Transparency should not be for Blame

I was going to write a small blog post, but Peter Kawalek's discourse on what isn't said around MP expenses says what I was going to say, and far, far more elegantly.

I'm encouraged by the flurry of interest and activity surrounding the release of expenses data, but at the same time I can't help but question whether it really matters after all that.

Did people really care when this all hit the headlines? I, for one, got the impression that the weeks of blathering waffle on the radio and in the papers was being drummed up and forced on to stage by either politicians wanting to embarrass other politicians, politicians wanting to un-embarrass themselves, or media outlets looking to embarrass politicians - which, incidentally, is like taking sweets from a baby in a sweet shop.

For everyone else, talk of expenses was dull, dull, dull, and generally a good excuse to flick channel, turn off the radio, or go and do something interesting like make pasta shakers.

The point of this rant is this then: Is it important to spend time and energy releasing the kind of data that, while ideas of transparency might be in the public eye, doesn't actually either a) contribute to our understanding of the state of things, or b) offer a positive solution?

After all, the main reason for releasing expenses data is to find people to point fingers at, rather than to actually applaud MPs for not spending money. (Personally, I'm thinking of sending my MP some better coffee than the Kenco stuff he orders...)

Data can be good. Transparency can be good. But shouldn't we be careful that we're not just opening up an attitude of blame culture? Can we avoid a society transparency and monitoring are no better than CCTV or a nanny state - a culture of wrist-slapping people for their mistakes, rather than encouraging and rewarding valued behaviour?

A Step-by-step Guide to Visualising Tweets

In response to psychemedia's request, I've put up a commented version of the code used to generate Wordles and Google Timelines.

The very rough and ready process was along the lines of:

1. Run the Perl script to output Tweets into CSV format. These will be ordered in forwards chronological order. The script also generates a count for the number of tweets in each 10 minute time slot, to give some idea of activity over the course of time.


2. Import the CSV into a fresh Google docs spreadsheet.


3. I found it handy to duplicate this sheet, to play with subsets of the data e.g. just tweets for certain days.


4. For the Wordles, I simply selected the relevant column (i.e. usernames, or tweet texts), and pasted into a decent text editor. I removed half the #ukgc09 tags for tweet texts, to stop it overpowering the rest. Then I just headed over to http://www.wordle.net/create, pasted the text, and played with formatting until I got something I like the look of.


5. For the Google Timeline, I created a version of the sheet with 4 columns: tweet date/time (to become the X axis), number of tweets for this 10-minute time band (for Y axis = activity), tweet author and tweet content (for the notations). Then it was just a case of opening the "Insert gadget" menu, choosing the "Interactive Time Series Chart" gadget, and setting the Range to include all the data in these columns.
   
   I found it easiest to limit tweets to 3 days (otherwise the amount of notations causes the browser to get very slow), and to move the gadget to a separate sheet.
   
   Then I published the whole document as a web page (see the "Share" menu in the top right of the spreadsheet - you need to publish the data for the chart to work).
   

And that's it. As yet, I haven't found a way to publish just the gadget - Google have code to embed it in a page, but this doesn't seem to work.

I'm pretty sure there's a whole lot more you could do - I was just intrigued as to how activity varied through the weekend. (Perhaps it's good that the wifi on the day was down - I'm not sure how well that Time Series gadget scales...) The Wordles also seem quite a nice way to remember the day. Perhaps it might be possible to generate a similar, animated version to view word/author proliferation throughout a day as well?

Anyway, if you have any questions, leave a comment or get in touch via Twitter.

Are we competitors? Or collaborators?

This week I've managed to catch up a little with the Power of Information Taskforce "beta" report, geniously (not a real word) put into a Wordpress site allowing anyone to head over and comment on each section.

Today I also had a quick squint at the Digital Britain interim report - or the executive summary a least. Those of you wanting to check this one out in Wordpress will want to run over to the rather less official version at writetoreply.org.

Comments and access aside, what struck me was the division in attitude taken by each. On the one hand, the POIT report seems to be about working out how we can start opening the doors, giving people access to data, encouraging experimentation, and shift data from where it's created to where people want it.

On the other hand, the exec summary for the Digital Britain report seems ensconced in the idea that we need to keep up with other countries - or, preferably, lead them in all the league tables we're able to league in.

From experience and instinct, it seems to me that those who are open to collaboration are more likely to a) produce things and b) collaborate again in future. On the other hand, seeing the world as a race just means we worry more about how we're doing in relation to others, rather than in relation to ourselves.

Perhaps, in other words, we're falling behind digitally precisely because we want to keep up with others, rather than work on what actually needs fixing, and what people actually want. Competition gives us excuses, collaboration gives us energy.

If we're going to change things, we need to start seeing everyone - and by this I mean our neighbours, our councillors, our politicians, and our friends in other countries and other industries - as potential energy, as possible links. We need more collaboration, but as long as we think of collaborators as potential competitors in some made-up chart that really doesn't mean anything, we're never going to seize the full potential of those links.

I'm not saying competition is a lie, or isn't sometimes useful. Just that being "better" than others shouldn't be our motivation - we should instead simply try to be better than ourselves.

Progress doesn't care about league tables.

Playing with UKGC09 tweets and Wordle/Google

As I said before, UKGovCamp '09 was very inspiring - and got me thinking that in this day of mash-ups and widget-gidgets, one probably doesn't need to actually do much coding at all. I put my theory to the test, wrote a quick Perl script to chirp all the #ukgc09 tweets for the day of the event, the day before, and the day after, and shoe-horned the data into a couple of places which could be prettier if I had more time.

Here's a Wordle tag cloud of all tweets over the 3-day period:


(Click to view large, you'll need Java.)

For fun, here's a similar Wordle for the Tweet authors themselves:



Finally, here's a time-series plot of all the tweets over the 3 day period, on a Google graph so you can zoom in and out and click on tweets. The y-axis indicates roughly how much twitter activity there is in a 5-minute slot.

All good, clean fun.

Update Feb 16th: Here's the code I used to grab the #ukgc09 tweets - fairly simple Perl, requires a system with the JSON library and command line Curl installed (see code for links). I used a Mac with curl already installed, and added the JSON library using "perl -MCPAN -e 'install JSON'" from the terminal. YMMV.

Post-GovCamp Thoughts: What is Trust?

Rather than re-cap my sporadic notes from UK GovWeb Barcamp '09, I thought I'd try to pick out some of the more intriguing thoughts that occurred to me during the day. This is the first, and you should be able to track them through the "ukgc09" label below...

What is Trust?

Everyone agrees that Trust is Good. But can we really leave it at that? Trust in what? Why? And how? There are, I think, different answers to each of these, and those answers depend - or inform - the type of political system in play.

Trust seems to overlap a lot with Transparency these days. But I'm not sure it's as simple as that. Take a simple analogy - would you trust your friends, even if hey didn't tell you what you were doing? In fact, wouldn't you have to trust them if you couldn't see what they were doing? Is that the definition of trust? And if so, then...

a) Can we really talk about "trust" in a political system that encourages transparency? Does transparency come about precisely because we can't trust our politicians?

b) Why do we trust our friends, or others that we deem to be "trustworthy"? If we want to trust our politicians (because, let's face it, we don't just want to watch over them all the time like some kind of nanny - we want them to get on the job we've entrusted them with), then how do we go about it? What systems do we need in place to build that trust?

Maybe Trust is a judgement, based on experience, character, reputation. Sometimes we get it wrong, and someone pulls the wool over our eyes. Sometimes we need evidence to start trusting someone again. But I'm not convinced that rushing to more "openness" and transparency is necessarily the best answer. We just need to be more careful about who we trust, and ask why our eyes were covered. And we need to force politicians who do betray our trust to prove they can be trusted again, but not through openness.

We have openness. And yet we still have no trust.