Disruptive Proactivity

One of the things I wanted to do with iQuango.org is to make the news from NGOs searchable by topic across the NGO sector. A small start is scraping reliefweb and doing what was described as “better alerts”, and also doing a best guess at adding links back to the source.

reliefweb drops that information and only gives the name (which it internally links to a useless page); so we take the headline and run it through google search to find the page (and include an “feeling lucky” link). We use the main google search page rather than Google news so that the links continue into the future; even when the post isn’t news any more.

The plan is to start adding more (non-RSSed) sources to iQuango News as soon as the latest version of mellanrummet is done (which is next on my list. I’m planning on starting with the IMF and WorldBank. What else should I add my little list?

This year’s BBC Reith Lectures were from Jeffrey Sachs talking about international poverty, growth and, in his final lecture, talked about international politics and its effects.

He considers whether a global network of Parliaments, connected by video conferencing and modern communications, could work together to solve current problems, and maybe, would those links have helped prevent the invasion of Iraq? When you have connections to the rest of the world, it’s harder to act against the greater interest. When you look only to yourselves, it’s far easier. Due to the nature of parliaments, what matters there is votes, not what people say. Whereas in the Executives, it’s far more what you say than how you vote (as in the US and at the UN, the executive can’t).

As a quick win following Sach’s line of thinking, I’ve added links on the SpinDifferent results page to votes in the US Congress (via govtrack) and UK Parliament (via PublicWhip) for that topic. When UNDemocracy has vote search for the Security Council and General Assembly, I’ll add that too…

MPtables today relaunches with a new interface built in flash. MPTables gives you the numbers , counts and rankings various places have for MPs, and lets you graph one against the other to see what they look like.

The new interface, using meinedata from mySociety today lets you play those through time (where we have sequences of data for years) and you can merge in your own data for visualisatoin, both as single points and sequences for constituencies. For more details, see www.MPtables.com

The merging of custom data will be available shortly.

My sense of awe at what Gapminder has done for some UN statistics has been covered here before (and again today), and served as the design and inspiration for this. All the flash development was done at lightning speed by Steve McEntee

Meinedata is a new gift from some of the mySociety volunteers. It’s a flash based tool for graphing data, which can be provided to it in the form of a spreadsheet (soon) or xml (now).

Very heavily inspired by and based on the Gapminder tools, it brings some of that style of data visualisation to abitrary data. Using the tool is the new MPtables.com which takes data about UK MPs and lets you compare them.

I’ve also loaded the UN Common Database in as part of iQuango.org (with the name of mellanrummet). As more and more data becomes available, there should be a tool for organisations to use to do comparisons on data, and allow their website visitors to do comparisons of data, that they’re interested in. This lets those with data easily allow other people to visualise that data and compare it with other data they provide; and everyone else to find a bit more about the world, and have a better understanding than the chimpanzees.

For more technical details, see the post which follows this one.

For all the similarities with Gapminder, we apologise for any regressions and very gratefully acknowledge the vast amount of inspiration, ideas, design and motivation from Gapminder, Hans Rosling (his blog), and, certainly as importantly, TED conference for sharing their “inspired” talks online, and showing what’s possible with one person’s vision…

What’s next?

There are a stack of things I’d like to see added to mellanrummet (which is the iquango.org installation of meinedata), which I don’t have the data for.

• Some sort of classification of country more detailed than by continent (gapminder has one)
• Data for additional indicators to add.
• I’d really love for someone to take on the job of tidying the data up. It’s all automatically generated at the moment, so there is lots of scope for improvement (I can give you a big excel spreadsheet of everything which you can then edit).

All of the work building the flash was done by Steve McEntee, who has done an outstanding job of building it better and faster than I had imagined. There are a number of rough edges around design and which might be interesting for someone with design skills and flash knowledge to take a look at (contact Steve and/or myself).

While the XML schema used is relatively self explanatory, some notes are in CVS. if that doesn’t answer your questions, please drop me an email and we’ll improve the documentation. It’ll be faster if you help, and we’re eager to hear from you – please get in touch.

I’ve added some screenshots (1, 2) to my flickr account,so if you just want to make simple comments on display, you can do so there.

All the original code for this is in the mySociety CVS repository, and (soon) the CGI scripts for merging in additional data as for mptables. Soon to be available is a service where you can provide the URL for your own data and have it displayed in the flash for you. It’s designed for relatively easy reuse, by just getting the flash and putting your data in (for merge, see the sites; upload of a spreadsheet without using any other data will be available after that if there’s interest).

Tom is fond of quoting the statistic that something like 40% of people think they know who their MP is, and a third of them get it wrong.

Does anyone know of a survey which has asked people to say what party their MP is from and how many get it right?

One definition of insanity is “Continuing to do the same thing over and over, each time expecting a different result”.

Lawrence Lessig, one of the people behind the creative commons, has a new target.

Both in the US, the UK, and internationally, those interested in the common good, rather than a special interest, fight the same fights again and again against copyright extension, proprietary software “standards”, broadcast flags, and other initiatives designed to help specific companies at the expense of consumers and the common good.

These negotiations are often in back rooms away from the public view, and are based on the advice of people in the room rather than the common interest. When all the people in the room only present the view of their one single employer, unsurprisingly, that’s the view that comes out of the room – cf the Cheney Energy Taskforce.

In the world of software, there are two “open” formats for documents (like Word documents, but standardised so there is a public reference specification that you can check it against, rather than Word documents where it might work…). One developed, designed and heavily promoted by Microsoft (pretty much exclusively), and another which has gone through the standards process and has a wide variety of groups who have looked at it and accepted it.
There is an International Standards body which oversees many technical standards, and to be recognised as a standard, you need enough countries to agree that it’s a standard. In the past, this has been done by interested countries and through consensus. Now, many many countries, which previously have never shown any interest in the body have representatives appearing at meetings. Only these aren’t civil servants, or even just citizens from that country, they’re Microsoft employees in countries where Microsoft has almost no staff presence besides lobbyists. Guess what the new “representatives” are pushing?

In Canada, the MP who is in charge of their department of Heritage, got campaign donations to their campaign fund from the recording and film industries in the US, and then tried to suggest laws to support them at the expense of the local recording and film companies (more).

In the UK, there was an independent review of the UK Intellectual Property Framework, the Gowers review which concluded, based on all the evidence, there was no case for copyright extension, thanks to the open and even handed way the review was conducted and examined the evidence. So those in favour of extension, to increase their own profits, simply ignored it and moved on to Parliament, potentially misrepresenting the Gowers review to get it ignored.

There’s also the “debate” in the UK around ID Cards where Evidence Based Policy is welcomed as long as the evidence supports the policy and those finding other evidence are bullied.

The evolution “debate” in the US where religion is dressed up as science and scientific theories are beaten down by “belief”. The fight that Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and friends are currently engaging in.

The examples are, unfortunately, almost endless across the countries, with some areas being worse than others.

Why does it matter? Because special interests will write a bad law in your country and then try impose the same changes on my country in the name of equivalence, what happens in your country has a significant impact on my country.

Continuing on the current tack will mean that those fighting against the special interests will eventually lose – because special interests only have to be successful once and get to pick the battles. Those fighting for the common good have to find out about the battle, fight it (often quickly), and must win every time. While those tactics can continue for a time, a longer term strategy needs to change the war. Which is where Lessig is going.

What happens when the all Environmental, open software, culture, science, reason and other activitists join together to make the playing field level for all those who want to play, irrespective of the size of their pockets?

I have no idea what will happen, but it’s going to be very interesting…

The Government Response to Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg’s “Power of Information” review is now up on CommentOnThis.com

At the mySociety pub meeting in Manchester this weekend, there was a coversation about engagement in the world of petitions.

Simple academic theory suggests that there will only be at most 1% of the population who are engaged on any issue. Petitions has shown that this is no longer necessarily true – it is possible to get more than that involved. Climate change similar may have such a reach, where there are hard decisions and tradeoffs to be made.

But in a world where that engagement is possible, with the levels, types and styles of technologies and discourse available is as it is now. Allowing a “full and free” exchange of views will generally lead to the extremes shouting at each other, and those who occupy positions in the middle generally becoming demotivated by the extremes (whether on their side or the other).

Petitions are a way of simply saying “I agree with X”. There’s little/no room for subtly, and it’s a relatively blunt instrument. Although people are finding ways to comment on petitions even though it’s something not offered on the core site.

Large scale government reviews often present a range of options to solve whatever issue was being looked into. Many large issues involve tradeoffs and have differing costs and benefits, there is, currently, no mechanism for wider engagement on which of those is deemed better by the general public. While “The Sun” may think it speaks for their audience, there is likely to be a difference there.

What if petitions was extended, so rather than agreeing with a statement, you could select from a list. So in terms of energy review, you could sign in favour of ‘more nuclear’, ‘some nuclear, more renewables’, ‘no nuclear, mostly renewables’, ‘less coal, more renewables’. Requiring the same information from people as to sign a petition, but instead of signing a single statement, you can select however many of those you agree with (including none if you don’t like any of them but want your voice heard, or all of them if you think we should do something but don’t mind which).

These reviews happen anyway, and often produce a number of possible solutions for consideration – and giving everyone the chance to state their view is one way of doing engagement, based on existing, and highly successful, processes.

Today was the Labour Leadership Conference in Manchester (this time they closed 3 streets round our flat to most traffic, rather than sealing 2 for the last conference). Apart from the very impressive speed that the security cordon dropped round the venue, it was pretty much a non-event (apart from the outcome).

At an Electoral Reform Society meeting this evening, for the first time ever, I met and had a conversation (more of a monologue from his side, since I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing) with someone who believes strongly that, not only are ID Cards are a very good idea, but he was very strongly in favour of them to cure all society’s ills. While it may just be that I spend time in what he described as “wishy washy liberal” circles where we don’t understand that “if you’ve not done anything wrong then you have nothing to fear”, he was an example of those whom Labour ministers point to as supporters of ID Cards.

So there’s at least one of them in the country; although as one of the few (3?) Labour activists in (I think) John Redwood’s constituency, he seemed used to supporting lost causes.