What you do matters far more than what you say.

A day after my last iPad mumblings, here are some more.

In a lazy day yesterday, i downloaded and read a couple of short books that have been on the to-read pile for a while. O’Reilly have a nice programme where if you register books you’ve bought from them, they’ll sell you an ebook version for about £3 ($4.99 – use discount code MB499), which is a bargain. As they’re primarily a tech publisher, that’s easy fro them as they have a the ability to to that to their back catalogue. And they’re ok layouts, buts they’re clearly automatically done; not manually. And there are layout issues which will take time to be fixed as ideas and best practices evolve.
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I wandered along to the apple store before work on Friday, queued for half an hour, and wandered out with a 32Gb 3G iPad. 3G because, while I’m often near wifi, I’m away from it often enough that not having it is likely to be an issue at the time that it’s most useful. Orange do a no-contract pay-per-use SIM with £10 of free credit. So far, I’ve used none of it.

It took a few hours to get chance to open the box, and then I left it syncing while I went for lunch. It was still going when I got back, because the “re-encode high-bitrate songs to 128K” button was ticked, and hence it was reencoding about 1800 songs. Very, very slowly. Unticking it, and it went fast. The lovely thing about the iPad, as an iPhone owner, is that it picks up almost all the settings from my iPhone, if you tell it to use your iPhone config as the initial thing to restore from. Some of them are different enough that it does what it thinks is sensible, and you can tweak it later. Some you’ll prefer to change yourself.

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In the next day, many people will abruptly stop the projects they’re been working on for the election. On Friday, we likely find out who our new Government will be, or possibly just start to sleep for a month.

Early next week, people will be given new jobs by the Government, either new or reshuffled. And they’ll sit down and start on whatever the first thing is.

If you got any rolethat you’d like, what is the first announcement (e.g. Independence of the Bank of England) that you’d like to happen; or if you took over an organisation/ministry, what would you say to your staff about what you’d like to see done?

We’re currently dancing in the fire of the election; remember to look at the horizon for the future.

Updated to correct youtube link.

What would a “ChatRoulette” clone for politics be like? So people get to talk to people on the issue  (e.g. digital economy bill in the UK, or health care in the US, or the UK election) without self-separating based on self interests? Would it work in all or just some types? That might be a good project to exist.

If that idea is possible, the style of this video show that you can do that sort of video, probably real time for debate group for different types of video meeting, for slightly larger groups. That would also scale and hierarchically federate rather well, and hierarchies of meetings can form.
Now that’d be a very cool demo of a html5 web app.

Twitter makes anecdotes (anecdata?) travel amongst physically dispersed groups at the same speed it travels down those in the same corridors. And, under some scenarios, gossip makes things different. In moderately political environments, where decisions get made for reasons that some may not be happy with. I wonder what would happen if EyeSpyNestle was created for those working in the entire chain who know how PR and reality are different. Secrets have a habit of getting out.

After a conversation at rewired state, here’s how to set up a EyeSpy type feed on twitter.

1. Create a gmail account (or wherever) – this is the email address you’ll publish for submissions
2. Create a twitter account – with whatever name you wish
3. Click the link in the email that twitter sends to the email address you used to register.
4. Register with http://www.tweetbymail.com/and copy the address you’re given for tweeting
5. Go to “Gmail -> Settings -> Forwarding” then in the “forward a copy of incoming mail to” and enter the tweetbymail email address and save settings
6. Go to tweetbymail, and modify the settings to only post the subject line, not the message body
7. Send a test email, and the subject should appear in your twitter stream.
8. Turn off the twitter email updates about followers and messages. Set up the other profile information on your twitter account
9. Turn off various options on your twitterbymail account.

These instructions might be missing a step (I’ve not checked them exactly against reality); drop me an email if you find a problem, or the 3 services change things.

There’s been lots of discussion about google buzz, and the privacy changes that they made in the first few days.

One thing I’ve not seen is a discussion about how, if you really care about privacy, or you talk to people who have safety issues (and I varyingly come into both categories), then it may not be the best idea to use *anything* on it’s first day.

Google buzz had a few defaults that were wrong, and they’ve been fixed in a few days.

But surely the a better, stronger, safer argument from EFF and Tactical Tech etc is not that googel must get everything perfect on day one, but that if you really care leave it a week, for things to be shaken out, and others to look.

Users who have privacy or critical concerns shouldn’t be expecting to use any services without strong technical consideration.

That’s a training issue for those who deal with the contacts, and not a service issue. Google didn’t get everything right, but I’m not sure the message from the critics is quite right either. Google fixed it in a couple of days; hopefuly tactical tech and EFF will learn too.

2009 is probably the year that WhatDoTheyKnow.com came of age, and joined TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet as being banner services from mySociety. Tom talks about how the way that core services like this often work is that you build them, let them run for a few years, and then find that they’re indispensable. WhatDoTheyKnow now accounts for over 10% of FoI requests in the UK, so it seems to have got there ahead of schedule. How long until someone copies it for their country? (New Zealand looks like it might be first).

It’s easy to look back with hindsight and see clearly that the site would become that vital to openness, but looking forward, it rarely is. One question, that we often come back to, is “what’s the next thing that has some transparency available, but which would benefit greatly from an additional amount of public engagement. That conversation is starting to happen around open data, as data.gov.uk (and data.gov) as raw data is opened, currently on faith that good things will happen. If the Treasury’s UK public spending database (COINS) database is made accessible, there will be great interest, probably from both taxpayer’s alliances, and many people in between. That’s the half of the problem getting the most progress at the moment; and it’s vital, but it’s not everything.

In the US, there is much focus on defence spending, which is as important to their politics and budget, as the NHS is to the UK. The revolving door includes examples such as a Pentagon staffer working on the rules for a programme, and then going to the defence contractor to work on their side project for vastly more money. Here, it’s NHS rule makers going to the drug companies to whom that money goes, after having had influence over what money goes into which multi-year budgets. and significant politics, that will take care and passion to engage with in a way which is beneficial to the public interest. There will be many of those areas. If a company can sell useless bomb-detectors to Iraq, similar unscrupulous individuals are likely to be doing similar in less obvious areas.

A few weeks ago, 2 MPs sent a letter suggesting that Gordon Brown should be replaced starting a media frenzy, while the labour twitterarti, possibly acting as the beginnings of a singularity, said many things, summarised by: #fail. It went nowhere. Gordon Brown may already have his evidence that realtime openness can be good, but it has downsides when the position is not quite so easy to defend. 

Stef used to say that TheyWorkForYou was the most important project that we’d likely ever work on. 3 years ago, when Julian first started building UNdemocracy.com, maybe that would be. Or is it Rob’s work on Who’s Lobbying? Something which watches who is pushing for what, where, and when. eyeSpy.MP is the crowdsourced panopticon on MPs; anyone can post what they see their MP doing by simply sending an email.

Clay Shirky talks about how change happens not when a new technology is created, but when that technology is widely available, such that the majority have access to it. Obama’s campaign in 2008 was seen as groundbreaking for the use of SMS in a campaign; while raising hundreds of millions of dollars through other media. The Haiti earthquake appeal raised $11 million in a week solely through the texts to an SMS number which charged the $10 to your phone bill.

If long term thinking in most of the world is 10,000 years, where a political cycle is a day, rather than a year, Tom’s 5 years of a waiting is a long news cycle of 1,500 days. When the public can really engage, and that will take more than data, but services, layered one atop another to provide a rich network of benefits, as people take an interest in what affects them.

PS – A sneak peak: JobCentreProPlus Experiences

DirectionlessGov was created as a joke in only a morning, just before Christmas. It didn’t take long, and hasn’t had much more work done since it launched. But, 5 years on, it’s still relevant, with roughly stable levels of media coverage and users. If you think that isn’t a long time, here’s a different way of looking at it: when DirectionlessGov launched, YouTube didn’t yet exist.

It’s been a fun time; but we do have to ask the question, given we’ve not changed what it does in 5 years, why is it still relevant and useful? Shouldn’t DirectGov have realised it exists and incorporated the simple idea into what they do by now? Or is it still just plain crazy.

One comparison that always surprises me is that our friends in the US at the Sunlight Foundation randomly complain about a different government website. Over here, we don’t seem to do that much; because almost all of them are so much better than DirectGov. Not because they’re actually good (the new FCO site is well done), but simply because DirectGov sets the bar that low.

But, I’d really rather that I didn’t have to do this any more. I’d much rather be working on other new projects, because DirectGov, with its huge budget and staff, did something better than a group of people cooked up in a morning while Stef was sleeping. Making DirectionlessGov irrelevant should not be a hard problem, but it does appear to have beaten them so far.

I hope Directionless will not get a 10th Birthday party. But I’m not going to bet against it.

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.