Tell Them What You Think

TTWYT’s development blog and related musings

The Home Office have launched a new website — MyLifeMyID — to solicit the views of young people on their ID cards scheme.

I make no secret of the fact that I think the ID cards scheme is an utterly inept folly, and neither, it would seem, do the participants on MyLifeMyID. There has been a flurry of activity since the site went live, almost all of it expressing the view that ID cards are bad, and that the respondents don’t want them.

This kind of open-ended consultation is great. It should be happening a lot more than it is. Its major benefit is its freeform nature: although the discussion may be seeded by the team running the consultation, the frame of the debate is (hopefully) not predefined — although there have been some complaints about over-zealous moderation.

There is, of course, a political problem for the Government in this kind of exercise. What will they do when their pet database is shot down in flames by informed people, whose views they have sought? And in a public medium, to boot? Undoubtedly they will spin a line about needing to educate the public, but really, anyone who decides to visit the website after the fact will see the real story for themselves. I wonder how long it will last, after the exercise is over. We shall see.

On a technical point, the site appears to be rather well put together. The design is clean and easy, the discussion is visible without registering, and you can get RSS feeds for all the posts on the forum. I’m not sure if it’s bespoke or based on some other software — does anyone know? In any event, it seems to be a bought-in solution. It’ll be interesting to see if this kind of process delivers useful results.

The Office of Public Sector Information has launched its Unlocking Service.

This is a site that allows you to submit a request for information held by a public authority to be made available for reuse by the public.

If you are aware of some public information that should be released to the baying throng, do go and post a request!

Some splendid people in the US have released a paper recommending that Government should focus on releasing its data in reusable ways, rather than designing better user experience — their thesis being that third parties will do this for them if the data is available. Funnily enough, I find myself agreeing.

The paper is a little US-centric but the principles are sound and entirely applicable to the UK. Ed Felton has posted an excerpt if you don’t fancy reading the whole thing.

The paper hits all the right buttons: let innovative private bodies come up with the best ways to display government data and compete for each other’s audiences. Make structured data available first, and then produce a government site to display it, if required — the data should be a priority, not an afterthought. Make sure that such data feeds exist in known, permanent locations. Make government sites operate on the same data they provide to others — TellThemWhatYouThink is powered by its own API. We eat our own dogfood. I wonder how many government departments can say the same^*?

I made a lot of these points when I spoke at Tower08 earlier in the year. It’s definitely true that there are people in Government who agree, but there’re still plenty that don’t — hence the unfortunate need for campaigns like Free Our Bills.

Hopefully, reports like these will continue to be written, good examples of the reuse of public data will continue to be found, and Government will eventually see the light.

¹ Ok, that’s not quite true. I know the answer, as does all of sentient life.

The MCGA have recently deployed a new version of their website. It has been significantly overhauled, and is much improved. Unfortunately, this has created some problems:

First, all links from TellThemWhatYouThink to content on the MCGA website have broken. Many government departments do not bother to ensure that their URIs remain alive after a consultation is completed. Often, they disappear quite quickly after a consultation concludes, or they are changed from something like:

www.department.gov.uk/open/someconsultation

to:

www.department.gov.uk/closed/someconsultation

This is really quite annoying. To deal with this problem, or at least, to lessen its impact, TellThemWhatYouThink checks all outgoing links to ensure that they are still alive. If they aren’t, a page is displayed with some (hopefully) useful suggestions — search for it on Google, and similar.

Unfortunately, this isn’t working with the MCGA, because they’re not returning the correct error code (404) when someone tries to access a dead link. Instead, they return a code indicating that the page has moved (302), and provide the URI of a custom error page as the new location. This is really broken: a 302 redirect should be used when content at a particular URI has moved to a new one, not when it has been removed completely.

Second, their new consultations does not exclusively contain consultations. It also contains awful, incomprehensible mess. Doubtless this is useful and meaningful to some people, but it is certainly not a consultation in the normal sense of the word: it it presumably a response. Whether or not the response itself is open to further comment, I do not know. The page doesn’t say.

Of the links on the consultation page,  only one looks to me like an actual consultation. Its structure does not bode well.

I shall review the MCGA website every so often to see if a new consultation has emerged to which the current one could be compared, and to see if any useful structure is present in the document. For now, though, I think it is broken, so I’m removing it from TellThemWhatYouThink until it can be supported again.

I had the pleasure of speaking to the assembled great and good at the Tower08 Transformational Government conference on Monday this week. I hope that video will be available at some point, and I’ll link to it if it is.

I talked, reasonably predictably, about the resusability of public data, and about why it’s important to embrace the idea that data should be made available in ways that allow people to use it, reuse it, combine it in new and clever ways and produce new, useful tools.

I also pointed out that there is an incredible amount of value to be generated from this data if it can be published in ways that allow more collaboration, and that it’ll be much cheaper in the long run if Government doesn’t try to solve all the problems. I drew a comparison between DirectGov’s fairly awful search facilities and the results produced by DirectionlessGov, which drew both heckles and laughs — an odd response. I am rather surprised to find that there actually are people out there who think that DirectGov’s search is better than Google’s. It’s a strange world we live in!

Being fairly new to the scene, I was most struck by the huge differences in people’s interpretations of what transformational government should be about. In fairness, this shouldn’t have been that surprising: everyone is interpreting it according to their vested interests, which is predictable enough.

At one end, there are people saying that everyone should own their own data, that public data is public property and should be disseminated in ways that make it as useful as possible, that massive data sharing and joined-up delivery of public services through one site is a dangerous folly.

At the other, you have people saying that we need to make identity card systems to share everyone’s data throughout government, that we should make public services usable online by having ultra-secure identification methods, that we need one place to find everything anyone might want from government, and that web 2.0, sharing and mass collaboration are merely the whimsical trends du jour.

I think it’s probably easy to tell where I stand! I’m happy to say that there is a cadre of people in government who also tend towards the former view, and that it is larger than one might think. These ideas are gaining some traction, at least, and that is quite something.

…but you probably won’t notice. Unusually, this is entirely a good thing!

I’ve been working with MoJ over the last few weeks to make some small changes to the way they publish consultations. These won’t be visible to the casual observer, but they will make it much easier for TellThemWhatYouThink to gather the details of consultations from MoJ’s webpages.

This has two consequences:

• The scraper that gathers data from MoJ is less likely to pseudorandomly break and require me to fix it;
• One day, I’ll be able to implement some new features.

I’m going to stay schtum about new features for now, mostly because I can’t launch them until more departments have updated their sites in similar ways.

In any event, I have been very pleasantly surprised by the painlessness of the whole process. Many thanks to Jeremy Gould and his colleagues. These changes happened very quickly and are definitely for the better. Kudos!

Just did a quick spot on You & Yours about the lack of central consultation publishing, the difficulty this creates in finding interesting consultations, and the consequent narrowing of public debate that occurs.

Unfortunately, they asked me not to mention the site’s URL on the air. Oh well!

Gavin, who is responsible for this tasty little number which generates an RSS feed from the Department of Health’s consultation site, is redirecting his feed to TTWYT. His site predates mine by some years and was inspired by a post at Doctors.net bemoaning the lack of RSS feeds on the DoH website. Having been at it for a while, and having only intended for it to be a stopgap measure, he’s decided to pass the torch.

Kudos to Gavin — his site is certainly the earliest one I’ve seen that produces RSS for consultations.