One of the things we like talking about at Public-i is identity . That’s because, for governmental authorities – whether local, regional, national or supra-national – it’s a big deal.

After all, having confidence that the people you are engaging online are relevant to you is important. To give a blunt example, there’s no point having 20,000 followers on Twitter if all of them have no relationship with your authority.

That said, of course, just because someone doesn’t live in your constituency doesn’t mean that they aren’t important: What if they work or study there? What if they own a cottage or a flat there? What if they have elderly relatives who live there and need round-the-clock care?

It’s these sorts of issues – among very many others – that a project we’re involved in, Scoping the Single European Digital Identity Community (SSEDIC, for short), has been set up to consider. As the name broadly implies, this isn’t a project to create a European single digital identity, but simply the process of bringing together a community of experts who will consider what that might look like.

At Public-i, we’ll be helping to find the people who will be those experts. In Eurospeak that is part of ‘Building a Thematic Network for European eID’, and it’ll take into account views from a very wide range of people – from government, society, business, leisure, finance and transport. For Public-i, that is going to be about finding folk who, like us, are interested in eParticipation – whether they’re our customers, friends or our competitors.

Getting involved

Of course, it’s not just about finding them, but will also involve talking about the SSEDIC. Indeed we hope that at least in some ways we can start to contribute to that conversation ourselves. And we hope you will too!

A good (first) way to get involved is by completing this survey – but this is for people who are really interested in this issue and already feel that they can engage.

For the time being, we’d also like to hear what people think about the project and how a European Singal ID can help improve eParticipation projects. Check the website and the documentation here to find out more. We’ll be getting in touch with people, but don’t hesitate to tell us what you think by commenting below.

Tags:

• eParticipation
• European Union
• Google
• Government
• Identity document
• Online Communities
• SSEDIC

We were at the LG Annual Conference last week and I just wanted to capture some observations. Firstly – and most notably – it’s the first time that a serving prime minister has been there and it did bring a frisson to delegates. It was clear, however, that the audience for his speech was not in the room and this was a platform to talk to the national press about pension reform and the planned strikes. Am I naive to find this a bit insulting to the delegates? No attempt to demystify the Big Society, no talk about economic reform and economic localism, but a lot of talk about other people’s pensions. I was disappointed and I guess resigned to the fact that Cameron does, indeed, intend to leave us to Mr Pickles’ mercy. Eek.

I missed Nick Clegg because I was busy on the stand, but did see Ed Miliband give a variation of the speech we heard a number of times that week – and then answer questions very fluently.

There were fewer people there than usual, more day delegates and smaller groups from councils. That isn’t surprising given the climate. However the atmosphere was actually positive – far more so than last year when (most) people still had a sense of euphoria from the election but no real idea what the impending cuts were going to mean. This year the mood was more settled and people are clearly getting through the planning and adjustment process.

With respect to our conversations – about using new technologies to support democratic and civic engagement – it was interesting how much more open people were to doing things differently. People who have repeatedly told us they were not interested, wanted to talk about webcasting and we had some lengthy conversations about how councils can respond to the fact that communities are increasingly active online. I don’t know if it’s because of more younger members, the financial pressures, or a general social change in technology adoption, but there was definitely something in the air.

And, finally, a few more inwardly focused points for us as a business…

This is a conference that we have attended for nearly 10 years and so we know (and like!) a lot of people. When I became chief executive last year and we started to widen our strategic direction beyond webcasting a lot of people were very kind about it but in a polite way. They really couldn’t see the difference. What was brilliant for us this year was that we were able to show a huge change in our range and types of products and a much more useful set of solutions to help engage more people in the decision people process. Lots of the people who came to the stand because they know us left with information and ideas that they were excited about. I just wanted to finish by thanking the team here for working so hard over the last 18 months to make this happen.

Tags:

• Citizenscape
• Connect
• David Cameron
• Ed Miliband
• Eric Pickles
• LGConf11
• Nick Clegg

I was at the alphagov pre-launch event last week as a representative of the ‘social media types who work with local govenment’ category (i think!) – very interesting!!

For those of you who don’t know – alphagov is the project answer to Martha Lane Fox’s entirely sensible suggestion that you need one government website and not hundreds.

As you’ll see below this is a real alpha release and is in no way complete – and for those of us who have been saying that government should get more agile and release early and get feedback this is a great step.

The project has actually taken the brief in a slightly different direction and rather than create another leviathan of a site they have looked at creating a set of tools that can sit on top of content and provide a single interface.  The overall approach is spot on – they have made the whole thing about search and about taking people straight to the content that people want.  You don’t want a relationship with a government website, you want to get in and get out with the minimum feeling of contamination from the experience.  There are some brilliant principles in play here as they design for the majority case and not the edge (example given was driving licences and the fact it’s crazy to pretend that a specialist hgv licence should be treated the same as ‘my first driving test’ given the differences in volumes of requests).

There is also an attempt to clean up some of the madly complex language that information is presented within and to use forms rather than complex explanations (for example calculating sick pay based on dates and offering a sample answer, rather than making you read through and figure it out).  You can see an example below:

They have also made the bold, but I think entirely practical decision to deal with accessibility once they have a clear view of user behaviour rather than making it part of the alpha release. This is a decision that will be debated a great deal, but at least they have been clear and up-front about what they have achieved in this area.  I also salute their rather clear decision to ignore the existence of IE6 altogether – I wish more people would do the same.

The team has been working quickly and agilely to get an alpha build together – and they have done an excellent job.  If anything, parts of the site look more beta than alpha, which is a credit to whoever is doing design (though may, of course, bite them on the arse when people think it’s finished – you really can’t win!!!).  I think we should also really appreciate the fact that they are releasing an alpha at all, given government’s obsession with the launch and the (false) idea that you can completely finish a website before launching it.  It offers hope that government can ‘do digital’ differently and, before we all wade in to explain how we would do it better, I think we should all be applauding the fact that they have got this far with a very different project approach.

So: no criticisms, but a few observations and suggestions at this point.

• They are going to get a lot of flak – some will be the usual waste of government stuff, some will be differences of opinion and some will be useful suggestions.  I think they need to have this debate in public and not do the government huddle behind closed doors. I think it was quite right to keep things private until this point, but they need to be open and welcoming of feedback for this next stage – and then hide themselves away again for the next build phase. Don’t fiddle with the alpha – put time into explaining thinking (and not getting bogged down in defending it), getting feedback and talking to people at all different levels of technical knowledge, experience and influence. Do some usability testing with real people and then go back to the room for another couple of months, synthesise it and do your next version.  A user forum would work well so they can have the debate largely on their own turf.
• I personally don’t think you need to segment the audience. Instead, I think you should be returning choices where audience matters, but in most cases you should offer up the simplest information – and provide a clear route to drill down and refine the search. And I’m not sure it helps to use different language for the business community – you should use the simplest language you can, no matter who the audience is.
• I think my greatest concern is the faith that the approach shows in the ability to predict what people want from search terms – and to predict what audience they are from.  The concern is that by trying to make things easier for people you frustrate them enormously when you get it wrong.  I think I am saying that if the tech is not perfect tell people and involve them in the solution. Ask them if you have the right results and then offer them choices, both in terms of your best guess, but also the chance to refine the terms. I find this confidence in search a bit (worryingly) technologically evangelical – but this is something that should get resolved in user testing.
• It was interesting to see the approach to departmental websites and grouping themes like ‘policy’ or ‘data’ across departments –  rather than in the drill down. Central government spends way too much on their basic web presence and I think this approach is spot on – though it will clearly need some very strong leadership to rip these different websites (and their budgets) out of individual department hands.
• Really good approach to presenting policies – and design head-on with the fact that ‘whose policy is it?’ may not have an obvious answer. Dealing with the grey areas is the most difficult part of any project like this and the team has made lots of really sensible decisions about this kind of stuff.

My last point is from the perspective of someone who is focused on trying to get people involved in decision making. I think the site should make it clearer who is accountable for the bit of government you have found. I’m not talking about a complaints process, which as Will Perrin pointed out quite rightly you may need at a transaction level, but an opportunity to react to bits of government policy that you understand but don’t agree with. If I have one criticism of the project, it’s the fact that it seems to have a customer, not a citizen view of the user.  This is an expedient and practical decision as with many interactions we are customers and given timescales I can see why it’s this way. But I wouldn’t want this model to be embedded as I think this is another important aspect of doing things differently.

At the point where you end up at a dead end within ‘The System’ and you think the process is just wrong then you should have the option to do something about it – otherwise your next click is to post a cross update on your Facebook page. Give people a ‘I want to change this’ button and then offer them the chance to email their MP if it’s personal or make a suggestion if it’s process change. You could point them to related consultations and you could tell them how things could change. This could be an elaborate  tease like the futile experience of complaining to a mobile phone company or it could point out to people that ultimately, as citizens, we have a little bit of responsibility for the way things are.

I often go on about the need for government to (urgently) become more agile. So, big congratulations to alphagov for getting government to do that and quickly releasing a really good alpha version of a complex proposition – and then asking people what they think. It’s not perfect and it’s not finished – and that is progress. Looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Tags:

• Agile software development
• Cabinet Office
• David Cameron
• Directgov
• E-Government
• Martha Lane Fox
• Ofcom
• pubsecagile
• Twitter

At 5am this morning Greater Manchester Police completed a grand – and furiously busy – experiment in social media-based transparency. Using four separate twitter profiles, two staff from the constabulary’s PR department tweeted all 3,200 incidents that the force’s officers responded to in a 24-hour period.

According to PublicTechnology.com, the force’s twitter following went from 3,000-odd to more than 17,000 followers – impressive, clearly, but what was the force attempting to achieve with this flood of tweets?

Well, on Greater Manchester Police’s website, the Chief Constable Peter Fahy used a YouTube video to say in advance of the experiment that he hoped it would ‘give the public a better understanding of what their police officers are doing today’.

He continued:

Although crime is a very important part of what we do, we do much else besides. We are very much the agency of last resort and a big part of our work load is related to wider social problems of alcohol, drugs and mental health – and people who are having problems with their relationships.

What I found particularly interesting, however, was the next bit of his explanation…

So through this exercise we hope to give the public a better picture of what is the reality of day-to-day workload and [we are] also saying that in the current debate about our public spending there are a lot of repeat individuals, families, locations that agencies are having to deal with and, therefore, if we were funded and measured in a different way, we feel that we could actually be more effective and do our best to maintain the service to the public in the difficult financial times to come.

So, the idea behind the great tweet out wasn’t just to make it more obvious what the police do, but to start to pose some fairly interesting questions about the responsibilities the police have and how it is expected to meet these expectations. A message, then, that wasn’t just aimed at the public, but at the government.

As Peter Fahy suggests in his statement, the UK’s police forces face a difficult time ahead. In the autumn spending review next week (October 20, 2010), we expect forces will be asked to find cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent. Since staffing accounts for about 80 per cent of police spending, that will have a profound impact on the way our police services operate. What the chief constable of one of Britain’s biggest forces appears to be saying is: we need better measurement of the police’s social value i.e. where it really makes a difference. It seems that he thinks this is missing at the moment and this little experiment will help provoke a rather better informed debate about these issues.

So has it? Well, frankly, it’s hard to tell. A deluge of tweets does not represent an in-depth bit of research. Nor, indeed, is it that easily digested – although someone must already have put all the tweets into a spreadsheet and be looking to make a few, more considered, observations about GMP’s 24 hours. (UPDATE: Well, someone has already made it easily digestible. Working at the Scraperwiki Manchester Hacks and Hackers Day, Enrico Zini and Yuwei Lin turned a dataset of tweets assembled by the Guardian‘s Michael Brunton-Spall from the GMP 24 event into a JSON dataset, producing a simple search tool to look through the data. While that isn’t running now (they didn’t have the resources to keep it going), they’ve made the code available on a GPL licence on Enrico’s blog, here. Thanks very much to Andrew Cater – who commented to tell me about all of this).

While Greater Manchester Police is demonstrating a level of innovation in its approach to social media, it remains to be seen whether this will be turned into a truly meaningful conversation about its priorities, its service and its funding.

But, as a PR exercise, coming only a few days before the government makes its announcement about where cuts to the public purse will be made, it may have been rather clever. Certainly, it generated some considerable media attention – and an accompanying twitter storm (not to mention quite a few blog posts, like this one). Such activity, and the accompanying conversation, can’t hurt Chief Constable Fahy’s argument one little bit (if you leave aside a few poorly considered moans about it in itself being a waste of money, like this one). And, if it does lead to a better informed debate, it’s to be applauded.

Tags:

• Autumn Spending Review
• Greater Manchester Police
• Police
• Policing
• Social media
• Twitter

This piece is not about the substantive changes in local government that are planned or underway – budget cuts, place based budgeting, devolution of regional bodies to local councils, LEPs, community empowerment, the ‘Big Society’ etc.

Nor is it about the things that need to change in the structure and financing of local service delivery – greater flexibility, powers of competence, reform of council tax, improved transparency in the grant regime, local income tax, green taxation, localisation of business rates, abolition of capping etc.

And, it is most definitely not about size, number and structure of councils.

It is about sharpening our appetite for change and honing the leadership skills that will be required to inspire, deliver and cope with the really radical change that will surely be required if local government is to have any future at all.

So what would a successful council of the future be like?

• Digitally ingrained – Citizens are engaging less and less with the formal democratic process at a time when online participation in informal social websites such as FaceBook, YouTube and Twitter is expanding at a remarkable rate. Councils will embrace the virtual town hall.
• Selfless not sovereign – Valuing delivery more than autonomy and structure.
• Hungry  for change  - ‘When one is hungry one is not choosy about food’.
• Coherent amidst chaos – Managing stability whilst fostering controlled instability is disruptive by its nature.  The neurobiology of performance amidst adversity is about spiritual intelligence: energy, enthusiasm and hopefulness.
• Unreasonably committed to innovation – Some uncomfortable ideas, when they take hold, will be national and perhaps global benchmarks of public service innovation.  Like them or hate them  ’John Lewis Council’ (Lambeth) and ‘Easy Council’ (Barnet) push the envelope.

Arguably, only really radical, risky and objectionable change will save local government.

“If what you are planning to do does not attract objections on the grounds that it is too radical and too dangerous, it will not have the power to change the world”. Bruce Sterling – Emerging Trends Conference, San Diego, 2006.

If this was easy, everyone would be doing it.  The fact is, few are.  The reason it’s not easy is that radical  innovation is not just a matter of ‘thought leadership’ and its application in practice.  New ideas emerge all the time, but just because you can think it or build a prototype of it doesn’t mean that people will adopt it. Innovation is as much a social construction of our future as it is a technical reality. To innovate our way out of the recession, people and organisations have to value the future possibilities more than they value the present and the past.

What this recession will do – hopefully – is make it impossible for us to cling to the past and develop ‘future people’.  These organisational alchemists will be undaunted by risks and disruption, inspired by adversity and comfortable in the new constitutional spaces of co-production and collaboration.  They will lead without the trappings of authority, will disrupt orthodoxy and nurture emotional resilience to change amongst their staff.

Tags:

• Council Tax
• Facebook
• Government
• Local government
• Twitter
• YouTube