What you do matters far more than what you say.

Last week, the new Government announced that DirectGov would be moving from DWP to the Cabinet Office. And, related, Martha Lane Fox would be taking over responsibility for it.

I’ve long been poking fun at DirectGov, and varing from critical to utterly scathing. However, with new political overlords, with new management, and a new basis, there’s a possibility for change.

I believe that were “Team DirectionlessGov.com” to suggest meeting Martha or whoever relevant for a coffee, that would happen. If we were to then go in with a set of actionable suggestions, we can probably get them at least read.

What would you like to be on that list?

Ideally, blog this question, and your answer, on your own site, and then add a link to it here. I’ll collate ideas and see where it goes. It might be a complete waste of time of whining on the internet with no one listening. But we’ve been doing that for nearly 6 years, it might be worth doing it again, now, when there’s a possibility that, just for once, hope may triumph over experience.

What would you like to be on that list?

Yesterday was ORGcon, the first annual conference of the Open Rights Group with whom I’ve worked since before they actually existed (they started to be formed at OpenTech in 2005).

It was a successful day, not just because of the sessions, but because of the conversations. ORGcon was a gathering of most of the most politically digitally engaged activists in the UK.

There was an interesting panel with Tom Watson MP, Julian Huppert MP and Eric Joyce ex-MP. But despite the high level interest, there’s one thing that really stuck out in contrast to the rest of the panel. I agree with the vast majority that Tom said, in what was a very good speech to a friendly audience who gave him a rousing round of applause as introduction.

Tom Watson was talking about his hugely admirable work on the Digital Economy Bill. He made a joke to thank a colleague on the panel, for helping him draft amendments and process. The punchline of the thanks was for showing him where the amendment office was, and telling him that he was due to speak about them (tomorrow).

My textual delivery is no match for Tom Watson’s personable and passionate delivery (it’s easy to see why he’s a popular MP both online and in his constituency). But the thank you got the laugh it intended from the audience.

Initially, I also found it uncomfortably funny; and on a second reflection saw why.

Tom’s been in Parliament for 9 years. And while he’s also been a Minister for a good chunk of time (Minister’s have staff for amendments), Tom’s position was that this ignorance is normal, indeed, amusing – it was the punchline of the joke. And the entire room of 200 people agreed with him. But if that’s the level of engagement we get from backbenchers, why are we surprised at the level of amendment and engagement that happens with issues. If that’s the level of expection that the most politically active group has on digital issues, there’s possibly also something wrong with that group’s expectations.

Tom tweeted after the vote that it was the first time he had rebelled in 9 years, and he felt sick at doing it. I see why he felt that way, but the main question is, in 9 years, were there no votes where the best interests of his constituents were to go the other way? While his personal interests are aligned with ORG, and while he and I agree on a vast amount of this, how was that vote representing his constituents any better than any others?

Julian Huppert responded to one questioner that indignantly asked why he hadn’t used his first BIS question in the House on an ORG issue, but he instead used it on something else for his constituents. The questioner got the response they deserved, by noting that ORG is a special interest too, just one that everyone in the room happened to agree with.

In summary, the take-away seemed to be “Find an MP whose interests matches yours, and hope they rebel against the whip”. Which is no way to run a party, policy or Government; Minority interests will always get trampled. Which, in summary of that session, seems to be why the Digital Economy Bill became an Act.

#fail

The last post ended abruptly and somewhat unedited when I read clay Shirky’s new book and it changed and connected various things that I had previously not.

Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest, and the associated website WiserEarth.org, talks about how all NGOs are at some level connected, and on some level don’t contradict each other. Child Poverty is related to Health which is related to Air Pollution which is related to Global Climate which is related to Indigenous Peoples which is related to… You can get from any one to any other.

Cognitive Surplus is mostly a guided instructional tour on the potential of what could happen if 99% of TV watching didn’t change, but 1% did. The entire of wikipedia has taken the cognitive load that is spent in the US, in one weekend, watching adverts on TV. That has a profound scope for changing things without much effort.

One of the groups I spent time with is various environmental groups. Its amazing how much is done by so few; and how widening that gap and gaining the interest of disparate groups will do. And one of the things the internet brings you is different point of view in a way that previously would have been impossible. Acting with support of others and networks, 2 people (full disclosure: one is a friend) have effectively, currently temporarily but hopefully permanently (consultation is still open) stopped all peat digging in Salford: http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=618

But if everything is connected, then that begs the question what joins these ideas, and is there somewhere that these connections discussed? And it turns out, that there is. The Long Now Foundation has a long running seminar series – “the slow conference” in the words of Paul Saffo, it just has a big intermission between each speaker. And over the last few years, the seminars, all of which are available online, has served as a shining example of something that might only be possible in a communication based society. http://www.longnow.org/seminars

I saw this earlier this week: http://infovegan.com/2010/06/24/why-developers-are-so-important/ Just as the cost of a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables is nearly 10x the cost of a conventional diet the cost of a high-fact, low-opinion information diet is too costly for most of society. Developers, as the new gatekeepers of information, can change those economics by not only building better tools for people to process that information, but by making it easier to become data literate.

The thing that surprised me most from this budget is that the BBC calculated the financial cost to me of last week’s budget is £3 per year (excluding the VAT rise). Given the high cost that those who will be hit harder will pay, there is interesting potential for engagement here. Last time, there wasn’t the communication networks to make this voice heard: http://deeplyflawedbuttrying.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/single-parenthood-and-victimhood.

One big difference is not that those connections can be made – they always could – but they can now be made by far more people. Shirky references the South Korean protests about beef imports, and how a significant proportion of the protestors were teenage girls who read about it on a boy- band fansite. The UK Government is currently asking for input on it’s budget plans which would cut a lot of spending on the young, and spend more on the elderly. Partially based on the fact that the elderly vote, and school/college/university student can’t/don’t. But maybe they don’t need to. Completely coincidentally, the labour party is running a leadership election, and is letting anyone under 27 join for £1. The labour party has a membership of 200,000. I’m pretty sure that there are internet forums which have a young UK readership higher than that.

If Ed Balls wasn’t so far behind, I’m sure Guido would be pushing his readership to be members and vote appropriately: http://order-order.com/2010/06/26/saturday-seven-up-37/

The UK government is asking for people’s opinions on things; what happens when they start to be provided,not just in the form of feedback into your freedom, but other service that use that as the start, not the end…

While you think of that, for now, I’m off to find a gin cart…

Update: Tom Watson reports that the labour membership has grown by 25,000 since the election and 1 in 3 are under 30. There’s roughly 10% of an increase in the party. And Ed Miliband wants votes at 16, almost all of whom will be affected by current cuts. Assuming that the next election is in 2015, if that happened, everyone in secondary school now would have a vote then, and they would have all grown up with the networked tools everyone else is figuring out how to use – to them, they’re not “new tools”, they’re just tools, and they’ve not been indoctrinated into the conventions of political games. They may also have the biggest motivations for long term education and opportunity. Do school cuts, or discussions of university funding, look a bit different now?

Cognitive Surplus is mostly a guided instructional tour on the potential of what could happen if 99% of TV watching didn’t change. The entire of wikipedia has taken the cognitive load that is spent in the US, in one weekend, watching adverts on TV (roughly 20% of airtime). If 99% of TV doesn’t change, then 1% does; that is 10 wikipedia sized projects per year.

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I’ve never watched a huge amount of TV. I’ve never really been able to explain why, it’s just something I’ve never really done. But Clay Shirky’s explanation in this talk really resonates (talk posted by Jeremy Zawodny); I tend to want to play with the mouse.

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A day after my last iPad mumblings, here are some more.

In a lazy day yesterday, i downloaded and read a couple of short books that have been on the to-read pile for a while. O’Reilly have a nice programme where if you register books you’ve bought from them, they’ll sell you an ebook version for about £3 ($4.99 – use discount code MB499), which is a bargain. As they’re primarily a tech publisher, that’s easy fro them as they have a the ability to to that to their back catalogue. And they’re ok layouts, buts they’re clearly automatically done; not manually. And there are layout issues which will take time to be fixed as ideas and best practices evolve.
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I wandered along to the apple store before work on Friday, queued for half an hour, and wandered out with a 32Gb 3G iPad. 3G because, while I’m often near wifi, I’m away from it often enough that not having it is likely to be an issue at the time that it’s most useful. Orange do a no-contract pay-per-use SIM with £10 of free credit. So far, I’ve used none of it.

It took a few hours to get chance to open the box, and then I left it syncing while I went for lunch. It was still going when I got back, because the “re-encode high-bitrate songs to 128K” button was ticked, and hence it was reencoding about 1800 songs. Very, very slowly. Unticking it, and it went fast. The lovely thing about the iPad, as an iPhone owner, is that it picks up almost all the settings from my iPhone, if you tell it to use your iPhone config as the initial thing to restore from. Some of them are different enough that it does what it thinks is sensible, and you can tweak it later. Some you’ll prefer to change yourself.

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In the next day, many people will abruptly stop the projects they’re been working on for the election. On Friday, we likely find out who our new Government will be, or possibly just start to sleep for a month.

Early next week, people will be given new jobs by the Government, either new or reshuffled. And they’ll sit down and start on whatever the first thing is.

If you got any rolethat you’d like, what is the first announcement (e.g. Independence of the Bank of England) that you’d like to happen; or if you took over an organisation/ministry, what would you say to your staff about what you’d like to see done?

We’re currently dancing in the fire of the election; remember to look at the horizon for the future.

Updated to correct youtube link.

What would a “ChatRoulette” clone for politics be like? So people get to talk to people on the issue  (e.g. digital economy bill in the UK, or health care in the US, or the UK election) without self-separating based on self interests? Would it work in all or just some types? That might be a good project to exist.

If that idea is possible, the style of this video show that you can do that sort of video, probably real time for debate group for different types of video meeting, for slightly larger groups. That would also scale and hierarchically federate rather well, and hierarchies of meetings can form.
Now that’d be a very cool demo of a html5 web app.