Disruptive Proactivity

We don’t have a written constitution, but a tradition and knowledge passed down. With a permanent Civil Service, it is they who are charged with maintaining that, politically neutral, informed service.

The work Puffles has started on twitter to begin join up campaigners with an understanding of the policy process is a start. But it’s a massive job, that needs to be supported from multiple angles.

If you’re based in the US, there’s legal clarity in (almost) all directions. [Carl Malamud][http://public.resource.org] has done fantastic work based on the lack of copyright on US Government work. This is now something that the UK has now made possible with the Open Government Licence.

The new Judgemental.org.uk and the long-running OKFN have been working in areas. But unlike the US, that’s not quite how the UK works. Spotify – possibly apocryphally – launched because the founder went for a pint with the right people who agreed not to shut them down for a while to see what happened and whether they could make it work.

The UK is like that. A dear (partially-)American friend was looking for a good overview of How The UK Works, and didn’t feel she got it until the Queen became involved (as a legal entity, not in the conversation). I’d love to see the writeup of that understanding. I suspect it would fill a number of holes in my assumptions & knowledge of how everything relates to everything else.

But in the absence of that explanation (probably phrased in terms of the Muppet Show), and even when we get it, that’s probably not how it should work.

But as the OGL kicks in, the scope to FoI all the docs for training civil servants (if you’ve ever wondered how thye got that way, you can find out), and then do something interesting with them online becomes greater.

Interesting competition for what to do with 100Drobos?

Apple recently announced the iCloud, which is not about storing your data in the Cloud, but about storing your data via the Cloud. 5Gb of storage isn’t much; it just passes through on its’ way to your devices. Much the same way that real clouds aren’t storage devices for water, they just hold it for a while while it moves from one place to another.

So, taking that analogy further, what would I do with a 100 drobos attached to slow network connections?

Fill them with all the below, and send them to the 100 most (potentially) effective small ngo-training NGOs in the country. Not with the raw content, but mashedup and structured into such that it’s usable by people who haven’t been through the training school for what all the words are used to mean, but who need to know to make their organisations effective.

That’s easy enough to do on the web, but without good internet links (e.g. In a training room attached only over ADSL), that rich immersive experience is difficult online. But as the iCloud implementation shows, it’s not syncing, but caching while the other devices catch up. Push data to the cloud as fast as possible, and then pull it down when it can. While

For home, I’ll get an Apple Time Capsule that can permanently grab a copy of all my iCloud data as soon as they release it, that same method can be used to push data elsewhere for purposes that are much more useful than my pictures of cats.

And a really good use for 100drobos.

Another idea is to lend them to the “unnamed organisation” to move their data, as a practical suggestion of how not to get locked in to a data centre when you have 2Pb of data. Sigh.

OpenTech now has it’s own blog/podcast feed over at http://blog.opentech.org.uk/

While I’ll probably post one announcement here, If you want to follow OpenTech news, you should follow that blog.

It’s interesting how the same themes keep coming out of multiple sessions. If it was remotely true, I’d say we planned it that way, but we didn’t.
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I’ve not had a chance to listen to many of the opentech talks yet. Certainly not the ones I really want to hear, so here are some preliminary thoughts.

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The Good News is never as good as it appears, and the bad news never as bad.

The Tom Loosemore, Martha Lane Fox et al prototype proof of concept of what a single Government website could look like, became publicly visible this evening.

This is not a metaphor for alphagov:

This is sort of a position of where people think alphagov is today:


The accurate bit is the big political teeth, innaccurate is the ocean going icebreaker.

What #alphagov is at the moment, is something much less grand. It’s not in the ocean, it’s in a canal; and is the rough equivalent of this:
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This book is about wikileaks, in the same way EastEnders is about the East End of London, or Friends was about New York. It’s mostly about transparency, online activism, and actually achieving a better democracy. Sometimes the best way is to start by knocking hard on the front door, but sometimes you need wikileaks going commando through an upstairs window.
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I use Things to manage my Getting Things Done style todo list.

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The Tories are consulting on replacing all Environmental Legisation as part of their Red Tap Challenge.

They’re probably going to completely bugger it up – push more permits to polluters – but a blank sheet of paper is an opportunity, as well as a massive threat. While campaigning groups are starting to mobilise to protect bits of the legislation, and other groups have been moving against it for years (more explicitly in the US).

The PM both claims to be green, and wants to dramatically reduce the complexity of legislation. I’m not sure they are necessarily contradictory positions in theory, even if they turn out to be in political practice.

But as environmentalists, we don’t fundamentally care about text of legislation directly, what we care about is the outcome on the environment. Is the current rules the best we can hope for?

Can we devise a rule, which meets the Government requirement of “less complexity” and does more for the environment?

There are hurdles to be overcome in such a challenge, but the new businesses that will be needed, the new innovations, the new technologies, will create growth, jobs, and all the things that the Government likes to talk about as coming in all other areas of the economy.

With the push for deficit reduction, NHS restructuring, school changes et al, there is an all encompassing push for speed. Environmental challenges are equally as urgent, if not more so; what if some of the political capital, all momentum (and downright political bullying) were focussed in the direction we want it to go?

Even if you don’t believe in Climate Change, consider only the pollution in your local park, and the quality of air on your street.

So, what if it was all swept aside, and the rules became something roughly as simple as these:

1. What you put out must be cleaner and safer than what you take in.
2. Where the inputs involve pollution, they must improve 10% per year on the 2010 baseline towards item 1.

It’s eminently doable, simple, understandable, which is the claimed goal of this review; and, as a bonus, it’s sustainable in a Decade. There needs to be careful definitions to avoid loopholes, but all sustainability really means, is leaving the world better than you found it.

So it’s probably a non-starter, but if the intellectual honesty matched the political posturing, it shouldn’t be.

During the recent #ecfdebate, David Babbs of 38 degrees and I had a brief discussion about metrics, and I used the example of inclusion of organisations in their mailout as an example of 38 degrees focussing on the wrong thing. Micah White from Adbusters talked well about metrics, I talked about press releases and substantive content of messages.

I repeated the question I asked on the ECF list: “Did no one else help?”

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