What you do matters far more than what you say.

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

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.

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

People interested in the techie side of open government data should read this post from Emma Mulqueeny.

I’ve long thought that data projects like that shouldn’t be considered successful until some 15 year old girl uses the data/services to make a tangible improvement to her and her community, that would otherwise not have happened.

When every 14 year old knows that they can do that too, then it’ll be a success forever.