I get that the reforms seem like a bad idea; lots of highly informed people I respect say so, but that doesn’t really help me understand why. I appreciate it’s not as simple as that, but there will hopefully be a simple-ish way to explain.

Ideally, something I can forward to friends who don’t give a crap about politics (I don’t have many of them, but think of it as something that your siblings might forward to their friends)..

Finally.

1. Moments of transition.

The GovUK beta isn’t ready yet, and the frameworks that will let innovators outside GDS shine are also missing. We understand beta, but it’s usually govcampers who are in first, not waiting at the back. As the GovCamp ethos moves centre stage, we’ll have to get used to that feeling for short periods. That’s what scale means.

2. Mike said Thank You

There are few single-track sessions that really work at govcamp style events, and his was one of them. Mike could not have given that talk at any other event, and it says more that he wanted to give it than necessarily any detail. But the detail was better than it appeared. Even if it hadn’t been done as a plenary, I suspect no one would have wanted to schedule their session against it (but a few may have wanted to head to the pub). It worked.

3. People notice

Chatting to various GDS people, it’s clear that they get the power and potential that comes from knowing that #unacceptable stickers could appear on Mr Maude’s iPad. This lets them do things that otherwise wouldn’t be possible, and the Country will see the benefit of that work over the next weeks, months and years.

4. There’s only one way it’s can go from here.

Combining the three above, you campaign in poetry, but govern in prose. Or, as the policy wonks might say, you pitch in PowerPoint, but execute in Excel.

If the govcamp fans have taken over strategy for a while, reality always wins, and it does that by picking the winners.

5. The rocks are coming

If the rise of govcampers suggests a reduction in power of the SIs and the big contracts, they are fighting to maintain the status quo. It is incredibly profitable for them, and the revolving door makes it profitable for the people in the system now too. It wont be the Beta or GDS that gets given a public kicking, it’ll be the whole govcamp ethos.

For some similar scenarios, see this interview of Jack Abramoff by Larry Lessig: summary or full interview.

A recent UK example is the victory of No2ID on what they asked for, but not what they wanted.

6. GovCamp was different

At a moment of transition, with a load of hierarchies and roles shaken up, it’s still settling out who is where.

Some people are now working 3 roles, probably not sleeping, and that only lasts for so long. I suspect we have, at most, another year of that being possible.

7. The ethos is getting there

I’m pretty sure that no site for which Bracken has any responsibility (either directly or via influence) would ever ask people what they thought of the information they were given, and ignore the answers. Hopefully, once that’s been in place for a staff changeover, it’ll stay there semi-permanently.

8. I probably should have run a session.

I was tempted to offer something on “engaging with internet troublemaking”. The sort of stuff I’ve done for years. I had a similar conversation a number of times with a number of people. In short: figure out what your commentator actually wants.

My goal was always “make DirectGov good”, and now that’s being delivered in effect, I’ve shut up. However, no amount of discussions with the former DirectGov team/friends/whatever, would have given them the ability to make DirectGov good.

The fact that you can’t/shouldn’t deliver a pony doesn’t mean that outsiders don’t think you should be able to. Depending on what’s wanted, that may well be your problem. If you’re a vet, then you probably should deliver it, but a horse might do. How you manage that engagement in a social media etc world (hi Puffles!) is a constantly evolving question requiring talent and expertise.

All that said, sometimes, the critic is just a crackpot govcamper howling at the moon.

9. I seem to prefer the hallway track most of the time.

10. LinkedGov is ace.

Ben hammersley nails it, as he so often does:


The basis of a Turing machine, is that rules can be bent and broken, because all inputs are outputs of another process. That rarely interacts well with a rigid power hierarchy, which is precisely what our current school system is.

An early Turing machine application ended rather badly for the Germans, and very well for the Allies.

Many teachers would like highly informed, highly engaged, critically detailed students – they’re the ideal University student after all. However, it doesn’t take much thought to consider whether you would like to be responsible for a class of 30 of them mandated to be there, and the impacts of and on only one of them.

In terms of current impacts of understandings, Glyn often talks about surprises and unintended consequences of not understanding the power of systems.

Josh’s tale of marking is an enlightening one, but surely a better answer, and a better use of Josh’s time, would have been to do something that would get the A*, and spend his time and creativity on coding something else. The goal of a school project is not primarily to reboot the world. Of course, great side-effects are possible (more likely is getting expelled), but it is not the primary aim, and can not be at scale. Although, in a singularity twitter world, it might just be.

Starting with a basic, paper based Turing Machine adding 70 years of evolution, you get codecademy, textsFromLastNight.com and grindr. Learning javascript, you can get most of what people think of as twitter and facebook (and node.js on the back end).

As with all topics, what matters is the guidance and “guardianship” given – the teaching. And that’s not rebootable in 18 months, even with the best of intentions. It’s interesting to note the different paths chosen by that cohort of RS attendees. I wonder whether, in 3 or 5 years, our choices then (and now) will have proved to be wise, or whether it’ll have turned into a progress trap. To quote Jonas Salk: “Are we being good ancestors?”

Much of my early time in “Computer Science” came from my Computing A-Level. I did most of the two year project in an evening’s manic coding early in the term, and handed in code versions with progressively later and later time stamps. The point here is not that the project was done in that time scale, but that it met the objectives being measured (eventually my tutor noticed, and only asked for versions at major deadlines), saving us both effort.

You can argue whether that is right or wrong, you can argue whether those objectives are right or wrong, but in terms of efficient use of my time, I clearly chose better. But the important part is what comes next.

I then spent the next practical classes (with approval) working on things that interested me and others – playing around with algorithms and practicalities and solving the interesting problems others created for themselves by accident). The sort of thing that I still find fun; but it is easy to see why a class of 25 kids doing that is not likely to end well.

I forget the name of the teacher on that course (and the TA who helped with practicals), but they were exceptionally good ancestors.

That’s what needs to scale.

(Thanks to Paul Clarke for the picture.)

A blog post about confusion on big data hits a lot of the things that I’ve been seeing but haven’t known really how to structure.

One of the truisms of hackdays and similar is that data goes in unexpected directions; or, more clearly, preconceptions about data rarely survive interactions with reality.

The key line in that blog post: But they all mean nothing unless you can act on what you see.

The same needs to be learnt for tools and their providers. Newer tools are less of a problem than older ones and institutions; but it’s easy to see

It’s not enough that you have 5* data out there, in a repository, archives, on your site, or wherever.

To avoid being pointless, it has to be used with the potential to do something in the real world.

There is a second order effect hiding there as well: something now is worth far more than maybe-more in x months time.

Reality will intervene as it wishes, and it doesn’t care about what you expect.

I’m torn about this book the first 12 chapters are a long form well-written discussion of the connections of various topics I’m interested in. It was nice to see various things like the Long Now Foundation tied to Buddhism via Aaron Sorkin and the Singularity.

The final chapter it goes off the cliff a bit, but I’m not sure if that’s because the last chapter is one too many, or one too few. Of all the places the book could have ended, “Paris Hilton” felt like the setup for an easy point. I suspect that a good addition to the bibliography would have been Zittrain’s “The future of the Internet, and how to stop it”, but it would have undermined the point Appleyard wanted to make. That is a long response to the “they have no soul”… “something should be done” of the last chapter.

Although it might be an interesting discussion on how political outlook can take the same set of facts and come up with a diametrically opposite view to what another might have done.

I posted my thoughts about the proposed Public Data Corporation as apart of my submission to the consultation.

The PDC is pretty dead and being dismembered, but the roles needed are still there. Interestingly, the announcement includes two organisations – the “Data Strategy Board” and the “Public Data Group”, without much detail on what they’ll do. I previously called for two groups to be created with constructive tensions, and those functions could be similar to what I was thinking – coincidences happen. So let’s look a little deeper in what this could look like (I have no internal knowledge).

I’d argue the current setup of the Board and Group are slightly backwards. Indeed, here, they have been swapped over because it makes life simpler to understand what they should do. The Board runs things, the Group is much more amorphous. What they end up being called is pretty irrelevant.

The “Data Strategy Board” seems like the organisation that should mostly be run by the current trading funds; with the “Public Data Group” being the thing that keeps dragging it, possibly somewhat screaming, into the present. I suspect it’ll be put more diplomatically than that in the official documents. In theory, think of it like Poggs and Jonathan Raper gaining a posse and some administrative heft.

Neither Panel as yet has Terms of Reference. So here’s a crack at what they should include. These structures are intended to be lightweight. It’s also not exhaustive, there’ll be a load of administrivia and bits I either don’t care about or, more likely, haven’t thought of.

For clarity, I’ll use the words Group and Board for the one that’s named that, and the word “panels” to mean both of them. I’ll also pretend that the only members of the Board are Trading Funds, but it doesn’t matter whether others in the same section of the announcement are included.. Remember also, that these are backwards to how they’re used in the official documents. An ad-hoc board is harder to think about than an ad-hoc group.

The Board – the Creators

Mission: Maximise benefit of the data.

The Board is easiest to consider. It should be 2 or 3(ish) members of each of the Trading Funds (or similar) – one person who is the CEO-equivalent, and one who is operationally responsible for the data use. There may be a sub-board of just the operational people for them to use this effectively.

Other sub-boards may wish to pick up particular overarching topics (licensing being one for example), and these may come and go. Putting all the lawyers in one place is usually a good idea.

Given there is already financial coordination/policy-lobbying between the Trading Funds, it may be useful to include that within this framework for transparency and integrity reasons. If it’s going to happen, let it happen transparently (stopping it is a different problem, and this may be a good step). Again, another sub-board may be the main forum here.

Each Fund should only get one “vote” if appropriate.

The Board should invite a Group representative (of the Group’s choosing) to meetings where topics are appropriate – and the Group should have input on the definition of “appropriate”.

How the Board does Governance of the Trading Funds is outside of this post, but giving the Group input would seem

The Group – the Doers

Mission: Support the long term viability of the data.

The Group should be much more amorphous, and in some ways, a Group of Groups – the people who care about weather aren’t the same group as who care about transport. It should be not-Government entities with a clear and stated direct interest in an area of data covered by the Board.

In practice, the full Group is unlikely to meet regularly. To be comprehensive, it’ll be too large to be feasible. But there should be a co-ordination function that is, and is seen to be, independent and serving the interests of every member of the Group, not some at the expense of others.

Sub-Groups should exist for all the relevant areas, which have a special-interest-group public discussion forum, but also a semi-private forum as well. That also provides a route for new expertise to come in.

For most data, there are individuals who have deep expertise in a personal capacity, outside of any paid “day job” organisational roles. Poggs springs to mind on the topic of train data. The structures should explicitly allow for that type of involvement at a core level.

How that is constituted should be done with care (and iteration) to take advanced of the inclusion of new organisations that gain or lose standing over time. The public and semi-private aspects will help with that progression.

The Group must have access to all papers of the Board, and, where relevant discussions are being had, Board members should be invited to Group meetings. Organisations that are members of the Board should only have observer status (at most) at Group meetings — although what that means in practice is up to the Group.

Each Panel should be chaired by someone from the Open Data Institute (but not both by the same person).

Panel tensions

Some of the questions above are around tensions. It should be, in some ways, separation of balanced powers. The Group has a megaphone and the right to see documents; the Board has most of the cards in terms of data.

An organisation such as ORG should not be within the Group (it doesn’t do anything with data itself), but may wish to convene a Shadow Group which has a similar but extended membership, but more informal rules (and exclude the Board). The Group should, explicitly, consist of People Who Do.

Are the two missions backwards?

Possibly; but the other way round reflects the logjam of the status quo. Making the Board somewhat responsible for promoting use, and the Group somewhat responsible for sustainability, ingrains the bigger picture. The head of a Trading Fund already cases about sustainability, but not really promoting use beyond the status quo.

That they both need to actively consider the other’s inherent bias could push things forwards. It may also make the jogjam worse if participants don’t want any movement. It’s there to think about, but creativity here is probably important.

Other Considerations: People’s Data

People’s Data is not Public Data. While it is “The Public”’s data, it should not be considered in the same way that “Public Data” is. If this confuses you, post a comment and I’ll try and explain it clearly (it’ll take a few goes round).

Reading the original Treasury document (p66), I’m wondering why there are screams about health data for research use being linked by a Government service, but silence about welfare data for industry, or “fitnote” data being used for “anonymised management of sickness absence”. All 3 should probably be treated equally.

If statement sections A.137, A.138 A.143, A.144, A.145 and A.148 (see below) are included in the Board – those being data about people, rather than data about things – then The Board should meet rarely, with 2 sub-Boards doing most of the work instead; one Board for all the data that is about or directly derived from people, and one for all the data that isn’t (the trading funds).

That the personal data and the non-personal data sections are so integrated in that document suggests that Treasury doesn’t see a huge amount of different between the two. Which, while it’s to be expected, should be accounted for when Terms of Reference are being joined up. It will save us significant hassle in the future if this gets cleared up now.

Appendix: Actual text of the Treasury Announcement

From pg 66 of the announcement

Publication of data

A.137 Linking primary and secondary healthcare datasets – The Government will provide a service to link primary and secondary healthcare datasets from September 2012 to reinforce the UK’s position as a global centre for research and analytics and boost UK life sciences.

A.138 Publishing prescribing data – The Government will publish further prescribing data by September 2012 and additional health and social care datasets by September 2013 to support health and social care data-based product and analytics markets.

A.139 Train and bus data – The Government will work with the transport industry to make available by April 2012 timetable and real-time train and bus information to support the development of innovative applications to improve passenger journeys.

A.140 Rail fares data – The Government will consult in early 2012, through the Fares and Ticketing Review, on providing open access to rail fares data, giving passengers and business better information and enabling them to make the most cost-effective travel choices.

A.141 Civil Aviation Authority – The Government plans to legislate to give the Civil Aviation Authority the power to publish data on the performance of aviation service providers, to enable users of air freight and passenger services to make the most cost-effective choices.

A.142 Highways and traffic data – The Government will release from March 2012 a range of highways and traffic data, including on road works, to help reduce congestion and enable business to make more predictable travel and logistics decisions.

A.143 Fit note data – The Government will consult on the content of anonymised fit note data to be published from 2012 to drive innovation in the occupational health sector and improve management of sickness absence.

A.144 Universal Credit data – The Government will design the Universal Credit ICT system so that aggregate benefits data can be published during the first year of live running of the system.

A.145 Linking welfare data – The Government will consider opportunities for linking welfare datasets to other government and commercial datasets to increase their value to industry.

A.146 Open Data Institute – The Government will provide up to £10 million over five years, with match-funding from industry and academia, to establish the world’s first Open Data Institute to help business exploit the opportunities created by release of public data. (i)

A.147 Releasing reference data – The Government will establish a Data Strategy Board and a Public Data Group that will maximise the value of the data from the Met Office, Ordnance Survey, the Land Registry and Companies House. It will make available for free a range of core reference datasets from these bodies to support the development of high-value data businesses.

A.148 Personal data – The Government will ensure all NHS patients can access their personal GP records online by the end of this Parliament. The Government will publish a new procurement arrangement for school information and learning services in spring 2012 to improve parents’ and pupils’ access to education data and increase competition in provision of learning services.

]]> http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/thoughts-on-the-%e2%80%9cdata-strategy-board%e2%80%9d-and-the-%e2%80%9cpublic-data-group%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/talk-series-social-movements-in-the-internet-age/ http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/talk-series-social-movements-in-the-internet-age/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:10:45 +0000 admin http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/?p=562 I didn’t know about the first talk in the series; but in advance of the second, I was chatting to a friend over coffee, about how I had not yet seen an academically methodological, technically competent, empirically accurate paper on online/offline integrated activism.

An hour later, I had.

All 3 talks have now been published online. Parts one, two and three

The first talk was the academic theory background. It is needed for understanding the academic bits of the other talks, and some of the background reasoning. If that’s not of interest, you can skip that one.

The remaining two talks are a pair, the second on Occupy and the US, and is now (and certainly was a 3 weeks ago when it was given) a talk about works in progress. The middle talk was looking at the process of revolution in the Middle East (primarily).

They looked deeply at the social, demographic and political reasons and interactions that intertwined in different ways in the different countries. Different reasons, for similar things, in different places, at similar times. It was a very good lecture.

If you’re watching it, the thing that computer people might question, is his use of “wireless” as a tool. He clarifies the means 3G and mobile phones (ie not wired), not WiFi. The connectivity wherever you are.

We’re starting to see some of that with FixMyTransport, or, more clearly, sukey.org where protestors could get comparable situational intelligence to the police. The Guardian Reading the Riots investigation picked up some of this when it was done ad hoc via BBM.

It was a very interesting set of talks, that my dear reader may be interested in.

]]> http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/talk-series-social-movements-in-the-internet-age/feed/ 0 http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/38-degrees-are-jumping/ http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/38-degrees-are-jumping/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:11:03 +0000 admin http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/?p=559 It’s slightly depressing.

In a week of #COP17, #€geddon, the veto, and the dozen other things that should be in the political news agenda, but aren’t, what did 38 degrees choose to twice contact their members about?

A fundraising drive.

I wonder whether David Babbs and Hannah consider this funny…

Behind the Scenes at MoveOn.org from Steven Weber

]]> http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/38-degrees-are-jumping/feed/ 0 http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/irregular-verbs/ http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/2011/12/irregular-verbs/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:31:44 +0000 admin http://www.disruptiveproactivity.com/?p=547 I’m reminded of a survey JISC funded about attitudes of PhD students to lots of things to do with PhDs. It asked them about their opinions on a load of topics, including their views on open access to research. It was about 85% in favour (and there were some who didn’t know enough to answer as they’d only just started).

But, that’s not quite what they meant to ask their rolling longitudinal study. They meant to ask about open access to their research, when the percentage in favour almost inverted.

The #datadebate on open access to Science on Tuesday evening was focussing on open access to research data; but in the same way that one person’s output is another person’s input, it was only looking at one side of the coin.

 

Baroness O’Neill’s argument that there should be some consideration of the requestor goes against the fundamental notion of FoI that it is applicant blind. Monbiot (badly) made the good point that would just make the problems around FoI of climate Data worse.

But there was no discussion on the panel of how it could help them in their research, rather than simply be the burden that other people wanting your material is. I suspect it would have somewhat illuminated the discussion. For every data request, there is a requestor, and generally requests have reasons.

When I said that health data was likely to be next thing covered by whatever the PDC became, and it might go badly, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so spectacular or quick (I was mostly inferring from direction, not knowledge). In winning one debate on the trading fund data, the community discussion didn’t know that it was conflated in various heads with the personal data of the NHS. Although, in hindsight, I can see how that accident was easy to make from outside, without seeing how the coalition looks at the NHS. Treating the NHS like a really-large-trading-fund is one explanation for some positions. Decision makers with this project historyalso doesn’t inspire confidence in process.Yesterday, the Oxford Internet Institute held a meeting on the anonymised NHS data. There is legitimate cause for concern, the details aren’t available yet (and probably don’t exist), but in a way that lets No2IDgo thermal.While Professor Ross Anderson is right on the specific case he designs and demolishes, there’s an argument that his concerns can be negated for a process of a different design. It is exceptionally difficult to anonymise a dataset in the abstract without knowing what is in the dataset, or what it can be used for. More flexibility requires more disclosure control which reduces the quality of the data. For a given set of uses, for a specific level of access, any dataset can be made safe. Whether it can also be made useful is the bit that requires knowledgable thought.

I doubt Ross or anyone would argue against research being good for society. I have also seen no arguments against this that say there is no potential benefit to society in this.

The significant and legitimate disagreement is how to do this safely.

There are ways. The various Government Data Labs, HMRC, ONS VML, etc, are one option. Give accredited people access to what they legitimately ask for, under tight conditions. You have to be very specific about what you’re asking for, and it has to be commensurate benefit, impossible from any other sources, and reviewed.

Fundamentally, not having copies of the data in other places is the best way to avoid losing them.

None of the NHS discussion is about open data. I would also argue that real #opendata has a significant role to play in the transparency of the process. Who is requesting access, to what, and the outcomes they find, are all places where the strengths of opendata come into their own.

Ben Goldacre writes extensively on problems in the Pharma ecosystem, and many of the issues that Ross and others are concerned about have very close equivalents. The nice thing about Ben, is that he also offers solutions to the problems he pushes. Many of them are the transparency aims shared by the opendata movement.

Requiring publication of all requests for access, as well as open access to publications resulting (and hence, clear and obvious gaps).

Within the research world, for sensitive data, this is normal.

This data, is also, effectively impossible to release as open data freely.

On both sides of the debate, both on the NHS and the access to scientific data from Tuesday, as groups talk past each other, an old Yes Minister quote springs to mind:

I use narrow specific exemptions; He uses invalid exemptions; They are Vexatious.

Accepting that (at least in others) is a prerequisite for progress.

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Disclosure: I used to be deal a (very) little with some of the organisations linked to above as part of my old day job. I don’t now.

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