That's not what we mean by democracy.

2009 is probably the year that WhatDoTheyKnow.com came of age, and joined TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet as being banner services from mySociety. Tom talks about how the way that core services like this often work is that you build them, let them run for a few years, and then find that they're indispensable. WhatDoTheyKnow now accounts for over 10% of FoI requests in the UK, so it seems to have got there ahead of schedule. How long until someone copies it for their country? (New Zealand looks like it might be first).

It's easy to look back with hindsight and see clearly that the site would become that vital to openness, but looking forward, it rarely is. One question, that we often come back to, is "what's the next thing that has some transparency available, but which would benefit greatly from an additional amount of public engagement. That conversation is starting to happen around open data, as data.gov.uk (and data.gov) as raw data is opened, currently on faith that good things will happen. If the Treasury's UK public spending database (COINS) database is made accessible, there will be great interest, probably from both taxpayer's alliances, and many people in between. That's the half of the problem getting the most progress at the moment; and it's vital, but it's not everything.

In the US, there is much focus on defence spending, which is as important to their politics and budget, as the NHS is to the UK. The revolving door includes examples such as a Pentagon staffer working on the rules for a programme, and then going to the defence contractor to work on their side project for vastly more money. Here, it's NHS rule makers going to the drug companies to whom that money goes, after having had influence over what money goes into which multi-year budgets. and significant politics, that will take care and passion to engage with in a way which is beneficial to the public interest. There will be many of those areas. If a company can sell useless bomb-detectors to Iraq, similar unscrupulous individuals are likely to be doing similar in less obvious areas.

A few weeks ago, 2 MPs sent a letter suggesting that Gordon Brown should be replaced starting a media frenzy, while the labour twitterarti, possibly acting as the beginnings of a singularity, said many things, summarised by: #fail. It went nowhere. Gordon Brown may already have his evidence that realtime openness can be good, but it has downsides when the position is not quite so easy to defend. 

Stef used to say that TheyWorkForYou was the most important project that we'd likely ever work on. 3 years ago, when Julian first started building UNdemocracy.com, maybe that would be. Or is it Rob's work on Who's Lobbying? Something which watches who is pushing for what, where, and when. eyeSpy.MP is the crowdsourced panopticon on MPs; anyone can post what they see their MP doing by simply sending an email.

Clay Shirky talks about how change happens not when a new technology is created, but when that technology is widely available, such that the majority have access to it. Obama's campaign in 2008 was seen as groundbreaking for the use of SMS in a campaign; while raising hundreds of millions of dollars through other media. The Haiti earthquake appeal raised $11 million in a week solely through the texts to an SMS number which charged the $10 to your phone bill.

If long term thinking in most of the world is 10,000 years, where a political cycle is a day, rather than a year, Tom's 5 years of a waiting is a long news cycle of 1,500 days. When the public can really engage, and that will take more than data, but services, layered one atop another to provide a rich network of benefits, as people take an interest in what affects them.

PS - A sneak peak: JobCentreProPlus Experiences

Still funny after all these years

DirectionlessGov was created as a joke in only a morning, just before Christmas. It didn't take long, and hasn't had much more work done since it launched. But, 5 years on, it's still relevant, with roughly stable levels of media coverage and users. If you think that isn't a long time, here's a different way of looking at it: when DirectionlessGov launched, YouTube didn't yet exist.

It's been a fun time; but we do have to ask the question, given we've not changed what it does in 5 years, why is it still relevant and useful? Shouldn't DirectGov have realised it exists and incorporated the simple idea into what they do by now? Or is it still just plain crazy.

One comparison that always surprises me is that our friends in the US at the Sunlight Foundation randomly complain about a different government website. Over here, we don't seem to do that much; because almost all of them are so much better than DirectGov. Not because they're actually good (the new FCO site is well done), but simply because DirectGov sets the bar that low.

But, I'd really rather that I didn't have to do this any more. I'd much rather be working on other new projects, because DirectGov, with its huge budget and staff, did something better than a group of people cooked up in a morning while Stef was sleeping. Making DirectionlessGov irrelevant should not be a hard problem, but it does appear to have beaten them so far.

I hope Directionless will not get a 10th Birthday party. But I'm not going to bet against it.

Manchester City Council's Call to Climate Action

Have published a CommentOnThis version of Manchester City Council's Call to Climate Action - add your comments here

Tilting at data formats

Cory Doctorow's new book, makers, arrived before the weekend. And over the last week, I've been pondering a couple of conversations that combine badly.

Data.gov.uk (currently in invite only development) had a long discussion last week about what was missing, and which formats output should be in. With arguments from all sides, with varying reasoning, about what they wanted, but with general active opposition to Excel as an option.

The second was a conversation with some friends at and around a barcamp. There appears to be an informal competition between some of the uk geek gatherings which was described as "who can be seen to do the most for charity". This explains a very considerable amount about the quality of the one event the Manchester group push. Held one afternoon for an hour or so, they felt is was successful (in terms of looking good) and in terms of doing something for the community.

Bill Thompson gave a talk about 2 cultures at OpenTech. His point, hilariously well made, was that there were 2 groups of people, the techie "us", the them of everyone else, and that we'd won, they just hadn't noticed yet. If you've not seen the talk, it's here: http://vimeo.com/5471283 . Bill's overarching point was that this is bad for society.

Releasing the Raw Data Now is good, and should happen (and is happening, at the various speeds of various departments). But to the vast majority of people, not on any mailing list, but on this planet (or in this country), a ruby gem is something you get for a wedding anniversary; that's not going to change (and if you think it should, just think about what would happen to your lovely community of developers if 60 million new folk, or 100 Daily Mail readers, showed up).

Rejecting additional file formats for data.gov.uk is just plain lunacy. While everyone was willing to accept most of everyone else's suggestions, excel was heavily shot down. While our tech culture knows what RDF is (even if some don't see a use for it, and others think you mean PDF and can't type). People inside the culture knows precisely where to put the JSON so the sun will shine, and most generally understand why excel is a bad sole output format, but few consider what others need or use. It's ubiquitously supported - even people who don't use Microsoft Office generally have something installed that can read those files, and converters exist for most things. The output of data.gov.uk wont only ever go into your django app, but must go wider.

For some strange reason, I keep imagining a specific use case of the eventual data.gov.uk services, as someone who was interested in the health (or lack of it) of a small brook near where she lived. Not something that many people would care about, but she could have benefited from environmental, social, industry and other data. All interlinked in novel ways, so that she could produce a comparison of why that brook was so much worse health wise than the others in similar areas with similar input, and get it sorted out based on actual evidence. That's never going to be something that exists as a service - it's way too specialised. It takes a small bit of knowledge and a lot of passion. Structured data is good, but TheyWorkForYou.com in 2004 didn't wait for structured data from Parliament to exist, it went out to solve the problem that they felt was urgent.

If you want to solve problems at country scale, sites of the size of theyWorkForYou are invaluable. But working on an individual scale needs something smaller. You can tell someone that they can look up their MP (without a postcode) by ward, but only 40% of people claim to know who their MP is; and a third of them get it wrong (US figures here - can't find again UK numbers, but they were slightly lower than US). Which means some things just don't work in reality, even though you'd like them to in the theory that goes into a software idea.

The whole country is who data.gov.uk is ultimately for, and that's who, if tech communities want to help others, they should at least consider. While we can do that by sitting at the front of a room as a panel of consultants/experts, giving advice to people who do help, it was suggested at barcamp that some one "might say that they were in need of a social media expert, and they could be pointed at that person there for a slot". Most people running an organisation don't know what RDF, and don't really want to care. In his EuroBSDCon talk, Harrison talked about how he uses FreeBSD in the oil and gas industry. His customers have no idea what FreeBSD is, but when they ask "what's that?", his reply is "that's the thing that makes it work". Perl Modules or data.gov.uk, for most people, should get the same answer.

I firmly believe, that doing something beneficial for charity for a bad reason is better than not doing anything at all, but that doesn't mean it's worth bragging about. We need to get beyond just a single site and beyond the technical community. And that doesn't matter whether we write URL or URI, it matters that we actually help people achieve real tangible benefits in their lives. Claiming that we potentially helped them is ok, actually doing it is better. See the top item on the writeToThem.com feedback page.


As a community, we shouldn't just walk into social groupings touting iphones and saying "you should do this" but join them as members, and help them achieve what they otherwise can't. That takes time, commitment, but above all, interest in the issue on which they work. It's far more work, far harder, and far less appealing.

If you're not willing to help in the medium term, you're just a consultant, pausing on the way to the pub to give some advice based on what you think the problem is. Unfortunately, most people scale problems are far more complex than can be broken down into a ruby gem developed using agile methodology. That's fundamentally flawed in definition - agile means you have to be around as your understanding grows or requirements change; consulting means that you don't. 

There are enough problems out in the community that need more passionate committed people to working to solve. Tech people can help bringing skills and methods that act as a multiplier of the efforts of others. But, in terms of implementation, most of what we do sucks.

Stewart Brand starts his latest book, the Whole Earth Discipline, with a quote that Bill Thompson talks about for the tech community as well: "We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it", because mostly, we suck.

Giving up the laptop?

For the last day and a bit (by the time you read this, ending yesterday), I've been without my laptop. Those who know me know I tens to spend a lot of time in front of that keyboard, so this is a brief summary of experiences.

Now, for background, its not unconsidered timing. A friend needed to edit some video in final cut, and I I've on my laptop. I spent a good portion of the day in meetings, having given it over at about midnight last night, so the first 8 hours were fine - I went home and slept. Checking email, RSS And twitter on my iPhone. This is different to most considered laptop-missing scenarios, as my laptop is just elsewhere, not broken or lost. And there's nothing I can do/pay/beg to get it back faster (although it'd be back in about half an hour if I asked). Which feels like a safety net and may explain why I've not gone crazy :) . Although if I find the spammer who caused a load of bounces to my inbox which I deleted from my iphone, I might have crazy might be mitigating circumstances...

While I do most of my stuff in 2 screen sessions, its still quite a surprise how much other stuff I do in different places. Having switched to a mac from unix, and never really actively used a windows machine thefew times I have, I had a load of xterms in cygwin. Work was interesting; just realising how customise my mac setup is after 4 years, and how utterly awkward windows can be when you're not used to it as the environment. But email, RSS, twitter, even writing a decent sized blog post was fine from my Phone (although a better mobile site from Blogger would be good).

But the main thing isn't technical. When I left my friend my laptop, she commented that she'd not do the same with hers. My reply, somewhat facetiously, but with a serious underlying point, was that I'll be fine, and if not, then I should learn how. Which is true. Getting home from dinner, my first impulse was to reach for the laptop and check my mail - the same thing I've done forever (well, 13 years). Waking up this morning, I went to open the laptop after turning on the kettle as normal. I found that I can handle just having my phone. Some video/audio based things need more than I have, but its capable for a few days, or easy to work around if it was permanent.

But, over breakfast, rather than reading web pages and not achieving much, I read a bit more of a book (Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline), and had time for yoga. That's a good thing that never happens normally.

One thing hasn't changed, I still forgot to eat dinner as I was writing this. Maybe I haven't learnt how to cope after all.


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Sent from my iPhone :)