Understanding Nothing

I had a fascinating discussion yesterday about Freedom of Information statistics. Apparently, in the country in question (which shall remain anonymous as the actual details here are less important than the general concept), the percentage of requests that are being rejected has gone up significantly over the last year. It seems that many people think that this is a bad thing and shows that transparency is on the decline. My immediate reaction, on the other hand, was exactly the opposite: I assumed that this was a good thing, and transparency must be much greater now than before!

To explain, let me first step back to my days at BlackStar — at the time Europe’s largest online DVD retailer. Amongst my jobs there was tracking the response times to customer support emails. But, the flip side of that was to keep a close eye on what sorts of emails we were getting, to work out what we could do to no longer need to get those emails. Every week we would see which thing was taking our care staff most time to deal with that could most easily be minimised by making the site work better in the first place. Lots of people emailing us to see if they could cancel their order? Well, then we needed to push the ability for them to cancel it themselves out as late as possible: not just from when it started to be packed, but right through until the Royal Mail delivery truck actually picked it up. Lots of people emailing us to see if we were selling an item that didn’t seem to be listed on our site? Then we found and licensed a database of every video and DVD that had ever been released, even if they were no longer available. Lots of people now emailing us confused as to why were were listing an item on the site if they couldn’t buy it? Then we came up with a service to track down used copies for people. This process repeated itself time and time again and led us to have the most customer-friendly ecommerce site in Europe. However, the natural result of this was that over time the average customer support email got more complex. The low-hanging fruit were constantly being picked off so that no-one would ever again need to ask those sorts of questions. So, by definition, most of the requests we were getting were becoming significantly harder to answer, would take longer to deal with, and had a much higher chance of being unresolvable.

I view Freedom of Information requests in much the same way. Having to make a request should be an exception. Each one is highlighting an area where a government department should have been more proactively transparent. A perfectly functioning system would never require any Freedom of Information requests, as everything that would be released on request has already been published anyway. Most countries aren’t at that stage yet, but there’s a definite trend in that direction, helped greatly by initiatives like data.gov in the US and data.gov.uk in the UK. Both of these countries (and, presumably, any others doing likewise), aren’t entirely sure yet what the most important datasets to release are, though. Patterns of Freedom of Information requests can provide great insight into that. If certain types of information are being requested more than others, that’s probably a good sign that that’s something that would benefit greatly from pre-emptive disclosure.

So, to return to the original question of statistics: what would it mean if a department (or indeed entire country) rejected 100% of all Freedom of Information requests? Well, I guess it could mean that it was the most secretive, refusing to release anything at all. But it could also mean that it’s the most open, and each request made is being rejected either because the information is already publicly available anyway, or because it’s amongst the subset of information that is exempt from disclosure. The raw numbers tell us almost nothing. As always, the truth requires much more digging behind the statistics.

Last weekend I braved a visit to the UK for Social Innovation Camp Scotland. My remit had been to be a roving expert, flitting from team to team, but I was so impressed by the first team I started working with that I ended up staying with them the whole weekend — right through to the point where we won!

Yesterday the News of the WorldSunday Times ran a rather hilarious scare-mongering piece about it. They quote Calum Steele, general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, as saying: “the police service already have ways for the public to express dissatisfaction”.

The point that this so magnificently misses, however, is that those ways aren’t good enough. Local councils already have ways for the public to report potholes, graffiti, broken streetlights etc. — yet FixMyStreet flourishes. All public authorities already have ways for the public to make Freedom of Information requests — yet in just over a year WhatDoTheyKnow has already grown to handle about 10% of all such requests. The National Health Service already have ways for the public to provide feedback — yet over 7,000 people have preferred to use Patient Opinion (who have also managed to pull off the neat trick of getting the NHS to pay them to deliver complaints to them.)

There are many reasons why someone would prefer to use these sorts of sites rather than going directly. For some it’s purely practical: in many cases it’s much easier to visit a single easy-to-use site with a consistent interface rather than navigate the more, erm, interesting, waters of official sites, some of which still sport “Beware of the Leopard” signs.

For others it’s the communal nature of these sites, where others who have experienced the same problems can chip in with support and advice, or even just learn that they’re not alone.

But for me it’s all about how transparency reverses the balance of power. For too long too many government agencies have forgotten that they are meant to be our servants, not our masters. Before they will engage with us, they make us jump through hoops that do nothing but frustrate us, in the guise of making their lives somehow easier (though usually anyone with any inkling of business processes can’t help but wonder how it possibly ever could). And more often than not, complaints get the stonewall or runaround treatment, and those who persist often get little more than a bland not-quite-apology with no indication that anyone ever took the time to engage with the matter, and certainly no sign that anything might actually change as a result.

The simple act of moving all this out into the open changes things dramatically. Everyone knows that “what gets measured gets done”, and, in the UK at least, government bodies tend to be rather sensitive to what the public at large think of them. As such, rubbish that has been left in an alleyway for weeks has a habit of suddenly being collected rather quickly when there’s a public report of it on FixMyStreet for anyone browsing that Council’s page to view. Agencies tend to be less inclined to take 6 months to respond to Freedom of Information requests when anyone looking at their WhatDoTheyKnow page could see at a glance that they never meet the required timescales. (We’ve heard, for example, that the Information Commissioner’s Office love WDTK as now they get see all manner of patterns and common problems that are missed when only dealing with complaints that get escalated to them.)

Transparency is powerful, as the UK has learned dramatically over the last couple of months. And once it’s in place, it’s extremely difficult to remove it. A central proposition of the Open Source movement has been that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow“. I wish I were witty and wise enough to come up with an equivalent for Open Government (suggestions welcome!), but even without a catch-phrase the underlying idea still holds. Government in the open will, more often than not, be better government. In some parts of the world, this is a concept that still needs to be fought for. In the rest, where there’s at least a token agreement, even if (or perhaps especially if) it’s more honour’d in the breach than the observance, then join in. Create your own site. Shine some more sunlight. You don’t need permission. You’re already in charge. Just Do It.

Matt Wardman, asking what a “bicycling Parliament” would look like, compares the salary and benefits packages for Norwegian MPs to those in the UK. I’m perennially dismayed by how infrequently this sort of comparison takes place, particularly in Britain. It’s as if there’s a feeling of “We invented modern democracy and everyone should be studying us. What could we possibly learn from anyone else?”

I’ve recently been comparing the UK’s Freedom of Information laws to those of other countries, and the answer there, as always, is “quite a lot, actually” (Particular kudos on that one to Estonia where virtually all government information is automatically electronically published and doesn’t need to be specially requested.)

Generally, however, making such comparisons is trickier than it ought to be. Unless you can find a report from some organisation that published the results of an comparison of a particular area of information, it requires lots of searching through primary sources and trying to work out whether you’re comparing like to like. And that’s not including all the cases where what the laws say bears only a vague resemblance to what actually happens.

Wikipedia is a good starting place for high level information, and provides a basic (and generally well-referenced) comparison on economics, tax rates, and some legal topics (e.g. Freedom of Information and Age of Consent).  There are also good pages gathering country-specific information from a variety of sources (e.g. visa-free travel with a British passport), but on other topics (e.g. comparing the remuneration of MPs or equivalent around the world) the information is either well hidden or not gathered.

Is there some other source for this sort of comparative study, generally? If not, should there be, and if so where? Is it just a matter of seeding pages on Wikipedia for the relevant topic, and hoping people flesh it out and keep it up to date? Or is there a better alternative?

Another great example of how to lie with statistics went by on the BBC Open Secrets blog this morning.

By law government authorities must reply to all Freedom of Information requests “promptly and in any event not later than the twentieth working day following the date of receipt”. Unfortunately many of them ignore the first half of this, and take it to mean that they can routinely take the full twenty working days to respond (I don’t have actual figures, but I suspect that graphing the responsese on WhatDoTheyKnow.com would show a disproportionately high percentage responding on the twentieth day).

The statement from the Home Office spokesman goes even further than this, though:

The Home Office is committed to responding to FOI requests within the timescales set by the Act but the complexity of our cases means that this will not always be possible. We have therefore set an internal target of 90 per cent which is achievable and challenging.

The arrogance here is breathtaking. In order to set targets that they believe they can achieve, they ignore the legal requirement, and set themselves a goal that involves breaking the law 10% of the time!

They then go on to boast about how much better they are now than a few years when they broke the law more than half the time. No doubt, if they manage to meet these new targets, at the end of the year there can be much rejoicing that “all targets have been met or surpassed”, and the small matter of the target being a completely ludicrous one in the first place can be quickly glossed over.

Recently, as part of my investigation into naming, I came across a curious entry in the Northern Ireland General Register Office FAQ:

• Question: Can I register my childs name in another language?
• Answer: You can register your childs name in any language you wish providing you use English characters.

I had already discovered that England and Scotland had no such restriction, so I was curious what the basis for it was in NI. Was it some sort of sectarian hold-over from a system that tried to discourage all those Irish names with their fadas and lenition? I could vaguely understand Chinese immigrants being forced to Anglicise their babies’ names, but would all the new Polish immigrants have to avoid all those ł’s and ś’s, or convert them to l and s, so that in generations to come there would be all sorts of pronunciation traps like with Menȝies?

Presumably some punctuation characters would be allowable, apostrophes and hyphens being fairly common, but what about others? Could someone have an ! or even an @ in their name?

So I emailed GRONI to find out.

At first they were mildly unhelpful, stating only: “The General Register Office will accomodate ‘accented’ character as long as the name registered is in english text. For example you asked if Irène would be acceptable. The General Register Office does accept such characters.”

So I asked about for a proper formal definition of what was acceptable or not, giving as a further example letters that might appear to be accented, but actually aren’t, like å, Ø, and š. Again the broader question was ignored and I was merely told that my examples “would all be ‘characters’ that the GRO could accommodate.”

Fearing a protracted game of Zendo, where I gave more and more elaborate examples and was left to puzzle out the rules, I gave up on the probing and asked whether it was a legal restriction (in which case, under what legislation), or purely a technical one in some system they use (in which case, an answer about what character set(s) or even Unicode code points would suffice).

After three further emails, all of which were completely ignored, I made a formal complaint. That was initially brushed aside, but eventually I got a response that said that, actually, names can be registered with “any Unicode character”, and although there is currently “a technical restriction on the signature field regarding Unicode characters”, this is “currently being investigated”.

So it seems things are better than I thought, and even 吳安娜 is allowable.

They still haven’t changed their FAQ though.

I have received an update from DETI on my FOI Appeal from November, where I challenged their right to withold information on the tender process for the production on an E-government Strategy (a project that eventually came in £150k over its initial budget of £30k).

Apparently “the Department is now minded to release a range of information, but before that can happen Central Procurement Directorate (CPD) will have to consult with the firms and obtain further legal opinion.”

Interestingly, one of the two decisions published by the Information Commissioner this month might also now come into play in relation to this request as well.

In the information which was provided by DETI, most names of personnel involved the process were redacted from the minutes, emails, etc as “not relevant to [my] request” or as “personal data”.

However, in Decision Notice 75489, the OIC upheld a complaint against the Department for Education and Skills, part of which related to a similar redaction. Here it was ruled:

The DfES has also claimed that the names of civil servants attending the meetings or who are otherwise referred to in the minutes is exempt information under section 40 of the Act. The Commissioner’s decision is that this personal information can be disclosed without contravening any of the principles of the Data Protection Act 198 and that therefore the exemption provided by section 40 is not engaged.

Looks like I need to go back and extend my appeal…

In June of last year, a report was provided to the Belfast City Council Policy and Resources (Members) Sub-Committee on the Pilot Study that had been carried out to investigate providing information to the Councillors electronically. Belfast City Council uses over 12.5 million sheets of copying paper per year, and a large number of these are in providing the information packs of minutes and reports to councillors for each Council, Committee and Sub-Committee meeting during the year. It was hoped that moving to an electronic distribution system might help this. (Of course the most likely outcome is that the councillors would just print the information themselves anyway, so the environmental argument probably doesn’t really hold that much weight here).

Unfortunately, the report revealed that the system had mostly been a failure. The website providing the papers was only made available from within the Council’s network, and still required multiple passwords to access. Even though it was ‘internal’, the system was very slow, and often completely unavailable, apparently due to firewall issues. The information wasn’t up-to-date, and there was no diary facility or even a schedule of meetings. As a result, some of the pilot group actually abandoned the system during the trial period

I was curious as to what exactly made the system so bad, so I made a Freedom of Information request for the manual that had been created to explain how to use the system. The system seems to have been built on Microsoft Sharepoint as a fairly straightforward Shared Workspace system, providing the majority (all?) documents in Microsoft Word format. Assuming the documentation fairly reflects the actual system, there doesn’t really appear to be anything particularly difficult about it.

I have to assume, therefore that the main problems were actually to do with the unreliable access, and the difficulties of actually accessing the system even when it was working.

The cover letter that arrived with the User Guide provides another interesting view on this, in that the Council decided that they should redact the Guide before sending it to me, in order to remove the references to the server name on which the system was running. Thus, in the Guide I received, the URL bar in each Internet Explorer screenshot has been blanked out.

The Council have claimed a Section 43 exemption for this, which permits a public authority not to disclose information if its disclosure would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any person, including the public authority holding it. They explained that providing “access to information regarding the server name would increase the risk of the security of our internal electronic systems being breached and would therefore be likely to adversely affect the commercial interests of the Council.”

The Act also requires that, even where an authority believes this, they also have to weigh it up against the public interest in disclosure. As such, the Council goes on to say that although disclosure would allow for a more informed public debate on the issue, promote accountability and transparency, and assist the public to understand and challenge Council decisions, they decided that “the public interest is not best served by putting at risk the security of our internal electronic systems.”

Although I have no particular desire to know the name of the internal server hosting this system, or the URLs of any part of the system, I find the Council’s reasoning here to be rather worrying.

Perhaps it’s just an overly paranoid approach to systems security – and the Councillors’ complaints about how the system could only be accessed from within the Council’s own network, and only then with multiple levels of passwords, certainly bear this out. But I was under the impression that it was generally accepted that security through obscurity is a bad policy.

I’m not going to appeal this one (if anyone else feels strongly about it, I’ll certainly give them a copy of the letter and let them take it up with the Council), but I think I am going to make a follow-up request for more information on the information gathered from the Councillors about the trial system. As with other things I’ve discovered in the Council minutes, I support the ideas and ideals that the Council appear to be espousing with such a system, but I think the actual execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Action Renewables is a joint venture between the DETI and Viridian to stimulate awareness and discussion of renewable energy technologies.

In 2004 they had an excellent plan to help raise awareness – power the lights of the Belfast City Hall Christmas tree using a wind-powered generator.

Everyone seems to have thought this was a good idea: the Council gets to show its committment to promoting renewable engergy, Action Renewables gets some excellent PR, and the public gets to see that renewable energy in action.

Unfortunately it seems that, much to the surprise of everyone else involved, Planning Services decided that, as the City Hall is a Listed Building, planning permission would be required for the temporary generator. And so, although the Council agreed in principle to the idea, it had to be shelved for a year to allow everyone to properly work through the details of the proposal.

However, I couldn’t find any record of this actually being brought back before the Council again this year, and so made a request to find out what had happened. The Council have confirmed that this wasn’t actually brought back before them this year, and have suggested contacting Action Renewables’ PR firm to find out what happened.

My suspicion is that this was simply forgotten about, so it’ll be interesting to see how they respond…

I’ve just been informed by Food Safety in Belfast City Council that they have plans to publish their inspection reports on the web, but are currently awaiting legal opinion to make sure it’s OK for them to volunteer this information openly (rather than as a result to a specific FoI request).

Assuming they get the go ahead they hope to have a site live in the first half of 2006 which can then be used as a pilot site so that all councils across the UK can present the information in a consistent manner.

Whilst I await the detailed response to my request, I should probably make a similar one from several of the other local councils, as lots of the restaurants I eat at semi-regularly are outside Belfast…

When I’ve visited Boston in the past I’ve always liked that the local press publish accounts of food safety inspections, and have often wondered why we don’t get that here.

I suspect that that’s about to change. The Information Commissioner has ruled that local councils have to make public their reports on the health and safety of restaurants they inspect.

No doubt it will take Belfast City Council quite some time to get around to implementing a system for doing this, so to kick things off I’ve made an FoI request for details of all inspections in the last two years.