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?

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”.

See Public Strategist’s writeup. Wish I:
- could have been there
- was good at all that coding and stuff
- still qualified as “young” (though I’d settle for “forever young”)

Can there ever have been more of a breath of fresh air in government IT? This is verging on Ideal!

Wibbi people just routinely described what it was like when the touched the state, or had any experience of public services. We could say “thank you”. Or we could say “wouldn’t it be better if…?”

There’s a World of Wibbies out there. And if we had enough of them, we could build our Wibbipedia!

Information is power – because information allows people to hold the powerful to account. This has never been more true than today, in the information age. The internet is an amazing pollinator, spreading ideas and information all over the globe in minutes. It turns lonely fights into mass campaigns; transforms moans into movements; excites the attention of hundreds, thousands, millions of people and stirs them to action. And constantly accelerating technology makes information infinitely more powerful.

We see the power of this information in Iran. Every time the Iranian state has tried to choke the flow of information to dampen down the protests, people have turned to technology to share and access information. When the state cut off text messages to stop people coordinating their protests, the protesters switched to social media like Twitter and Facebook. When foreign journalists had their visas taken off them, people on the streets started uploading video clips onto YouTube. And when the government tried to monitor internet traffic and ban popular websites, people outside Iran set up proxy internet servers so Iranians could continue to access information anonymously.

He talks of a wide range of public data:

We’re going to set this data free. In the first year of the next Conservative Government, we will find the most useful information in twenty different areas ranging from information about the NHS to information about schools and road traffic and publish it so people can use it. This information will be published proactively and regularly – and in a standardised format so that it can be ‘mashed up’ and interacted with. What’s more, because there is no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new ‘right to data’ so that further datasets can be requested by the public.

There’s a danger this strictly non-partisan blog may start to appear to favour Punch over Judy here (I feel Tom Watson looking over my shoulder as I sit). Full credit for the Power of Information work, full stop. But the personal data agenda is so wrong. The authoritarian, expensive and unimaginative policies we’ve critcised as far from Ideal for five years are all dreamt up under Labour, and defended – often in an unimpressive and even insulting manner – by Labour ministers whose thinking seems solidified in centralised bureaucratic concrete. They’re bad listeners at the top of government.

The LibDems and Greens have always been pretty cool on this stuff, but now it’s a concerted and co-ordinated burst of Tory Wibbies. We can just sit here and tag them “We told you so”. Some very good people must be advising the Tories (it’s not me). And they’re listening.

I do wonder, as a postscript, what good loyal Labours and LibDems who “get it” make of recent speeches by Pauline Neville-Jones and David Cameron. Hey, even my local MP Jeremy Hunt is at it. Does the desire to see the right thing done in the information age transcend visceral party loyalty?

Publicexperience.com seeks raw, unvarnished feedback from the point where the person in the street meets Whitehall. If there’s a gap between what that feels like and what it should feel like, just say “wouldn’t it be better if….”

Publicexperience is created by a team led by Sam Smith (of Commentonthis and DirectionlessGov) and backed by the Ministry of Justice. It has the ear, to put it no strongly than that, of officials in Treasury and the Better Regulation Task Force. Their interest is in cutting pointless red ape and saving money (for which there is now, to put it mildly, some urgency).

Of course there are already any number of usual rowdy channels for political discourse, digs at opponents, foul language and rehearsing entrenched partisan views. That’s not what PublicExperience is about. PublicExperience is basic ethnography: the dispassionate raw description by the person who has just encountered the workings of the Whitehall tribe. It recognises no opponents. It’s merely futher evidence that raw, unvarnished and constructive feedback is coming.

It’s an idea we originally kicked around five years ago under the name UKFeedback or “the Wibbipedia” on Idealgovernment and at the Young Foundation. That’s where we learned that PatientOpinion was already starting to do it. Health is trickier. Patient Opinion was doing it very well, and it was emerging that people largely wanted to use it to say “thank you” to their care providers. Health feedback is still better directed to PatientOpinion. If you want your street fixed then FixmyStreet is smarter at directing the right issue to the right local authority. There’s a lovely Fixmysite idea from the Rewired State event for a neat way to report web site failings. Horses for courses.

But if you’re on the receiving end of the workings of Whitehall and you’re not apathetic, if you care about what happened and especially if you encountered pointless red tape or wasted time or money use Publicexperience.com. It could’t be easier. The right people will be listening. If we use it constructively, they’ll continue to listen. Let’s see where that takes us.

We need help!

Sam, Emily and I plan to put into circulation a brand new UK Feedback-style web site which asks for the unvarnished account of what public services feel like at the receiving end. The only proviso is that for each episode we ask for a Wibbi. In essence: “It was like this, but it could have been like that”.

This has, we feel, some constructive potential as a broad-based suggestion scheme. It’s an outlet whose only requirement is that feedback be constructive.

There’s upside in that some significant parts of government have undertaken to listen.

There are risks to avoid. We don’t want people reciting party manifestos or rehearsing what they would say if they were on Question Time. We dont want Guido versus Dolly Draper, vile language or any endless repetition of hard-wired positions on policy issues of the day.

What we now need are some good “starters for 10″ – some model narrative descriptions of everyday public services coupled with “Wouldn’t it be better if…” I’ll trawl the IdealGov archive. I may do a bit of emailing out, so stand by for some spam. But if you’ve got any good ones (just done a tax return? applied for a benefit? had a run-in with the strong arm of the law? had dealings with asylum seekers, victims of crime or the military?) do please email me or leave a comment here. Thanks!

We know it better, it’s our data, and we care more about having the right data in the right place and right time. It’s the easy and respectful way to achieve a proper healthy ecosystem of personalisaton and choice. And it supports the sort of data minimisation and privacy by design that would reduce data nitwittery and start to restore trust.

Now Doc Searls has drafted some “founding principles” for the VRM wiki:

VRM Principles

1. Relationships are voluntary.
2. Customers are born free and independent of vendors.
3. Customers control their own data. They can share data selectively and control the terms of its use.
4. Customers are points of integration and origination for their own data.
5. Customers can assert their own terms of engagement and service.
6. Customers are free to express their demands and intentions outside any company’s control.

These can all be summed up in the statement Free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

In a broader way, the same should be true of individuals relating to organizations. With VRM, however, our primary focus is on customer relationships with vendors, or sellers.

I think that, just like Kim’s seven laws of identity all those years ago, this early draft needs some feedback so that the principles of VRM are broadened to address the CRM-like problems of Transformational Government. I think that means a small broadening of principles, and a revision of the language. What do you think?

It’s not just the online tax disc, is it?

How about

David Miliband blog
DirectionlessGov
Identity developments: Higgins, InfoCards, Mydex, Prime
MySociety family of democracy web sites
OpenTech
OPSI Public Sector Information Unlocking Service
Patient Opinion
Power of Information Taskforce
Scotland’s privacy expert group
Showusabetterway competition
Tellthemwhatyouthink
The Key problem-solving group for head teachers by TEN UK
Tom Watson blog –
Whitehall Webby’s blog

I’ll recompile and sort into alphabetical order if I get much more input (this should probably be the IdealGov blogroll).

This is all preliminary to thinking about Transfomational Government 2.

The fact is, we’re three years into Transformational Government 1.0. I think we felt here that the world was already ahead of that at the time (or perhaps headed in a different direction) and has since moved on further. So we’re going to need to start to think: what should Transformational Government 2 look like? What do we want? What would be better? But that’s for later.

For now let’s build that list of things that are going well: the inspirations, surprises, and the “about time too’s”

Plans to build support for identity cards by introducing them among ‘guinea pig’ groups, such as airport staff and students, are in crisis after 10,000 airline pilots vowed to take legal action to block them and opposition swept through Britain’s universities and councils.

In a move that could wreck the government’s strategy for a phased introduction beginning next year, the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) said it would seek a judicial review rather than see its members forced to adopt ID cards at a time when pilots are already exhaustively vetted…

We hve a general presumption against dropping the “F” bomb in the course of our very civilsed conversation here. But in this case it seems most straightforward to say to all the Ministers who have ever been involved and all the officials who have ever plotted a path towards ID cards:

We don’t want the fucking things. Fuck off

We want freedom, not fear. Cheerio.