategic decisions pronto, call in Ctrl-Shift. (Disclaimer: I work for both Ctrl-Shift and Mydex. IdealGov is my hobby, a sideline which persists from a previous job.)

WRITTEN ON July 25th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Uncategorized

Getting government IT right isn’t my job – it’s John Suffolk’s job. It’s not even my job to opine about it. So now IdealGov has had that terrific burst of activity and energy getting an ideal government IT strategy during the election period * thank you all involved!!* let us chill for a bit. I propose yet another change of tack for this blog.

There’s too much exciting good stuff going on for me to keep abreast of. And I think the blog has covered the bad stuff many many times. So even if there’s new bad stuff happening – or far-from-ideal stuff persisting – there’s not much new to say about it, and perhaps not much point.

Like I said, I’m now very focussed on two new businesses: Ctrl-Shift Ltd and the social enterprise Mydex CIC. They’re both about customer-driven relationships, empowered customers or VRM which I first wrote about in 2007 here.

So IdealGov is going to focus for a bit on what all this empowered customer/user-driven data stuff can do for government and public services. I’ll declare my interests upfront and again. Ctrl-Shift provides professional research and advice about what this means in detail for large organisations. Mydex CIC is an entrepreneurial social enterprise, incubated by the splendid Young Foundation, which gives individuals the platform to make this happen.

First up, a Minister from the new administration got interested in all this and asked me to draft a broad paper on it, which I did with some help from Jerry and others. Here’s the text below.
(more…)

WRITTEN ON July 5th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

Hurrah – I like the new Patient Opinion widget:

Sam did some of these for publicexperience. His one let you just type your experience straight in. The PO one just offers recent feedback, with options for filters. Has PO got the other sort I wonder?

WRITTEN ON June 24th, 2010 BY ruthkennedy
STORED IN Across the Board, Design: Co-creation, Design: user-oriented, Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

Following on from Will’s post below, I’m pleased to say that in places (albeit all rather far from the Westminster media hub) people ARE using the burning platform of the current economic situation as a reason to re-think how they go about doing what they do. There are places where a requirement for a shift in both mindset and culture is being made more explicit, leading to a re-think about the nature of leadership, and how you measure success.

One example of this is a project commissioned by Nesta. The Innovation Unit is leading a programme of work pursuing Radical Efficiency (innovation that produces better outcomes at less cost) in 6 localities in England, all focused on early years services. One element of this – very similar to the approach we take in thepublicoffice – is to showcase exemplars of innovative practice, which can inspire people with the art of the possible.

I’m on the urgent lookout for new exemplars of innovation in the way outcomes have been delivered – especially (but not exclusively) in complex social policy areas. CAN YOU HELP? I’m particularly interested in any examples of work you can point me to which illustrate the themes below:

Uncover, build and really work with existing community capacity, networks and resources to deliver services
Overcome barriers to engagement with existing services (e.g. improving information and awareness, re-branding, tackling fear of judgement and stigma around accessing support)
Meet people where they are at – physically relocate services to places where people already are or go regularly and where they feel comfortable
Work with new ‘units’ of users – moving from children or traditional family units to really extended units of support (e.g. grandparents, close friends etc)
• Rethink the role of the professional; create a much more mixed economy of support in the delivery of services, e.g. peer:peer, professional and non professional, formal and informal
Create a system with a diverse mix of service providers, formal and informal, private, voluntary and public sector

Suggestions needed ASAP. Prizes definitely on offer for suggestions that we use

WRITTEN ON June 14th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Ideal Goverment - project

The original “Ideal Government” agenda – quick wins; co-creative service design; foundation of trust – is now happening so thick and fast I’m not even pretending to keep up with it. That’s because Ideal Government stuff is now a fringe hobby topic for me; I’m fully focussed on new ways we can all protect, manage and realise the value of our personal data (with Mydex CIC) and with what this means in terms of opportunities and threats for large organisations (Ctrl-Shift Ltd).

What I’d say on the “ideal government” agenda which we’ve been watching and commenting on here since 2004 is just this:

- much or most government IT is still “far from ideal” too expensive; ineffective; poorly designed; large parts of it of dubious legality under European data protection and human rights law

- there’s a terrific start in open data and the quick wins arising from mashups etc, but we’re barely 5% into just this part of the new agenda. There’s so much more to come. We can have theories about the implications of it but we’ve yet to see the reality in all its glory and unintended/unexpected consequences.

- We haven’t yet seriously started on co-creation or participative public services where the systems delivered are formally designed successfully to meet a real need, and created, measured and improved with active input from those it’s intended to help

- Nor have we seriously addressed the questions around personal data and the foundation of trust. Cancellation of the benighted ID scheme and Contactpoint is barely more than a welcome signal of intent.

We have yet to deliver really good public-service IT in the manner Google started to deliver good search in c. 2001. When it’s really convenient and helpful people (cf Google then, or Facebook c 2007) people will adopt it. Martha will prevail, eventually.

Only once we/they’ve adopted it en masse will people seriously think about the consequences and underlying implications and start to ask the hard questions about whether we’re right to trust it (cf Google Buzz 2010, Facebook 2010 or even BP 2010). What Ross Anderson and FIPR have to say is both urgent and important now, but I fear it may be 20-25 years until people catch up with it.

All that is just a preamble, or context, to the observation that this visualisation of government IT spend is wonderful. Thank heavens people such as dharmafly and the Open Knowledge Foundation are getting excited and making stuff.

WRITTEN ON May 30th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Uncategorized

In 2008 I made the rash promise that when the benighted ID Scheme was cancelled I would perform a celebratory “Dance of the Intellectual Pygmies”. Well – here it is.

The idea is we can all do it en masse at various celebratory events.

Choreography is by Aliya Saleem, filming, editing and captions by Richard (shortly to be Lord) Allan, music borrowed on a wave of goodwill from the Pet Shop Boys. The whole thing, triggered by a comment in Parliament by David Blunkett, is a tribute to the relentless hard work of many activists especially Phil and Guy at No2ID, Simon and Gus at PI, the JRRT, everyone at FIPR, ORG and beyond and to many of our more enlightened politicians and journalists.

WRITTEN ON May 20th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Policies, Save Time and Money

As well as the good stuff on civil liberties noted below, the governing coalition’s Progamme for Government (pdf download) has this on government IT procurement:

We will take steps to open up government procurement and reduce costs; and we will publish government ICT contracts online.
We will create a level playing field for opensource software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.
We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
We will require all councils to publish meeting minutes and local service and performance data.
We will require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full.
We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.

It’s an important read with some enlightened ideas in a realistic tone which acknowledges the real diffrences on important topics such as Trident.

It closes with the sobering reminder:

The deficit reduction programme takesprecedence over any of the other measures in this agreement, and the speed of implementation of any measures that have a cost to the public finances will depend on decisions to be made in the Comprehensive Spending Review.

Cheers Edgar.

WRITTEN ON May 12th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy

The LibDem-Conservative coalition is probably the closest to Ideal outcome for civil liberties. According to the BBC

Civil liberties

The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion.

This will include:

# A Freedom or Great Repeal Bill.

# The scrapping of ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the Contact Point Database.

# Outlawing the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.

# The extension of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.

# Adopting the protections of the Scottish model for the DNA database.

# The protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.

# The restoration of rights to non-violent protest.

# The review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

# Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.

# Further regulation of CCTV.

# Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.

# A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.

There’s some more to add, but it’s a very promising start.