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.
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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.

WRITTEN ON May 6th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal Goverment - project, Ideal government IT strategy, Wibbipedia/MindtheGap

Busy as we all are, @ricallan (who else) observes we might do well to schedule in a quick #idealgits event:

Date TBA in next four weeks (ie before mid June)
Time 1700-2130
Venue ideally BCS or LSE or elsewhere (any offers?)

Aim – to keep new administration listening by offering maximum bright ideas pertinent to their stated policy aims in a very short time

Aud – politicos from both sides and selected enlightened officials. Total 40-60?

Format: UnConference (building on what worked at Intellect), ie
- exposition of what crowdsourced IT strategy approach offers
- #idealgits background
- suggestion for structure based on our work to date
- invitation to any present to “lead” on a particular heading (incl a new one if they want)
- break up into groups
- resume and present back

Does this make sense? Who’s up for it?

If so next step is: secure venue, book date. I think this should be for designers as much as for contempory tech people: “redesigned state” as much as “rewired state”.

WRITTEN ON April 27th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal Goverment - project, Ideal government IT strategy

Here is the picture we promised not to publish before the manifestos were out and the election under way. Jerry and William take the core Wibbies of the Ideal Government IT Strategy (#idealgits) to Downing Street, at the invitation of Jim Knight MP.

This was the logical culmination of the “courteous and mutually respectful dialogue” (#CMRD) which Michael Wills called for but then illustrated by omission.

We got there. The points on governance, architecture, procurement had been well made and well received. But the part that got most traction, with both Labour and Tory policy developers, was the new personal data agenda. The Labour manifesto says:

We will explore how to give citizens direct access to the data held on them by public agencies, so that people can use and control their own personal data in their interaction with service providers

And the Conservative manifesto says:

Wherever possible, we believe that personal data should be controlled by individual citizens themselves.

Jerry and I did #idealgits together. But William has to declare an interest which may affect what we do going forward. I’m working flat out on two fronts. First is to try to understand the wider implications of user-driven data as part of the work of research and advisory startup Ctrl-Shift. Second is to provide a service that makes it possible in the social enterprise Mydex CIC. I’ve blogged about this manifesto development at both those places.

Not sure what happens next with #idealgits. I suspect Jerry and I will do one more final write-up (perhaps with help from David at BCS again). And we promised a party, for which we have to set a date once we have our VIP visitor. Man, I cant wait!

WRITTEN ON March 29th, 2010 BY William Heath
STORED IN Ideal government IT strategy, Identity, Transformational Government, We told you so...

The #idealgits process now has a supportive champion in Jim Knight, DWP Minister charged with all digital aspects of Smarter Government.

Jerry and I had a second meeting (we can’t really say where or with whom) at which it was Jim who led in setting out the case for personal control over personal data. There’s growing interest in the “framework of trust” idea for on-line identity. Now adopted by the Obama administration it was, after all, originally UK policy a decade ago. Technically it still is.

So the good news is: the UK had a good policy; it’s is still in place (including some legal underpinning), just unimplemented; the US has led decisively down this route which creates a market and gives confidence for UK government; there’s a new climate of listening and political realism, and we have the courteous and mutually respectful dialogue #CMRD. The bad news? The UK lost a decade. *sigh*