Understanding Nothing

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?

Having driven most of my friends insane over the last few years with my continuous ranting about what a terrible place the UK was becoming under a government who was seemingly dedicated to overthrowing three hundred years of rights in the course of a single decade, I decided I’d like to try living somewhere else for a while. To paraphrase Martin Fowler slightly, “if you can’t change your country, change your country”.

When I started looking in earnest for a suitable candidate, Estonia kept popping up as a serious contender, which surprised me slightly as all I really knew about it I’d learned from Eurovision! But the more I read the more I decided it was the place to relocate to for a while, and a visit in October sealed it.

So, as of this week, I am now resident in Tallinn. I’ve created a new blog at http://eek.tmtm.com/ for those who want to keep up with the more mundane details.

I’m sure Ed will be able to keep me adequately informed as to the important details of what’s going wrong back home, but at least for now my despair in that regard can become a little more abstract.

Late last week I found myself stuck in Christmas traffic, taking almost 45 minutes to get home from the Lisburn Road. Fortunately I was able to distract myself by listening to a debate on the radio about the upcoming water charges in Northern Ireland. For reasons that are already known to some, and will shortly be completely public, I haven’t really bothered to keep myself informed on this front, and so don’t really have any strong opinions on the matter.

However, I do still have strong opinions on the role of government in general, and was astounded at one point by the complete bizarreness of the argument being put forward by a representative of the Consumer Council, who apparently successfully fought a High Court action against the government over the manner in which the charges were being introduced. She didn’t really provide much detail on this, but in general I’m all for keeping the government in check. But she then went on to say that there needed to be much more consultation and research and the like into this whole area, and that the costs of this should be borne by the government, not by the public.

In an even more concerning twist, no-one challenged this logic at all. I still have no idea where she believes the government’s money actually comes from. This is all part of a very disturbing trend where the government is no longer seen as drawn from, working for, and paid by the public, and thus our servants, but has instead somehow switched to the opposite view, where they are in total control of the country and we are merely their servants (or, at current tax rates, well on the way to becoming their slaves).

At EuroFoo a few years ago Stefan Magdalinski explained that when they were about to launch the wonderful “They Work For You”, there was some hesitation that the name would prove too provocative. However it was felt that the name could serve as a powerful reminder of just where the balance of power actually lies. If only more people would actually believe it …

It is true that some years ago, when considering the terrorist problem in Ulster, I suggested that identity cards might be helpful, but I was persuaded by the powerful argument of the security forces to the effect that – contrary to what the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) said – any benefits that they would derive in terms of combating IRA terrorism would be greatly offset by the problems they would face in enforcing compliance were a minority of the community to resist the use of ID cards. That is a problem that we may well face if we try to introduce this measure, particularly given that – as we now know, and as the Government acknowledge – its principal purpose is to deal with unlawful terrorism. That is certainly the principal demand of the public.

The general public mistakenly believe that most members of ethnic minorities are immigrants, which is not true- of course, most of them were born here and have British nationality – and that most immigrants came here illegally, which is not true either: most came here legally. The general public therefore believe that the police need to have the power to compel people to have these cards about their person at all times, and to have the right to stop and question anyone who looks or sounds foreign, in order to get them to justify their presence in this country. I find that abhorrent, and I am astonished that that there is any Member in this House who does not find it abhorrent that our fellow citizens, just because they are a different colour or have a different accent, could be constantly required by the police – and will be, ineluctably, if this measure is on the statute book – to justify their presence in this country, simply to satisfy the mistaken belief on the part of many people that such a requirement will help to control illegal immigration, which it will not.

This is a fundamental change in the relationship between the citizen and the state. Such a change has only ever been introduced in countries that had authoritarian, fascist or communist Governments. It has never been introduced in a country with a common-law system, and I hope that we will not set the appalling example of adopting that system here today.

– Peter Lilley, Commons Debate on ID cards, 28 June

(The wonderful reasons why the DUP are opposing this bill, even though they believe in ID cards, can be found further up the page!)

I’ve been ranting all week about the latest radio advert from Invest Northern Ireland. They’ve been spending a lot of money over the last few months encouraging people to start their own businesses. Most of these are terrible, but the latest one irritates me more than the rest. The basic premise is that you shouldn’t keep putting things off – especially starting a business. If you leave it another year someone else may come up with your idea and then it’ll be too late.

When I used to be invited to give talks to people thinking of starting up their own business I used to encounter people who wouldn’t even tell the course organiser what their idea was for fear of it being stolen. I always told these people that if they expected to succeed purely on the strength of an idea they should just go home, because making a successful business was much more about the strength of the execution than the strength of the idea. For some reason this never seemed to go down well. And now I find that INI are promoting this nonsense in a major radio campaign!

Thus I was pleased today to see a link over on the xPlane blog to an article on this very topic:

In 1967, an angel investor, Fred Adler, received over 50 business plans for entrepreneurs who proposed to start microcomputer firms. Only one of the teams presenting this idea ever made it. Its name was Data General. But why did so many entrepreneurs pitching a plan to sell microcomputers either never receive funding or if they were funded, never succeed? They didn’t make it not because the idea was per se bad or didn’t have the potential to be a good opportunity. It was a great idea and enormous opportunity. Rather, it was because the other entrepreneurial teams were unable to execute.

I wanted to link to this just because of the title. But it’s actually quite interesting:

As implemented, there is a single number and customer service center that customers use to get answers to all their city questions and help with any problems.

Most Government things in Belfast require you to phone about 4 different numbers before you get the wrong people. I’ve a hideous story about a speeding ticket that I’ll tell once it’s finished. I keep wanting to write it up, but it keeps getting more and more insane…

The UK courts project is floundering. A few years ago ICL won the contract to modernise the UK Courts technology systems, by writing an entire new system for document sharing etc. This was heralded as a great move for the entire country, as many cases are delayed because of paperwork errors, leading to an increase in the numbers of prisoners having to be held on remand, and increasing the risk of criminals re-offending before cases are heard.

As the only company in the running, ICL signed an £183m contract. 2 years later they decided that it would take 12 years, instead of 8, and should actually cost £319m. They also cunningly wrote the contract so that somewhere in the region of half of this be triggerable for setting up the infrastructure for this (installing Microsoft Office on some new PCs).

But, in a recent memo, the Lord Chancellor’s Department has said, “Despite the best efforts of all those involved we have been unable to reach an agreement with Fujitsu on a proposition for Libra which represents value for money and which we can afford.”

If this does all collapse, then UK taxpayers will have paid ICL/Fujitsu over one hundred million pounds to set up some computers and install Microsoft Office on them – in many cases meaning that courts workers have to have two computers on their desk – one to access the court records on the old system, and one to do their email and word processing etc!

Time to write to my MP, methinks.