Irrepressible.info for video

Irrespressible.info (take a look if you've not seen it, otherwise this wont make sense) is a site which republishing information that someone wants to try and hide - items on democracy which are banned inside china for example.

We talked about this very briefly at the convention.

Doing this for video (and pdf etc - it's all regular expressions) is insanely easy. If there are people willing to help mirror stuff (and there will be).

Firstly, write a piece of javascript which blog authors can embed in their blogs, which will push all the youtube, vimeo, mp3 etc URLs up to a server which publishes the full list. Then you have many clients all hitting the list at random and mirroring all/some of the material to their own private, local, copies.

Because someone has gone to the trouble to issue a takedown request, it must matter to someone. More importantly, as the mirroring is automatic, the blog owner can take the material down, without having to worry that it's not there. More complex javascript could notice that the link is no longer in that page and flag that as something potentially interesting - that way, blog owners wouldn't even need to proactively publish that stuff had been taken down, the entire system would just notice.

This is something I've mentioned before. Anyone want to built it at Rewired State next Saturday?
drop me an email if so.

Notes on the Convention on Modern Liberty

It was a fantastic day. Congratulations to all those who worked hard to make it so. My slides (which I read the notes from, but didn't show on screen due to cabling issues, are available here (and I'm somewhat suprised by just how many people have looked at them). There'll be video online at some point.

There were various questions asked in the session that could have been answered in more detail. So here are some thoughts.

how many people do you think it takes?

This was the title of my talk, even though it never actually appeared. And an underlying theme of all of the people talking in my session was that it takes one person, but lots of one people. Heather Brooke is fighting the FoI fight, generally on her own, but she's not alone. There are huge numbers of people doing little bits. And small pieces loosely joined is something that can generate a huge system.

Ben Goldacre and Phil Booth also talked a bit about this.I'll probably return to it at some point in future

What about politicians who are getting buried under the online engagement tools?

Jason Kitcat (a Green Councillor in Brighton) asked about what's happening on the other side of the engagement fence. mySociety and others are busy building better tools to engage and contact representatives, and they're cowering in their bunkers saying "no more" because they don't have anyone building htem better tools.

There are solutions to that, but many of them come down to "pay mysociety money" and they'll build such tools for you. With good tools on both sides, this can be a good thing. With inequality, comes chaos on one side. But representatives have some motivation to do it and at the moment, aren't. it's likely, after the next general election, that some of the new cohort who get twitter/blogging etc (or RSS sourced data more generally as an additional filter to email) will look at getting something done. It's not hard, it's just no one's doing it. It only takes one person to lead, but they'll have to develop it.

Consistency of Data over time? It isn't

One of the questions in the Q&A was, having seen Hans Rosling's about why the government doesn't make available data over time, and want to be able to produce such graphs via cut and paste. Unfortunately, live's not that simple as the real world has a habit of changing and screwing stuff up. If you want consistent data for a long number of years, you're probably going to have to understand it and do some work - definitions change over time, especially when you're looking at statistics, and so numbers may not be directly comparable from one year to the next. Heather mentioned how knife crime stats are fiddled to get headlines. But there are legitimate changes - think how the place in which you live has changed over the last 25 years. Brian Eno in his panel talked about long term thinking, and that's vital, but equally, it's hard to do evidence based policy over long time periods. And most importantly, over those time periods, what you choose to care about depends not on the data you have, but as much on the question you're asking. Some questions you might care about an ethnic group breakdown, some people might just want "us" and "them". There is no right answer.

APIs are great

For people who wandering in from elsewhere, I should probably state that APIs are generally good things.

But, that said, there are things that they shouldn't be used for. And one of the prime examples is the definitive statistics for the country, which in the UK are called National Statistics (capitalised like so) and while they may be produced by the Office of National Statistics, are not necessarily produced by the ONS, and can be produced by any department.

The thing about NS is that they are used to create policy, information over time, the definitive stats, is vital. If you want the National Statistics for the country in 1909, you can get them (of course, they weren't called that back in 1909).

This stuff can't change without significant and careful consideration; and most importantly, it can never ever go away. There is an API for Statistics (data exchange) which does some of this, but it must not become the definitive source. Definitive copies must be replicated and kept, so that they can be referred to. Some National Statistics have a significant discontinuity in/around 1997, because the Tory goverment that had kept some statistics going since 1979 was replaced by a labour governemnt that wanted to measure different things (legitimately). There's no reason to assume that wont happen again, and, indeed, it's somewhat likely that a new government will care about different issues and want statistics on what is changing to inform policy.

Many things depend on those statistics, including budgets .If you consider a budget to be the number in the outcome cell of a spreadsheet, that's fine. But budgets determine how many people have jobs. And you don't want revisions to those without some care automatically as data changes - that needs somewhat careful planning and monitoring of change over time. Otherwise you may find that your budget suddenly drops as data changes. APIs aren't everything.

The real world is not only a messed up place (see here) - and stats should reflect that it's a sequence of messed up places, changing over time. While you can produce one statistic covering something for ever, the only thing you can be certain about is that it's wrong.

Summary

but thanks to Sunny for organising the Bloggers Summit and inviting me to speak. it was great.

Convention on Modern Liberty

I'm speaking for a few minutes in the bloggers' summit at the convention on modern liberty tomorrow.

UPDATE: The slides are up at http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/coml.pdf. More notes after I've slept.

OpenTech 2009

The call is going well so far, but there are up to 60 slots in total, and so there's plenty of space available.


Open Tech 2009 is an informal, low cost, one-day conference on
slightly different approaches to technology, democracy and community.
Thanks to 4IP for sponsoring what promises to be a day of thoughtful
talks and conversations with friends.

*What do we need?*
- Proposals from people who want to give a presentation, run a panel,
organise a tutorial, or run a demo of something new and interesting
on something that they think matters or getting people to help.

- Publicity - please blog this announcement, write a newspaper article,
forward to mailing lists, and tell your friends!


What topics do we hope to cover?
- Mashups, open data and security
- Disaster politics and technology
- Future of media distribution
- Community engagement
- Democracy 2.0
- Highlights, lowlights and lessons learnt
- Long term thinking on big problems and massive opportunities
- Tutorials & Workshops - share what you know

- If you've got an interesting proposal that doesn't fit into any of
the categories above, please send it in anyway!

What have we already got talks or sessions about?
- ID, surveillance and data-sharing
- mySociety
- international disaster management technologies

We're still looking for more talks on all our topics,
so if you want to offer something, we're waiting to
hear your ideas.

*How do I submit a proposal?*
- Online form via http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/offer
- Deadline for submissions is midnight on Saturday 1st May 2009

*Can I buy or reserve a ticket to the event?*

- Register at http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/list
and we'll email you nearer the time with more information

*Any other questions?*

Read the Submission page or email opentech@ukuug.org

More information at http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2009/

EuroBSDCon 2009

The 2009 EuroBSDcon call for papers is now out. The conference will be in Cambridge UK, and is being led by Robert Watson and myself. Find out more.

School Closures

Congratulations to Direct Gov on launching innovate.direct.gov.uk. Launched at govbarcamp with one blog post, and claims of promise. Small steps to start with, but that's ok.

Then it started snowing, and various public services started to not work very well any more.
Tom Watson MP registered www.schoolclosures.org.uk, and called on someone to build a mashup.
Directgov stepped up and took a swing. As an aside, the fact that a Minister of the Crown would make that call shows just how far some have come. More impressively, Directgov did very well.

The intial prototype was greated with adulation on the web. As it should be. Not only was it usable, it was developed fast, and well by an organisation with a reputation for only being able to do the opposite. So there was only one direction it could go from there. Maybe they're not as directionless as we sometime claim...

On the 5th January, a message appeared that "The alpha prototype is offline at the moment for maintenance.". Which is fine. it's an alpha of a prototype. Not a full service. And a second version appeared buried in directgov which forwarded people off to the local authority sites which have that information. But it was still snowing and people had the URL. 6 days later, the "alpha prototype" address is still showing that page.

An update appeared earlier today. There is only one point in bold there, and it shows just how completely the people who seem to have taken it over on day 2 missed the point (that, or the original team got hit by a snowball and had all the clue knocked out of them).

But to recap, we have one site at schoolclosures.org.uk which has the label "alpha prototype" and is probably permanently closed, and a second, working service which is buried within the directgov monolith. If you can find it (good luck with that), it's reasonable. Nothing flashy, but once you can figure out where it is (which is quite hard), it does the job.

So why didn't directgov point schoolclosures at the new page (great URL of http://local.direct.gov.uk/LDGRedirect/index.jspLGSL=1140&LGIL=8&ServiceName=Find+out+about+emergency+school+closures). They said they did this, but that's just plain not true. They just didn't do the simple and obvious step of pointing people who knew of the prototype at the service. Of course, if you follow the directgov groupthink, it doesn't matter that it's buried, as people will look through the site for lots of detail. A nice URL doesn't matter (to them).

As a result, the big bold text shows that they have so far done one thing: learnt the wrong lesson.

Directgov should be happy that people were talking about their service, and if it isn't wasn't clearly stated that it's an alpha prototype jut fix the labelling because the only people who matter are those who look at the site.. As a bit of help with that, the fact that it had a tag of "beta" might have been a source of some of the confusion.

But they got comments and feedback; hopefully they'll figure out why people made those comments before using them as justification for doing something that follows their own processes and prejudices at the expense of a useful service. While it might be extremely unlikely, so is the fact that the first iteration of schoolclosures.org.uk existed at all.

This should be considered a large success for directgov. Maybe they'll just call it a cockup instead of realising what a decent online service they had for their users, then decided to turn off.

Apparently, they're going to bring it back "imminently" after addressing comments. Good luck with that.




On an unrelated note, it's exactly 2 years since we lost Chris Lightfoot, I do wonder what he would have said about, well, everything really. RIP Chris. We still miss you.