Tell Them What You Think

TTWYT’s development blog and related musings

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.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence and the Legal Services Commission have been added today.

Unfortunately, support for NICE is pretty patchy. It’s the same old story: When their website is better,  TTWYT will be able to display more!

…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!