Sphereless

"Open Data" Needs to Die

2012-01-23T18:42:00.002Z

Amongst all the UK GovCamp 2012 buzz, point #18 from Tom Sprints' write-up caught me as being one of the more curious:

18. A lot of “open data” sessions just seemed to me to be variations on a theme, and didn’t sell themselves to me at all. I am therefore worried that some of those discussions are either very esoteric, or insufficiently informed by people who understand the issues rather than the tech.

Where have we come from?

As a data geek (I like the word "mechanic" myself), it's been intriguing to see the conversation around "open data" change over successive GovCamps. A few years back, the question was heartily "How can we get hold of data?" - Tim Berners-Lee was starting out on his comeback tour, and mySociety were beginning to show that data could be made useful with some clever tools.

As I remember it (likely in a fairly ~~biased~~ narrative way), the conversation then switched fairly rapidly into "What's the best way to open up data?" - in terms of what data and what platforms were most useful to developers. Suddenly data stores had (experimental) APIs, and the public realm had massive amounts of spending data. There was some loose rhetoric about transparency and accountability, while developers picked things apart with fine Excel toothcombs.

Then things got more interesting, as it turned out everything that had happened so far didn't automagically lead to Amazing Stuff Happening. The question became a necessary "So what?" - as if transparency and accountability weren't enough by themselves! The topic turned to users and reasons and (more often) to interesting examples. Surely, somebody was clamouring for this stuff after all this?

I'm kind of hoping this explains something about why "open data" sessions are a bit fumbly-jumbly now.

Open data got complicated, quickly. Because data is complicated. Jump to the present, and conversations rapidly flit between all of the above either because everybody is involved at the same time, or the people who should be involved, aren't.

"Open Data" is harmful

Or both. The paradox is that it's become difficult to talk about open data firstly because those who were talking about it from one point of view are now talking about it from many points of view. And secondly because those who weren't talking about it before aren't talking about it now. Data silos still exist. Most people still use Excel. Statisticians still output reports.

The term "open data" is meaningless now. Not just meaningless - actively harmful. If you're used to talking about it, then the conversation has begun to fragment and coalesce around more subtle outcrops. And if you're not used to talking about it, then you're put off because nobody can explain what it means - and more importantly, what it means to you. So you carry on as normal.

My session at GovCamp on Data Engagement was, in retrospect, an attempt to get back to the previous question of "So what?". What I really want to do is fence the conversation off from the technical, economic and political aspects of data (although I'm still into all these things) and focus on the why. I desperately tried not to use the term "open data" because I think it would have distracted the discussion. (To be honest, I wanted to find something better than "data engagement" too, hence the phrase "Everyday data".)

And I'm really glad that some of the idea got taken up on day 2 by Tim Davies and others. A "Charter" for engaging with data really starts to delve into how we think about how to make data useful.

I admit I'm a little afraid that the term "Open Data Engagement" just makes the discussion even more vague. What does that mean to you if you have no idea what it is, or what Open Data is supposed to be? Is it all at risk of becoming another buzzword? What about "Data Usability", or "Public Data Engagement"? I'm still aware just how much I hate the terms "Public Understanding of Science" and "Public Engagement with Science". Are we going round in circles?

Should we call a Stats Spade a Stats Spade?

Many people with useful, everyday data and databases really don't think in terms of data. Because the data is about stuff they know, they think of it as "information". Maybe even a "resource". But ask them what "data" they have and they'll probably give you a back-up of their website.

One of the interesting points coming out of the Data Engagement session was that people deal with data all the time - think football, Formula 1, house prices, etc. But do people even refer to this as "data"? Or - more likely - do they call them "stats"? Mention "stats" and people think of tables, averages, and counts.

In a way, "stats" makes sense where "data" doesn't. "Information" makes sense where "data" doesn't. "Data" is tricky because it's all of this and more. It's figures, it's formats, it's visualisations. No wonder even those who understand this get confused when talking to each other. The more you try to take "Data" into the real world, the less the term applies.

Should the "open data" moniker be scrapped instead of more "useful" terms like these? Would this make talking about implementing it more difficult, or easier? After all, any conversation on how to make data useful quickly turns away from talk of even databases and on to other issues (standards, protocols, best practice, comprehension).

Maybe if we talk about our bus times as "public information", and spending figures as "spending figures" then people will be interested in it, and we can stop trying to work out what "open" means.

Maybe.

UKGovCamp 2012 - 5x5 (plus one)

2012-01-22T20:36:00.001Z

So Friday and Saturday were host to the indispensable UKGovCamp 2012 - a huge gathering of people interested in making public stuff better with technology, roughly speaking. I got along to the Friday day all about talking (rather than Saturday's doing), and gorged myself on thoughtmeat. Seriously, I was feeling dizzy by lunchtime.

Somehow I think I managed to carry on talking sensibly enough to feel useful. I also took notes and recordings of the sessions I was in, but here are 5 points from each that struck some kind of chord with me. They're a mix of things people said, and stuff I thought, but I think I can remember which was which.

I've put up audio from each session here.

Session 1: Data Viz + maps issues + challenges
- Vicky Sargent

This seemed to focus largely on data quality.

Poor quality data can be exposed through openness.
Different users/uses want different levels of quality/reliability.
Bringing together those who want reliability with those who want usability is hard.
Getting useful "infoporn" is hard.
Start by knowing what you're trying to achieve.

Session 2: Open Data as a Business Model
- John Sheridan

This went into how to sustainably fund both open data, and businesses based on it.

It's not just a choice between "open"/public and "closed"/private.
Perceptions of data reliability (including being up-to-date) are inherently linked to data management and its economics.
i.e. Some people think you need a tightly controlled team / contract / business model to maintain data quality... Whereas others think openness is a viable form of reliability. (Cf. Wikipedia "vs" Encyclopedia Brittanica)
Licensing offers multiple funding models depending on end-user, a la open source software. Chris Taggart doing a lot of this with openlylocal.com
Does the data business model depend on the size/resources of the dataset/audience?

Session 3: LinkedGov tool to clean up & link data!
- Dan Paul Smith

This was a demonstration of the really impressive work being put together by @LinkedGov (http://www.linkedgov.org).

Software that extends Google Refine to let you easily link data structures and tidy data.
If letting people edit data ("cleaning", "linking", etc), you have to be careful not to introduce "new" data such as assumed defaults for new values.
Suddenly linked/semantic data is starting to look really powerful. I'm almost converted :-)
The ability to "modularise" links to other external data lists has huge implications for data as a Distributed Ecosystem.
Metadata for what's been edited needs to be accessible and clear, to understand who's done what over the lifetime of a dataset.

Session 4: Data Engagement / Everyday Data
- me

This was an attempt to think about how to get data into something everyday and, not perceived as a "technical" thing. "Slides" and audio available.

People love data if it's about something they love - e.g. football, F1, sales...
Language used is massively important - often 2 groups will talk about the same thing, but in totally different ways.
A range of "necessary" precision was brought up again - how can you transform the complexity of data into simplicity without misleading?
Does data visualisation have to be 'comprehensively accurate', or can it just be enough to get people to ask more questions?
Give data context and it's easier to turn data into feedback and so learn from it.

There were some great examples, and some amazing ideas coming out of this for me, which I'll blogpost properly soon.

Session 5: Network society engagement
- Catherine Howe

This wasn't to do with data at all... This was about the advantages offered by moving to a more networked, more engaging approach to decision-making.

Catherine claims that the current system of engagement/consultation is actually a method to mitigate our own ongoing disappointment in political participation.
If done better, political participation can be enlightening, rewarding, and fun.
Bringing people together as part of the consultation process can mean they understand it/others more, and are less disappointed if they don't get what they want.
Feedback as part of the consultation is vital to success. In effect, consultation moves towards conversation rather than just gathering views. (Does this that changing people's views is an objective of a networked approach? Does this raise questions around the accuracy of the final result, or does a more involved process and more post-process feedback negate this?)
While I generally agree, I wasn't sure how much success from trials was down to using a networked approach, and how much was down to just using a different approach (i.e. novelty can often be fun in itself) - more consultation iterations needed?

I'm running out of time so won't go over Mike Bracken's speech or the Closing Note. Here are 5 random, general points instead:

The data landscape is slowly coming together in my head. I know I know something important about it, but I don't know what it is yet. Like Cooper in Twin Peaks. You know, when he has that dream. I need to mull it over and chuck some rocks at a bottle.
It feels weird not having twitter usernames on name tags.
GovCampers are a bunch of (mostly beardless) ale-swillers. Much to the surprise of the pub.
The engineering/development going into the new gov.uk single domain is seriously good.
The medium T-shirts this year are definitely smaller than the medium T-shirts last year. Or did I get a ladies' one?

Pintless Debate

2012-01-13T21:52:00.000Z

[In which the debate for/against the regulation of pub companies is ultimately broken down into the futility of arguments.]

The Parliamentary debate on the future of pub licenses has me hooked. Living in Brighton, it's difficult to describe, or even imagine, just what effect local pubs have on every day life - from evening entertainment, to decent food, to convenient meeting and organising places, to Damned Good Beer.

So it was great to see my MP Caroline Lucas weighing in with views from the Landlord of the Greys in Hanover - in fact, this was why I clicked through to the rest of the debate.

Two Pints, Please

In a nutshell, the debate is a classic "is market self-regulation enough?" argument. Most voices in this one argue that large pub companies ("pubco's") have too much power when it comes to setting a) rents for licensees, and b) rules and rates for "guest beers" and other things that help make pubs "interesting" (or affordable).

The motion moves for regulation to free up licensees from this "beer tie" and to review the self-regulatory nature pubs by an independent body.

But as you read through, it becomes clear that the debate is really about:

1. BIS' response to CAMRA's complaint appearing to be taken fairly word-for-word from a BBPA (British Beer & Pub Association) submission without much further input - recently discovered through an FOI request.

2. The Government's apparently "weak" action of apparently rubber-stamping the self-regulatory guidelines as what should constitute the statutory code. (See Adrian Bailey's comment.)

3. What seem to be otherwise fairly "liquid" but one-sided negotiations between tenants/licensees and the pubco's (see here for example).

Brian Binley makes a very interesting point about the unsustainable debt model used by pubco's basically being passed on to landlords - and hence on to consumers, who unsurprisingly either go to a cheaper local pub (if one exists) or the supermarket. Andrew Bridgen goes on to call it "almost feudal".

How [the] debate rages

But over time, the debate threatens to emerge from its pretence of being about the pub model, and into an attack on the political process that is driving it (or being driven by it). At this point, the debate breaks down into 3 types of discourse:

1. Anecdotal/qualitative rhetoric: Stories from constituents, traders, etc. I suggest that the Select Committees' evidence also falls under this as they adopt an "interview" style approach. (Also, here's a good SC report from 2009 on the matter.)

2. Statistical evidence for/against intervention: Ed Davey seems to use stats more than others, for example.

3. Attacks against process and character: With the nature of the BIS response and its apparent "close ties" to the BBPA being thrown open by the FoI request above, this is a third line of argument which seeks to undermine both of the above, on matters of personal principle.

There are also appeals to "external" authority. The OFT, for instance, seem keen not to be involved, which leads some to say they're not relevant, but others to say this merely means regulation has no place in an apparently successful market.

Welcome to politics. What's interesting is how - or if - each of these types of argument "trump" each other. In other words, should we give pubs more choice over beer because

a) a lot of people say it's a problem?

b) data suggests there is a link between lack of freedom, and pubs closing?

c) the people behind the non-choice have too much economic and political power?

In my mind, this is a bit of a paper-scissors-stone situation. Can any of these really be more important than the others, or do they just lead to a cycle of disagreement? How much do each of these - or all of them combined - duly influence any voting on the matter? And should I really have bought that four-pack of Speckled Hen from Sainsbury's today?

Exit, Stage Left

I also liked the general response to Ed Davey's comment which reads a little like the script for a bad school comedy play:

Brian Binley: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Edward Davey: No, I want to make some progress.
[Hon. Members: “Oh!”]

Also:

Martin Horwood: Will my hon. Friend give way?
Edward Davey: No, but I will in a second.
Brian Binley: Will the Minister give way now?

Occupy is not equality, it is Equality.

2011-10-30T22:31:00.002Z

Read Occupy London is a nursery for the mind by Madeleine Bunting at the Guardian. Think this through.

Let's be clear. The Occupy movement is not about equality. Sure, they talk of "the 99%", but this is more a description of the world around them, rather than who should act.

It is not about forcing a one-size-fits-all, globally-empowering solution, but about the personal ability to build a better world where you are. The most important message coming out of the Occupy movement is that there is no global solution. There is only what you can do.

Those striving for equality rely on some kind of Universal Right - but such Rights always require a centralised and authoritative power to maintain that equality. Capitalism "fought" against communism with this very tenet in mind - that the network is more sustainable and more adaptable than a single viewpoint.

Now maybe history is being repeated - the New Network is flexing its strength around an old one that has crystallised. The old market has laid out its flaws for all to see (imbalance, resource exploitation, workforce exploitation, future exploitation), and challenges the centralised authorities (the State) to fix them. The enemy and the saviour are on the same side.

The Occupy movement is not about equality as we understand it because requires effort, and responsibility, and right now, the motivation to employ this effort scattered between individuals. Instead, t is about inspiration. The idea of "equality" is shifted fundamentally, from a notion of identicality - in terms of living arrangements, in terms of spending power, in terms of life expectancy - to a notion of potential.

The difference is huge. It almost seems to speak more to traditional market values than those who defend the markets as they stand. The idea that you get out what you put in, and that if you create true value then you will be valued. Be smart. Be authentic. Be happy. Be hard-working. Be connected. Be helpful. All of these are network values.

And all of these are values inherent to each and every one of us, not "skills" that we "choose" to get "taught".

Commonality is the new equality. Everything else - how you live, how you die - is just what you do with it.

The Networked Knowledge Worker in the 21st Century

2011-10-02T22:12:00.000+01:00

Harold Jarche talks about the new knowledge-worker (via @DavidGurteen) as defined by Neal Gorenflo, highlighting the role and importance of information sharing, systems thinking/complexity and mixable politics to a certain (emerging?) group of people.

But I like the way Harold ties the idea into a lot of what I've been thinking - that this kind of "worker" is a big part of the puzzle staring us in the face. He raises the question of how companies and organisations can attract such a person, and says they need to become more caring, flexible and ethical to take advantage.

But why is this such an important question?

Because right now, it feels like we've run out of map. We can see a cliff looming, built out of superfluous bureaucracy, management fear, economic uncertainty, and political distrust. There's no map, no plan. Optimism is the main strategy still running, and another bit of it drops off the cliff every week.

Knowledge workers, as outlined above, are fundamental to where we go next, for the following reasons:

We need to know what the possibilities and the alternatives are. The "solutions" we've been relying on at all levels - economic cutbacks, party politics, representative democracy, quantitative easing, debt-first economics... - will take either a long time, or will continue to entrench non-solutions. New solutions, or new takes on existing solutions, require local/small-scale thought and experimentation, but rapid communication to interested parties, like any other meme.
We need to understand a more diverse population and set of viewpoints. Maintaining a status quo "intended audience", or idea of what constitutes the "general public", will result in outdated and narrow answers. To caveat, I think there's always a danger of birds of a feather forming into networks, rather than diversity being realised inherently, but at the same time networks are key to "making diversity more transparent". The old, broadcast-only models of understanding who we are are no longer relevant or useful.
We need to maintain a systemic perspective. This is tricky, because we're so unused to organic modes of thought. We like to simplify in order to communicate and persuade, but over-simplification is useless - it leads to faulty solutions and worse, to solutions that create new problems. The logical approach of a single person is irrelevant when dealing with organic systems. The "wisdom of the crowds" needs to step up to meet the way of the world - some people will have some of the solution, but networking is the only way we can bring the pieces together.

Blocking the transfer of ideas happens all over the place for all sorts of reasons, good and bad. Yes, it's bad to inflict rapid change on people. Yes, it's bad to inflict badly-thought-out change. But it's also dumb to wait for an answer that everyone will agree to. It's dumb to old back from doing something because there's no short-term economic gain. Understanding when and how to apply change needs to be a skill that knowledge workers, and knowledge management need to get to grips with.

Guess what? The networks are massing. But in their raw form, they're only good at disrupting - tearing down existing structures, routing around "slow power". But the ability to problem solve collectively - to bring about unity rather than entropy - still has yet to be proven.

It's about more than knowledge. Or work.

Why we need Worst Value Guidance

2011-09-22T17:20:00.001+01:00

CLG's recently-published Best Value Guidance (2 page PDF) is a fascinating subject, all wrapped up in some ~~fairly~~ dry linguistics. At its heart is the question "How can we get most bang for our buck, without screwing up communities and the environment?"

(For further background, go and read Toby Blume's piece "Planning for people or for profit?" and Jo Ivens' piece on the risks of open data being used primarily by the private sector. Done? Good.)

Photo: karlfrankowski

It's fascinating because this is the big question that we (as a whole, interconnected society - even if we don't know it) are grappling with today. On the one hand, we've come to define "efficiency" as money spent vs money gained - or rather, in today's new landscape of austerity, money spent vs money saved. Headlines dealing in rhetoric proclaiming "£100,000 OF TAXPAYER'S MONEY SPENT ON STATIONERY/MUFFINS/HOOKERS" are a stab at inefficiency - and the idea that we can get the same thing for less, or even do without it.

On the other hand, we all know that Money Isn't Everything (although you wouldn't think anyone actually believed that schmaltzy crap, given recent doom-mongering, market-crumbling headlines). It's easy to see what happens once we f--k the environment enough - it goes from not having green space to "enjoy", to pollution, health problems, food supply issues and a generally over-industrialised future which people love to see in movies, but not on their holidays.

Community is a funny one though. We've kind of divided up and lived without "community" for a while now. We have TV and the Internet to hold our hands, and large-scale institutions that we pay up front for to catch us when we're ill/depressed/untrained. Is "Community" too often seen as something that fills in the gaps where both the market and the state fail?

But intriguingly, it's when it's clear that economics alone isn't going to get us out of our current troubles that the impetus to reach out to alternative lines gets stronger. We expand our idea of "measurement" to include the stuff which we don't normally measure - and/or that we might consider important. We start looking at things like crime stats to get an idea of how "nice" we all are. Or community perception stats to see what we think of each other.

Worse Value

Is this enough though? In fact, let's go crazy for a minute - is the "Best Value" approach enough any more? When does "Best Value" turn into "GREAT VALUE BARGIAN BASEMENT"?

A digression. Years ago I realised the need to become, at least partially, an "irrational consumer" - that is, to disregard the assumption that you want to spend as little as possible and get as much as possible. Over the years, this has kind of happened. Freed from needing to find the next bargain (assuming that "rationality" is defined fairly narrowly), I feel more able to focus on some other hugely important factors:

Long term quality. An item might look and act the same as another, but the old phrase "you get what you pay for" often stands up. Pay 50% more to get 5% better now, but with the hope/expectation that you won't have to replace what you're buying in the next week.
Funding values I agree with. Sometimes it's not just about what I get. It's what I give. And what I give can support some hugely talented people to create some amazing, inspirational things - things of real value (at least to me). In-advance music pledges are a great example - I don't buy anything immediately, and I may even pay more than latecomers, but at the end of the day, I feel happy to put money into something I like to exist.
Buying The Unknown. Some time back, I went through a phase of buying random music albums. Often they'd be dire. Every now and then I'd be in awe. But it kept me on my toes. It introduced me to things I didn't know I liked, and it introduced me to things I didn't like, but glad I know are out there. That's pretty huge in terms of staying flexible, staying creative. Don't just stick to what you know.

If I'd have stuck to the idea of "Best Value" then I'd probably only buy the stuff I was sure I wanted, and I'd probably only get it if/when someone offered it to me at half-price. This is the world of Christmas sales. A world of bargain basements. But it does nothing to help me grow into new ideas.

So what is value then?

Photo: Robert Couse-Baker

Sure, not spending all your cash on crap is important too. I don't go buying luxury food because I don't have that much money. But there is more to life than money, so nor do I try to buy crap, industrialised food - which would probably, under a few definitions at least, count as "Best Value".

Remember that the "Value" range in supermarkets is always the cheapest. "Value" is a weird, indefinable quality. "True value" is something else. "Beyond value" is probably just a dodgy marketing device. But "Value" - what is valuable to you - isn't necessarily something that we can purely base on measurements. It's a gut feeling. An unexpressed response. An imagination.

There are things we can measure, beyond the realms of economics. We should do this. We should make it open.

But measurabilityness isn't everything. Money isn't everything because money is just a measure of life. Money is not a "thing", in the same way that a survey about emotions is not a "thing". The emotions are the "thing". People feeling those emotions is a "thing".

Numbers have a value. But it's these "things" which are valuable.

Not on social media blocking after all

2011-08-12T22:18:00.003+01:00

Oh God I was going to write a blog post about how social media blocking could work in practice, and why it wouldn't work. But then I came to my senses.

Seriously. I mean, how distant an understanding of the world do you need to try to get communication services shut down whenever some 18-year olds are planning trouble? If that's the route to go down, why do we even let anyone under the age of 30 have access to the Internet, or phones, or paper? It's like people think we can be parents on the whole Internet. It's like technology MUST have a master. (Although ironically this is the reason why AI will always tend towards either failure or SkyNet [tm]. OMG that's it - teenagers are the manufactured cyber warriors we've bred to become in perennial war with. The only solution is to send Justin Bieber back in time to KILL TIM BERNERS-LEE in an increasingly self-parodying series of movie-style events.) Come to think of it, it's probably best to ban youth clubs and schools as well. At least that might achieve something of value. It's not like young people trust, respect or believe anything that supposed teachers and role models tell them. I mean, young people seem to have all these ideas and passion to change the world and make it a better place - or at least a more fun one with, y'know, trees and shit in - but then when they realise how the world works and that there's no money or enthusiasm to do it, or the whole "change" thing is oppressed with "process" and tut-tuting, you can ACTUALLY SEE their eyes roll back in their head. There's a reason why zombie films are so popular now, y'know, and it's nothing to do with the gore. The long, slow, gradual, crushing drudgery towards inevitable consumption. The lack of flow. The life which never ends, but never goes anywhere. When was the last time you saw a happy zombie? Welcome to the real world, here's your desk and a keyboard.

STOP HAVING IDEAS. IDEAS COST MONEY.

Overviewing the Government Web Presence

2011-07-31T20:04:00.006+01:00

The Government released a list of about 440 current websites listed by department, which was fairly easy to turn into some PHP code. Hoping to release the code soon (once I've got Github working), but so far you can see what's below. Both projects try to get an overview of the Government's total web impression - it'd be interesting to repeat this, say, yearly to see what changes.

Click here for a page showing screenshots for all 400+ homepages

I also scraped the listed pages and did a bit of processing to turn the content into Wordles. OK, not terribly exciting. But I kind of like the idea of turning open data into "art".

Here's the front page content with some common and site-related words removed (click through for original):

Here's the same data but with more common words removed by wordle.net:

As I say, hope to post code and data soon, even though it's not much work to re-create... In the meantime, any suggestions welcome.

"Forget the data."

2011-07-15T09:06:00.004+01:00

Holy crap, Emma Mulqueeny's (@hubmum) blog from yesterday on the next challenge for Open Data is possibly the. Best. Thing. I. Have. Read. In. A. Long. Time.

In particular:

Open data? Awesome, and we are making tracks.

Open Government? HARD, and we are not banging on that door yet."

and:

So what’s the next challenge for Open Government data?

Forget the data.

Find a way to enable these revolutionary ideas, apps, websites and widgets that save time, money and mind-numbing frustration from those who have to engage with government.

Do that, and only that.

This is the conversation we need to be having. Why? Not to work out "how to do it", but because it questions what is valuable and necessary in government.

Open data isn't a technical thing. It's about relevance. If you could do everything, what would you do? If you were hungry, would you eat, or would you talk about how to find out what the best thing to eat is and what the best way of eating it is?

"Open data" that lacks a medium for turning creative use into real-world change is irrelevant. It's what bad businesses do - they invent a million great things, but never actually want people to use them. Instead they use them as examples to tout how great and creative they are, in the strange hope that a people will think a symbol of progress is as good as progress itself.

Until, that is, someone comes along and not only has a better idea, but also actually builds it. For everyone to use.

Is that difficult? Of course - building stuff requires foresight, management, flexibility and the wisdom of knowing what your goal is. Do people do it all the time? Look around you.

Open data needs to be about other things now - including how it's funded, what the audiences are, and what the future holds. But none of these are about data. None of these are technical. We already have a society that runs on data, so data itself isn't a new paradigm.

We can't keep thinking of open data - and possibly even our entire creative efforts - as some kind of "continual prototype". We need to apply it like we applied sewage systems and electricity.

We need to understand that this isn't just about making the game easier to play, but about a whole new game.

Open data funding - experiments and ecosystems

2011-07-13T10:55:00.007+01:00

Paying for the Open

The funding aspect of open data development came up at Open Data Brighton & Hove (#odbh) last night - who should (or shouldn't) pay for it?

While one camp says that there are lots of people who will build on top of open data for free and for passion, the camp at the other end of the hall wants to see return on investment for work paid for. The latter works both ways - people want to be paid to develop, and people want to pay for development. If the payback is enough, of course.

In a sense, both camps are "right" - the model you believe in depends on your daily interests, daily funding models, and where else you get money from. So it's easy to see that some people are fine building free side-projects, while for others it's a day job. Sometimes one person may have a foot on both sides, depending on what's going on that particular day/week/whatever.

This will always be the case. So it's really really important to understand that there is no "correct" model. Any open data ecosystem needs to fundamentally take this into account. Making data available is great - some people will run and play with it. But working out funding and collaboration is also great. Both are essential, even in the context of open-source, cutbacks, austerity and liberal progressiveness etc etc.

Bountiful

The more I think about #odbh, the more I notice how much I'm influenced by the openness of the Bitcoin community. Other open communities exist, of course, and do similar things, I'm sure, but Bitcoin is the one I'm closest to at the moment.

(Background sidenote: Ignore what Bitcoin is, and whether it's a good idea or not. The relevant and important point is how people are organising around it.)

One funding model that seems to work is the "Bounties" model - a kind of funding pledge, but one based on identifying desired functionality rather than, say, group activity or a band's next output. This list of bounties isn't complete, but it illustrates how it works and the kind of work people want done.

Could this work for open data development? If people are serious about wanting an idea turned into reality, shouldn't they put their wallet where their mouth is? Does it offer a "third way" to both working for free or having to "prove" your idea in advance?

I suppose what I'd envision is a bit like the Ideas section on data.gov.uk, but with more ... oomph, more "I really want this" instead of "This'd be nice".

So...

To wrap up, what this says to me is that open data is more than just about getting data out there, and even more than just about how we weave data into our everyday lives. It's about how we commission progress, how we organise collaboration, and how we identify needs.

All stuff we've been doing for ages, really. But here's a chance to try new ways of approaching old problems, and to bring all of that experimentation together. To create a very real open ecosystem.

Averages in the Tabloids

2011-07-06T15:12:00.001+01:00

Comparing the original report on public-vs-private pay to the tabloid coverage just makes me want to give up talking.

Nearly all of the caveats in the report are missed out of the tabloid piece. All of the interesting analysis is omitted. The result is a headline designed to get people angry. The common name for this is "ignorance". Irresponsible ignorance.

As the report points out extremely clearly, many factors affect what is basically a comparison of averages between apples and oranges:

The public sector has recently outsourced low-cost jobs, pushing up averages

The public sector similarly has more educated people, pushing up averages (at no time does the tabloid ask what value is added by staff)...

... but also, people with a degree earn almost 6% less in the public sector than they would in the private

There are some other interesting points such as whether banks are classified as public or private, age and gender differences, and comparison between highest and lowest earners in each sector.

For me though, this is a reminder that averages are hard - especially for people who "just want to read a newspaper". Understanding evidence is tricky, and presenting is even trickier (something we tried to take into account on the Improving Visualisation project.) It's too easy to fool people, and the tabloids keep. doing. this. all. the. time.

How much stats do people need to know to engage "fairly" with demcoracy? Should they need to know about mean, median, mode? Should they trust the media? Should they trust statisticians?

Re-uniting Democracy: 1: The myth of limited power

2011-06-29T10:46:00.005+01:00

Part One, in which we try to escape the trap of thinking of power as a limited resource.

Synchronicity is a useful thing - it allows us to begin to make connections we otherwise wouldn't have made.

For example, this morning's diverse reading brought together two articles that really need to be meshed. Hence this blog post.

First read Richard Veryard's post on Contradiction and Ambivalence .

Now read WeLoveLocalGovernment's post on whether Central Government cares about Local Government.

Both look at the ongoing issue of whether we should be more centralised or more decentralised. Reading through the speech that David Cameron made shows how embedded in our thought this issue is:

"When we see a problem, we don’t ask what central government can do...

...we ask what can local people do, what can councils do?"

...and...

"That doesn’t mean I want us locking horns on an ongoing basis.

In fact quite the opposite."

It's clear from this that the modern political model is fundamentally competitive. It views Power as tension, as a resource, as something that is owned and fought for and handed out by one group just like money can be.

Allocation of a resource depends on division. In the same way that we're forced to deal with party politics and left-vs-right, we're also shoe-horned into a political model that plays central-vs-decentral, inner-vs-outer, top-vs-bottom. Zero-sum all the way. A quantum of power can be given to one group or another, but not both.

Power-as-a-resource means it can be bargained with. I'll give you X power but it means I can do Y. A barter under difficult conditions. An assumption that there is a limited amount of power to go round.

This is wrong. It is a distraction. Smoke and mirrors.

Guess what? All the exciting stuff happening right now is all about people collaborating. Not just across parties, but across layers. Left/right/top/bottom/centre/edge/institution/freelance/private/public.

Synchronisation, rather than tension. Collaboration is a new form of power.

No, not a new form of power. A new form of power creation - collaboration is more than just a way of distributing power, it is a meta-power, a means of actually increasing the power available to all.

How it does this is another blogpost. What matters now is that this creation of power is essential. As the power/resource/money model gets itself into knots and ever-decreasing circles, things get more and more vicious. Things get underhand. Things get confusing. We divide ourselves and we end up conquering only ourselves.

We need a way out, to reverse the trend, to grow rather than shrink. And right now, collaboration is the one act firmly keeping real progress alive.

Kettling: Illegal and Counter-productive

2011-04-14T11:22:00.003+01:00

The High Court has ruled that kettling tactics at the G20 protests in 2009 was illegal. But the Police say that kettling "is a necessary tactic to tackle the potential for violence".

Potential is an interesting word. Crowd control is a fine line between structure and chaos.

But that line isn't one created or maintained by the Police. It's one that manifests through trust.

Public demonstration is inherently problematic - if an issue has reached this stage, then there's already a lot of anger around. A lot of people who feel like they haven't been listened to. Of course the potential for violence exists in a demonstration - "successful" politics avoids all physical confrontation, walking or fighting.

A demonstration is a final call to be listened to - but more than that. It's a final show of order and solidarity, a challenge for the ruling parties to trust this potential. If the Police - as the on-the-ground representation of the parties - cannot display this trust, and actively suppress this physical demonstration, then of course anger will turn violent.

How do you network yours? (Why the medium is not the message.)

2011-04-06T10:50:00.008+01:00

Even co-operation is in competition, it seems. Social media has sprung up all over the place, and even those that "get it" are feeling fairly confused. Should we set up a new conversation, or find an existing one? Should we post our thoughts to Facebook or to a blog? Should we be broadcasting or engaging?

For some people, the answers to these will be "obvious". But often what we think is obvious is actually just what's lacking - what we're arguing for more of.

Really, the answer is that there is no answer. Sometimes broadcasting is useful, sometimes listening is useful. Sometimes blogs are fine, sometimes Facebook is fine. It depends. It matters. And yet at the same time, it doesn't matter. Conversation is more than a blog post or what-have-you, because conversation is about ideas - and good ideas will spread across networks, across media.

Stepping back a moment, Louise Kidney does a great job of picking up on digital inclusion/exclusion within existing groups, and takes a practical line of engaging people with the communication tools they need in the modern world.

I think this is vital. It's ridiculous to think that our democracy is limited to pre-defined routes of communication. Imagine if you couldn't phone a council because they were afraid of misusing the telephone. Imagine if you couldn't e-mail them because they weren't sure whether to say "Hi" or "Dear Sir".

But at the same time, I think we need to look beyond this. (Hey, I like big ideas.) We need to look under the hood and ask why there seems to be a continual mismatch between the tools being used by citizens, and the tools being used by authorities. Can we really afford to re-assess every new website as it forms? Following on from that, should all forms of communication be used to engage with citizens? And if not, which ones should be? When should support for old networks get killed off?

(I don't have answers for these. What I do have is a different way of approaching the situation, rather than going in circles. I'm a geek. I abstracterise things. Big ideas come out somewhere along the line. Sometimes these make things clearer. Sometimes not.)

In my mind, the "problem" is not, fundamentally, one of tools - but of how and why we organise ourselves.

Go and read this article on Scotland's social media efforts. Go on. I'll wait.

Now notice - the strapline there mentions social media. The article mentions Twitter and Facebook a couple of times. But really, the core point of it, is not what people are using, but who is doing it, and how. Social media are just one way this manifests.

But the tools are ephemeral. In the real world, groups form around issues, and tools form around groups. Not the other way around. I use many websites and I even go to a few face-to-face meetings. But, largely speaking, the networks are the same across all of these. Sometimes bits of these networks use tools I don't use (e.g. Tumblr) but that's fine - I participate using the tools I find most useful (e.g. Beer).

Learning how to use a tool/interface is useful, but it's not essential. True engagement happens whatever the tool - it comes from getting involved, turning up to meetings, listening to people, feeding back, taking things seriously, having fun.

And I think it's this level of engagement that people are struggling with - new social rules, not new interfaces. People are afraid of turning up to workshops or pubs in the same way they're afraid of using new websites, but if we're to make something that benefits everyone, we have to work out what methods and, more importantly, what networks suit each person best. (That's one to return to in a different post, though.)

Hackers, transparency, and the zen of failure

2011-02-14T20:17:00.005Z

This week I picked up the Hacker Ethic from my library (remember them?) by Pekka Himanen, with an intro by Linus Torvalds and an outro by Manuel Castells. It was hard to resist it with names like that splashed across it.

The book was written in 2001, back when the browser wars were in full swing and streamed video was still a bit of a novelty (so nothing's changed that much). But the theme addressed by Himanen is anything but dated - and contains some key threads which I want to think about and blog about more.

A lot of the text deals with the idea of what makes a "hacker" tick -and not just geek hackers, but anyone with a passion for what they do, rather than a bitter feeling that they work because they have to. Central to this hackerness is a passionate creativity, and a desire to share knowledge - including the results of that knowledge, such as code.

The truth and untruth of progress

This act of sharing knowledge is partially a form of status, true. But when you read articles like this about incorrect data being published, you start to notice what else open knowledge (including data) is about - social learning.

Hackers and open government are both (now) keen on sharing data - knowledge, code, ideas. But the real difference is in how they learn - for the hacker, openness brings about learning and improvement through public failure - there is an assumption that what you create can be improved, and an attitude that anyone else is welcome to improve it.

Now compare this to CLG's response to the LGC article above - a response filled with defensive language and finger-pointing. There is something rather scientific - or, rather, legal - about this discourse: claims are made by one party and refuted by another. Slowly the "truth" is "sculpted" from what is left.

But for the hacker, the truth is only what is created - not what is undisputed. Hackers fork code, create new communities, start new websites, run unconferences. If "truth" exists, then it is what emerges, not what is discovered, or what remains.

What do hackers sit on?

Can a highly hierarchical structure such as our democracy adapt to be creative rather than competitive? The open data movement is driven by both of these - data for transparency can be thought of as "evidence" in a legal bid for the justification of an organisation's existence. Data for new apps, on the other hand, only needs a use, and to be useful in a creative context.

This split in attitude is key when considering efforts like the recent consultation on local data transparency, which clearly puts "open data" into the evidential context:

The Government wants to place more power into people’s hands to increase transparency by seeing how their money is spent.

img by AMagill

My fear is that this inherently makes "open data" unuseful to the hacker crowd - an essential crowd to interest when the data is being released in CSV files, or other formats that require some parsing. If hacker's can't create something with the data, they won't do anything with it. The idea of an "army of armchair auditors" becomes a functional paradox, as the people the Government has in mind for the data apparently sit in armchairs, while the hackers sit in cafes, meet in pubs, and generally find comfy chairs far too comfy to code in.

To return to this post's title, what role will failure and learning play in this paradox? Looking at the draft code, we can see a desire to use the "many eyes" approach to fixing data:

18. Data should be as accurate as possible at first publication. While errors may occur the publication of information should not be unduly delayed to rectify mistakes. Instead, publication and use of the data should be used to help address any imperfections and deficiencies.

The hacker approach agrees with this - fix things as we go along. But does this fit with the idea of "armchair auditors"? As we saw in the LGC article, how can an auditor tell the difference between what is incorrect, and what is wholely disagreeable? And if they can't, why should they trust any of it?

(Maybe we need a "stable release" system like that of open source projects? Maybe, like the Linux kernel or desktop distributions, data can be released with an "unstable/testing" tag, then marked up as "stable/trustable" after enough testing has been done on it.)

Transparency is a lovely thing - but everyone has different uses for it. If it's used for creativity, then there is, perhaps, an implicit assumption that things can and will change. If, on the other hand it's to be used for accountability, then there needs to be trust in it.

GovFiction: The Beast Made Transparent

2011-02-08T17:55:00.002Z

Richard picked up the flaming Torch of Transparency and held it in front of him.

"I can see it," he whispered. "I can see everything."

The creature lay before him, barely breathing. Its belly was half-open, but Richard couldn't tell which parts had been clawed apart by an unknown swarm, and which had been torn open by the creature itself. Quick, but deep cuts littered the remaining flesh, but it was clear that most of the creature's lifeblood had leaked away long before.

Richard looked on guiltily - he couldn't suppress a faint sense of pity for this beast which for so long had had so much control over him. He felt a sense of anti-climax - a romantic desire that such a mighty being should meet its demise in some proud battle, rather than like this. Rather than in dark obscurity.

With slow, steady breaths, he put out the flame, and headed back towards the surface. Somewhere, there was still daylight.

#UKGC11: Hooking into DIY Data

2011-01-23T22:12:00.002Z

Following on from data relativity, the second thing that grabbed me at #ukgc11 (UKGovCamp 2011) happened during Will Perrin’s introduction to “Making a Difference with Data”, and followed up in conversation with Helen Jeffrey (@imhelenj) on community-led data. Will talked of comparing his local authorities’ data on lamp-post repair time to his own count for how long a lamp-post had been broken for (encouraging crime). Helen talked about data that a group of volunteers had collected themselves, and then turned into a report to feed into government decision-making.

In both cases, what struck me was that people don’t have such an aversion or fear of data that is often assumed - if they start by generating it themselves.

To go back to data relativity, the most confusing and scary part of data is figuring out the thought processes and assumptions that have gone into a dataset, as well as figuring out what the hell’s important (often around 0.01%-0.5% of the data) and what’s “noise” - to an individual. Self-generated data doesn’t suffer from this, because all the scary background and assumption bits are part of the citizen’s/volunteer’s mindset and experience. Voila, understanding data comes from experience. And as such, successful engagement with data is about creation as well as consumption.

OK, it’s clearly a little more complicated than that, but it’s a principle that’s often far too implicit for some datasets (crowdsourced maps, etc), and far too often forgotten about for others (most centrally-gathered stats). There are also a whole bunch of stereotypes about what “people” “want” from “data”, and often these stereotypes do little except re-establish the status quo. When data comes up against real-world users (yes, even geeks), and the magic “fails to happen”, we’re left wondering if natural engagement is such a given after all.

It’s difficult to get excited about thousands of datasets when you have no idea where to start or where they can be relevant to you. It’s much, much easier to get excited about data that is relevant to to you, that you understand, and that you can see how it will benefit you. I think that’s why I love the idea of Mappiness or Christian Nold’s maps - both involve getting people to create data they find interesting, and through this “personal” data, the need and relevance for other data suddenly becomes instant and appreciated. (For example, if I’m feeling most happy on street X, what other properties does that street have, and how do they relate to me - house prices? Pollution? Streetworks?)

This seems to be an issue that is bubbling along - everyone knows that organisations collect data, for instance, so an open data system worth its salt will take that into account. But there are still assumptions about the scale and complexity of that data, I would argue - whereas really, data can be as simple as counting, and everyone can count.

UKGC11: A General Theory of Data Relativity

2011-01-22T16:56:00.005Z

First of a small series of small thoughts coming out of UKGovCamp 2011.

One of the key points emerging for me is just how much “data” is tied to the groups or people using it - not just the content, but the structure of it, the tools used to manage it, the background of the data, the assumptions behind it, and so on and so on. This comes up all over the place - standardised, central taxonomies often fall out of favour for being a jack-of-all-trades, useful to none. File formats are a direct result of people wanting data as an easy-to-edit spreadsheet, an easy-to-email PDF, or an easy-to-parse data file.

More fundamentally, even the understanding of what a dataset means becomes embedded in the structure of the data. If something is being measured , what defines that thing? What assumptions are inherent to the way data is measured? Is a van a form of car? More importantly, why are these definitions in place? Reasons are forgotten long before hard drives expire.

If you assume that all data is “relative” - I.e. a combination of the data itself and the people viewing it - what does this mean for linking it? Do we need more effort on translation? Or do we need more effort on fuzzy inferences between metadata, rather than direct mapping? (I suspect the Semantic Web rears its head here, but to me it always feels like a simpler solution is waiting to be seized on.)

Knowing how and where to ask questions about a dataset is a huge part of this - metadata about origins and background is vital; questions help build up an idea of how to fit a dataset into your own world view, your own data model, or your own database. Perhaps development needs to focus on making these links between contexts as transparent as possible, rather than fixing a single, over-arching context in place to fit all.

Why democracy is getting routed around

2011-01-11T22:58:00.000Z

Recent events have brought me back to thinking about an old topic - what's the best way of making a point? This time round, though, I'm slightly more fatalistic about it all.

What seems more obvious now is that established democracy, in its current form, is being outpaced - traditional representative democracy is no longer a priority, to put it bluntly.

Why? Two reasons:

1. Communication has changed. Everyone knows this. Everyone is routing around voting. Electronic voting is boring - we have electronic memes now. Public meeting videos are boring - we have hashtags now. I am talking to national and international strangers about the future of politics more than I talk to my neighbours. Never mind AV, we need something more than simple, single representation.

2. The topics of politics have changed - or, rather, they change ever faster and faster. We have a while to go before the singularity, but nonetheless, we no longer believe the future is 'distant'. Good sci-fi is becoming rare. We do not dare to imagine what we'll be able to do in 4 years' time let alone know what government party we'll want to cope when we get there. The future is flexible, party politics is boring. Far better to rely on the fluidity of networks and social knowledge, than on the heavy infrastructures of politics.

We have secure and instant comms, so we have Wikileaks. We have flashmobs, so we have street protests. We have crowdsourcing, so we have inspirational projects, both as showcases by individuals and as industry-standard, open source giants. Bit by bit, there are people doing stuff, instead of waiting for politics to change for them.

Screw "Government 2.0". Food prices, climate change, economic sustainability, education, wisdom? The next decade will tell us if modern democracy is even out of beta-testing yet. If government is to survive in any respectable form beyond its current version, it needs to "get" reality - the kind of reality that everything else is now trying to work out how to do better.

Tis the Season To Be Open

2010-12-15T09:56:00.004Z

I apologise in advance - this post was originally a small comment on Paul's post, then turned into a blogpost here, and a bit of a rambling one at that. Hopefully it raises some points of interest, and hopefully I can return to some of them in future posts. The area is, ironically, complex in itself.

Paul Clarke has a nice summary of systems complexity generally, and the eternal battle between getting things done, and pleasing everyone. Fortunately I haven't seen the original stories on the Christmas Tree in question, so have no idea what the context is. I prefer it like that.

I think Paul is right to highlight the role of open data as we move forwards into a technical democracy, and the possible solutions/problems coming in as a result - I think there's a good chance that transparency can lead to ever-decreasing circles of receipt-checking, process justification etc, and the whole country implodes in a swamp of exclamation marks and daily mail headlines.

These 2 questions seem rather pertinent, IMHO: "And with what discretion? Authorised by whom?" - Are these the same issues we've been grappling with for years anyway, in the form of representative democracy? On a broad picture, it's not necessary for all citizens to be involved in all decisions all of the time - so we vote for the person we think we can trust most with power. We, as voters, are handing over discretionary power so that someone else is creating a world we want to live in. I call this "trust", because even today there's no way I can know (or want to know) everything my MP is up to. I have a wife and kids and a job.

I've yet to be convinced that the drive for more transparency isn't just a way of getting us to trust politicians less. The over-riding message from on high seems to be that transparency is there to hold people to account - which I think is a real shame, as open data is far more powerful as a platform for collaboration than accusation.

Transparency as distrust leads to a bizarre situation in which people we've "trusted" via our vote are then afraid to apply that power - especially considering a vote is local, while headlines are national or global. Worse, it can drive important decisions further into obscurity and complexity to avoid such scrutiny (and here it's hard not to draw comparisons with the banking industry as a warning).

Perhaps part of the problem is believing that cost is the deciding factor in how accountable (and hence transparent) a decision-process should be. But cost says nothing of either complexity or impact - both of which are much more important in deciding the "suitability" of decisions, I would say.

Cf. two other realms - banking, as mentioned already, and open-source software.

On one hand, the uselessness of auditors in predicting the collapse of banks serves to show how bad it is to have systems that can rapidly create complex models around themselves. Compare this to how open-source software operates - for a project to be sustainable, it is vital that complexity is managed, and that the code is readable by anybody. If the code is unreadable, it grows more slowly, is more prone to bugs and security risks, and is less maintainable. Both designing and refactoring code are essential to ensure a solid output.

Can we apply these lessons to government decision-processes? If transparency is the way forwards, then I think we have to - sure, there are fundamental differences between software (which, for instance, can be forked) and a democracy (which can't, quite so easily). But as things become more open and "many eyes" start taking peeks, the productivity-gains and effectiveness of open data mean that we cna't just assume that openness is enough. Openness needs to be accompanied by feedback - the same constant re-factoring process that goes into software engineering.

In other words, it is not enough to use transparency to justify decisions already made, and to prevent bad decisions being made in future through the threat of later accountability. Openness in data needs to go hand-in-hand with an openness to change - to influence new ways of contributing, of collaborating, and of voting for those who we trust. Even new ways of thinking and feeling about why the decisions are being made in the first place.

Structured data: Accessible magic?

2010-11-25T19:59:00.004Z

Magic Numbers (source)

Have you ever dreamt in SQL? Few of us have, and we only ever speak of it in hushed, yet secretly astounded tones. Database development is a weird way of looking at the world. Those who venture into it too deeply may never come back to being "normal".

But at the same time, it's also like any language - reaching a state of fluidity involves a fundamental shift in thinking. To think in French is to adopt a new philosophy, and the same is true of database logic; linking and manipulating rows of data is a world away from editing each row by hand.

To explain the importance of structured data, is it important to first get across this conceptual paradigm shift? Is the ultimate draw of structured data tied inherently to a new way of seeing the world? One in which we, as data/content hackers don't see the data at all, but merely instruct a computer to do stuff with it.

Maybe this explains the "format divide" between those publishing in "closed" formats, and those publishing in open ones. If you do not know how to automate the data-munging process, then you do stuff by hand, you take a long time to do it, and you have absolutely no need for "structures" other than those in your head.

This happens everywhere, all the time: half the world lives in Excel during office hours. At some point, computers became popular as difference engines, but not necessarily good at being them. Human operators became part of the machines, rather than directors of them. In a way, this mirrored the huge factory production lines, and the endless supermarket checkouts, so most humans simply accepted this as the new way of life. Any sufficiently different technology is a form of magic. Processing as a manual task.

This happens today. Never forget that. Seeing data is more important than defining a structure for it, because structure is *hard*. Datasets have peculiarities, errors, and specifics that resist simple structuring. And changing these structures is effort - effort that involves communicating these changes to other. In short, it's easier to stick with "sloppy" data if you're not using the right tools. It's even easier if the other people using the data don't care about the tools either. Content is King.

So how do we bridge this divide between "manual data labour" and "magic"? On the up side, I believe it must happen, as data - and talk of data - becomes a public matter. Those not structuring their data will need to structure it, or face a new kind of exclusion - call it "un-APIness" perhaps.

But this doesn't help us to move into a culture of automation, of magic, which I think is important because it determines what you *believe* you can do with data. Understanding structured data is essential in coming up with new services, new applications, and new answers.

Working with people to build answers will help too. It's not enough to just want "raw data now" - to build bridges, we need to build real things based on data. We, as geeks, need to find out what people actually want. We need to show that questions can be answered with "magic", but also be open enough to demonstrate that structuring data has a direct impact on what can be done, and how quickly.

Change the tools. Rethink processes. It's time to end the conveyor-belt, factory line approach to data.

UKGovCamp 2010 - a far-too-lengthy write-up

2010-01-24T13:29:00.005Z

Yesterday was UK GovCamp 2010, a gathering of people interested in how (roughly defined) government can be taken forwards using the Internet. The day was crafted lovingly by Dave Briggs and hosted excitingly at Google HQ in London. Here's a quick rundown of where I was, what I saw, and what I'd attempt to think about the day after if I had any brain left.

Session 1 was an exercise in getting data geeks talking to data users - hypothetically, at least. The room broke into 5 or so groups, each looking at the problems that members of the public might face around certain topical issues, such as road chaos, sporting events, or sexual health. To get us thinking, we first asked what kind of information would the public want/need for each of these. In the second half, the data geeks migrated to a different group to see how data could help with answering this.

I'm not sure I came to any particular answers about either road chaos or sporting events, but did find it a useful way of breaking down the issue. Without realising it, I'd probably stumbled into the first recurring theme of my day - usability of data. Some notes of interest:

Data may exist in a central database, but that doesn't mean everyone will be accessing it for the same reason and/or/therefore by the same means. Different groups of people have different networks - football supporters might check their club site for news, for example. Local residents might check a council site, or a paper newsletter, or even just handy signs put up on the side of the road for future travel "alerts". A good reminder why data shouldn't be tied to a particular "portal".
It's far too easy to focus on using the latest devices to make getting data out easy. But that doesn't mean it reaches people we want it to reach. (One reason I'm so excited about Newspaper Club.)
We draw data from many, many different places to form a decision or an opinion, e.g. form local authorities, central figures, news, private sources, etc. Linked data is probably hugely important in joining all this up, but it's also a process that we, as humans, do naturally and constantly. I think there's a big question about how we tie these two worlds together. Too big for this post though.

I actually ended up kind-of starting up Session 2 in the end which, not having really done before, I wa slightly nervous about, but in the end am pretty pleased with how it went. I'd decided to try to get some discussion going about How to find and filter data, which I've been thinking about a bit after the recent attention around data.gov.uk. I think the debate wandered on to the meta-topic of how to describe data, and how to share those descriptions between organisations and viewpoints, but it's a good debate to have and people seemed genuinely engaged with it.

I started by taking people through what we'd done with data4nr.net in terms of UI, XML and tying it into external services like data.gov.uk. Most excellently, Richard Stirling was on hand to fill in about the latter, which probably helped to raise the issue of how we actually tie all this data together. Notes on all this below:

One thing that came out of the talk around data.gov.uk is where duplicates appear (as everyone is cataloguing data, with a fair bit of overlap), but without any real way of knowing so. Unique IDs are like, really, really important, but even the definition of one is subject to interpretation problems. Simon Field noted that some users, for example, want to treat amended data as a "new" dataset, while others don't. "Unique" is subjective, perhaps. I get the impression this is going to take a while to bash out.
Andrew Walkingshaw of Timetric (also one of the sponsors) noted two extremes of presenting data to people - "either lie to them, or freak them out". I think the extent to which either of these is necessary depends on who you're making the data public to - or, who is your audience? Different people have different training, and therefore different expectations about what the data represents. How do we manage this, or integrate it with our processes and applications?

Maybe not everyone needs to understand data - just those in the argument? e.g. if a journalist uses some data to come to a slightly ~~suspect~~ headline-grabbing conclusion, are there people who can re-run the data and verify that? Coming out of that, do we have forums where such verifications and/or dispute can be raised legitimately?

And to return to the idea of defining metadata, there is still a question about whether definitions should be "standardised" (i.e. everyone shares the same vocabulary), or if we accept that everyone has their own "language" and the challenge is to map between these somehow. If the former, is it practical to define one in advance, or just let people make their own, in a more organic nature?

I think there was lunch at this point.

Session 3 was on Using Wordpress in Government, run by Simon Dickson of Puffbox. I've been doing a fair bit of integrating PHP sites with Wordpress this year, so was interested in hearing about what other people had done with it, and how. A lot of the session seemed to be extolling the power of Wordpress rather than focus on the grittier details of rolling it into a project, process or workplace, but it was interesting to hear where it's being used, and a great chance to finally meet Steph Gray in person.

Good to note that about half of all (central?) government departments are "dipping their toes" into Wordpress, although perhaps under the second theme of the day - covert innovation which I'll pick up at the end.

Good point from Simon - that for all the talk about re-using software, making sites, etc, "Wordpress has done it - we are doing it." Good tools make exploration easy, and make it easier to experiment with little nuggets of progress without too much risk/cost/project management. We have good tools already that mostly just need tweaking, why not use them?

Wordpress is great for swapping content between sites, as everything is available as RSS feeds. I suspect this ties into my session on finding and filtering data more than I realise.

Session 4 saw Richard Stirling talk about his week launching data.gov.uk to way more attention than he and his team expected. The launch apparently saw an average of 6,000 visits over a 3 hour period, split across 4 servers. Amused that Richard was bemused why it was such a big story ("2nd most important bit of news on Working Lunch"). Maybe it's because the British are winning back the Internet, rah.

Finally, session 5 saw Steph Gray (slide here), Anthony Zacharzewski (links to slides) and Paul Clarke talking about persuading politicians and bureaucrats of the value of digital engagement. A great talk all round, with some inspiring, and almost crafty, thoughts being put forward about how to make websites and influence people:

Talk about activities, not tools. Talk about how what you want to do results in outcomes. Decision makers like to see a direct link between what you propose and what gets saved.

Use narratives, storytelling. But be careful about who you include in your stories - different viewpoints and people are perceived in different ways. Sometimes people love the idea of appealing to the "main in the street". Other times the same man is seen as, say, unreliable or anecdotal.

Terms and words are political, as I've noted before. Use terms, especially "buzzwords" carefully, as they may "belong" to particular groups. Technical speak suffers from the same problem, I'd say. WTF do AJAX, Web2.0 and WTF mean anyway?

Themes

The two recurring threads I really picked up on during the day were:

Usability of Data - How can we make data as a whole easier for everyone to find? How do we know what data is out there, what it means, and what it can/can't be used for? How can we access it other than clever websites?

Covert Innovation - A lot of the exciting stuff in government is being done "under the radar". This, in itself, is not necessarily a problem, but there were a couple of tales around the idea that successful efforts would be prevented if they were made more public - for various reasons. I think currently there are a lot of conversations going on, but within almost hushed tones - tones which can only get loud once this success has reached critical mass and gone "mainstream" to the point where it can't be covered up any more. The tales of Gordon Brown giving Tim Berners-Lee free reign were great, but really not enough. Hiring a hugely respected scientist is quite different to trusting your own staff.

Failure is an option, even necessary, but a lot of the time organisations believe that it isn't - perhaps because they're used to thinking in terms of large scale projects (= large scale failure)? Contrariwise, a lot of the efforts seen at GovCamp were small scale innovation which can and even should fail quickly and easily (e.g. "does this Wordpress plugin do what we want?" Click. Install. "No." Learn. Move on.) The move towards opening up data is all about risk management. Bang the rocks together.

OK, this post was a little longer than I thought it was, and now my stomach is rumbling. Cheers to all for a great day, and look forward to seeing the thoughts that take place in its aftermath. Keep the momentum.

Transparency should not be for Blame

2009-07-01T10:07:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-16T22:13:00.002Z

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:

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.

Import the CSV into a fresh Google docs spreadsheet.

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

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.

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?

2009-02-12T18:58:00.003Z

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

2009-02-09T22:32:00.004Z

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?

2009-02-07T10:16:00.003Z

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.

Debategraph

2008-12-16T20:26:00.000Z

Debategraph is totally awesome. (Via rohan)

Hugely interesting and thought-provoking vague-future-of-gov-on-web event up at Nesta last night, all thanks to dominic. Time is tight and parties are loose this week, and there are so many (relatively) disjointed points to break down, mash back up again, I'm going to have to get this blog back on track over Christmas... In the meantime, Rohan has a summary and some video.

Wispas or Tweets: What have we achieved today?

2008-12-05T19:58:00.000Z

The recent events in Mumbai were curious from an infotech point of view - standing watching a silent screen in Specsavers, I noticed one news channel (perhaps Sky, perhaps CNN or CBS) were actually showing "live" Twitter coverage of thoughts and comments. It looks like the BBC were also experimenting with integrating "Tweets" with a "live updates" page.

The comments on the Beeb article above are an interesting and considered mix. The Independent also followed up on it proclaiming the downfall of British journalism etc. But that's a debate I'm not getting into here.

For me, the interesting thing is that Twitter is being used in this way. In America, hack the debate spliced Tweets into the US election. This would be difficult to do with blogs - content is harder to scan, and then has to be summarised to make it ready for simple broadcast. Twitter "bypasses" this. It's already all ready to just be spat out. In other words, Twitter is broadcast ready.

When investigating the power of communication media, we learn that "impact effectiveness" - how much information you can gleam in as short a time as possible - is essential when the comms channel is already rammed with a million voices. (OK, I kind of just made that up, but it makes sense.) Ideas put more simply and more effectively will take precedence when the cost of communication tends towards zero, and when time is of the essence. This blog would be dead in the water if everyone was concerned about the time taken to scan it.

Politics is ideas as well as discussion, and everyone has a lot of both. A lot of people say that Twitter is the next "fad", and for a while - when it first came along, when I first signed up - I was cautious about it for the very same reason.

But where politicians have turned to Facebook as a way of re-engaging, we must ask "What really has Facebook achieved?" The answer may come back in the form of a Wispa.

But while politics remains a hierarchical structure based on representation, networking and media attention-grabbing, it's stomping ground will be the micro-bite attention worlds that creatures such as Twitter thrive in.

New Report - Progress in Online Services

2008-04-30T21:34:00.000+01:00

Sphereless... it lives! I've been having many ongoing thoughts buzzing round my head for a while, thoughts which would squeeze nicely into this blog's techno-leotard. Unfortunately, they'll have to wait a little.

In the meantime, to get things re-rolling, the Public Accounts Committee has published their report on Government on the Internet, concerning the progress made (or not) in delivering government services by hooking an "e-" up to them.

The Register has a handy summary. Highlights include:

25% of .gov organisations couldn't say how much electronic services were costing them to run, and 40% of the rest could only estimate this. (That's an inverse total - 60% of 75% of... hmm... 45% of everyone, I think, who kept track of these things.)

One third of sites aren't up to accessibility standards. That seems quite a lot still - and I'd be interested in which sites don't meet the standards: old ones no longer under development? Particular sectors? I wonder if there's a chance of mapping these things out.

The question of the digital divide is raised yet again, probably relevant in light of the recent announcement of some kind of inclusion strategy.

Interestingly, the Government "aims to close 951 websites by 2011". Furthermore: "the Committee recommends that no new government websites should be set up without permission from the Government's CIO." There are some interesting questions about centrality here - control over what people want, but also over the best way to navigate through both sites and site content. Maybe that's a future blog post, right there.

One for further bedtime reading, I think.

Straddling the Democractic Divide: Individuals or Groups?

2007-10-25T14:25:00.001+01:00

I've realised that I've got a lot of blogreading to catch up with - there are some excellent posts out there that are very thought-provoking, and many interesting links that spiral off them. This, of course, is also rather ironic in light of the following post. Information overload is something that I've always been thinking about, but maybe it's time to take it seriously... Anyway, I digress.

This follows on from my previous post on one-click politics, along with David's summary of
how the BBC are consulting Bloggers, and also Phil's thoughts on identifying semantics in information. An odd set of links, maybe, but here's where I think they tie together: consolidation - of ideas, of opinions, and of decision-making. Where they differ is in terms of how these things should be consolidated. And it's this difference that's worth exploring in more detail, as it represents a clash of principles over what sort of democracy we're going to have in 10, 20, maybe 50 years' time.

On the one hand, the "one-click" approach is a very "modern" way of doing politics. It represents an individualist approach from a bottom-up perspective, or a populist approach at a societal level. It can be considered "liberal" as it is mainly concerned with expressing an opinion rather than negotiating one. Thus, such campaigns are often either directed at one very specific issue ("we want X") because there's little to no capacity (or desire) for deliberating over alternatives. Consolidation - working out which opinions exist and matter - comes from making an opinion public, but in the light of the large scales involved, organised expressions are generally the most effective mode of publicity. See the previous post for more on this.

On the other hand, the "underdog" of democracies (in my view) is a more interactive, more deliberative democracy - closer to the perception of the Athenian method, of rhetoric and reasoning. Debate seeks to persuade people and to argue for a case both "emotionally" and "rationally". However, this means it takes more effort, leading to possible exclusion under a kind of "time divide". Consolidation is a process here, using argument to attempt to coalesce opinion around one particular point of view.

This is probably the main point of this post: we can imagine two "opposing" forms of democracy, and two corresponding perspectives on how digital democracy tools should be built. (Naturally, things are a little more complex in reality, but I think this covers a lot of how people see the development of digital democracy.)

Tech-Politics: By the Numbers

ICT clearly affects both of these in both positive and negative ways. Greater access to information makes it easier to participate in debate, while reduced social cues (e.g. more text, less inflection) may both help and hinder interaction for different individuals. Voting is made easier, but (currently, at least ) at the possible expense of security (deleting cookies is easy when you know how). However, the current climate of individualism and mass markets (in which everyone has their own of every item, including PCs and Facebook accounts) means that the populist approach is here to stay for a while. So far, the computational basis of on-line politics, combined with this populism, has meant that the success of campaigns and political issues boils down to one thing: numbers. Ultimately - in terms of affecting policy - modern social networks are more about assembling quantity than engaging people in discussion.

Even the "blogosphere" is an example of this configuration: everyone has their own blog in which their opinions are presented. Argument is possible - and somewhat common - through comments and cross-blog debate. But for most (and here the irony continues, perhaps), the links established through comments, trackbacks and blogrolls are an accumulation of like-minded individuals, ready to be called upon when support is needed. Just like social network campaigns and petitions, at the end of the day numbers and big lists matter. The value of liberalism is defined by controlling the masses.

From Quantitative to Qualitative Populism

This brings us back to Phil's post on the semantic web and, oddly, to yesterday's quote. What are we using technology for, and in what direction are we planning to take it? The Semantic Web, or even the Syntactic Web, offer one path to overcome the disjunction between individualism and deliberation. It defines the problem as that of distillation - of being able to discern an overall, "common" sentiment from the plethora of segregated (yet interconnected) forums that now exist. In other words, the (techno)logical next step, from quantity to quality, in a pluralist, populist democracy is to treat opinion as just another measurable, to be analysed by technology. It is the measured form of opinion that changes - from polls and petitions, to emotion and context.

This is why David's post, as well as some of his previous thoughts, are interesting (and why I need to catch up with the articles linked to...). Reaching out to bloggers is one thing, but what exactly is a "cross-blog conversation"? Is it an effort to raise awareness of a particular issue, and to elicit opinions that can then be aggregated somewhere else? Or is it an attempt to come to some kind of consensus within those blogs? My experience points a lot more to the former, although I welcome people to point out counter-examples. This leaves us with the question: when it comes to real decision-making, where does the power lie? Expressing opinions on a blog is one thing, but deciding between opinions is another. Is the aggregator - the conversation "overseer" - the best position to do this, or should we be encouraging greater omni-directional interaction between the individuals?

Conclusion

OK, so maybe from a political theory perspective there's not a lot new here - there have always been debates over what form of democracy is more preferable, and to what extent citizens should be involved in making decisions. However, there seems to be a huge deal of enthusiasm (and optimism. and hype.) for both ways forward under the technically networked paradigm. But what of the gap between them? I think the picture I'm laying out - that there is a conflict and an exclusivity between individuality and group-decision-making - is fairly bleak. But maybe it doesn't have to be, maybe we can have both our own voices, and participate more fully in "real" debate to explore an issue. Hopefully the next few posts will explore the 2 sides, and the gap, a bit more.

Does ICT "Tidy Up" Democracy Too Much?

2007-10-24T16:54:00.001+01:00

There are all kinds of things I've been wanting to coalesce into blog posts recently, but for now here's a short quote that caught my eye today. It's from an chapter by Lawrence Pratchett called "Democracy Denied" (in 'Orwell in Athens').

...if anything, the symbolism of ICTs implies a clinical and rational world that emerges from their increased deployment, that has no room for the inefficiencies and inconsistencies of democracy.

This, for me, ties in with ideas about how democracy is put into practice (e.g. vote counting and quantitative representation rather than deliberation) which, hopefully, will appear in greater detail here soon.

One-Click Politics

2007-10-10T17:36:00.001+01:00

(Warning: Ooh, wow, this one turned into a big long post...)

David Wilcox has an interesting report on Amnesty using Facebook to recruit people. I should note that I'm not a huge fan of Facebook - I have an account to see how it works, but no contacts in my list. So far, nothing on there particularly makes me want to add any, either. That said, the number of people using it clearly earmarks it for attention on a societal scale.

Two Facebook campaigns that David picks up on - Burma and bank charges - highlight the trend in "Web 2.0 politics" that is worth investigating in more detail. Whether it's worth worrying about it, of course, depends on your point of view on how democracy should work, and what kind of participation we want.

Here's the bit from each of the above campaigns, respectively, that interests me:

Burma:
The Support the Monks in Burma Facebook group has reached 300,000 members, making it one of the largest groups of Facebook, and one of the fastest growing. One thousand people are joining every hour. “We are showing that the eyes of the world are still on Burma, that ordinary people are showing their solidarity and support,” said Johnny Chatterton, the UK co-ordinator...

Bank charges:
A campaign group on Facebook reached over 5,000 members and helped lead to HSBC freezing their plans.

Now, reaching out to so many people is all very impressive. But c'mon now, is this really the modern, networked democracy we've all been looking for - one based, on the whole, on how large a number we can amass?

I think there's a good side to numbers, of course - voting and polling are examples of where they can be used to settle a decision (in the instance of an election, say) or to gauge opinion (before an election). But these are specific uses, and have specific impacts - namely, they're purely about one-way information, from the individual to the central point of data collection. There's no feedback to the individuals, and there's no interaction between individuals. It's a view of people as static individuals, not as a dynamic group.

This is also the problem I have with Facebook in general, and with other schemes such as petitions - the most visible aspect to them all is a quantity: How many people have signed up? How many friends do you have? How many widgets have you added? How many fish have you been sent today? How many campaigns are you a part of? "Participation" takes on a very bounded definition, like an economic view of consumerism. It is transformed, away from the Greek idea of democracy - rhetoric, persuasion, and exercises in evidential argument - and towards an extremely shallow, almost simulated form of populism.

Two threads lead to this, each with different effects. Firstly, the networked aspect of this is hugely influential. The comparison to polls and voting above is unfair, because Web 2.0 politics doesn't cater to individuals in the same way a survey does - it caters to connections, the links between people. Thus, when we say that X number of people have signed up to a campaign, what we may actually mean is that a social network containing that many people have signed up. In terms of the demographics and the "hierarchies" that are then part of that sign-up group, this is a fundamentally different beast. You most likely have a more homogenous group, which raises issues of representation and of organisation - are people only more likely to turn "allegiance" into "action" if their peers do so? Should a more decentralised, local-social group approach be encouraged to take advantage of this?

Secondly, the numbers-led approach encourages, I think, a lot more simplified interaction. Complex interaction paths, requiring greater thought and time, dent these numbers. In the automated, economic, on-line world, these numbers are sales, hence the hullaballoo over Amazon's one-click purchase method. In political terms, a numbers-led democracy seeks to unite the most basic of political argument - emotion - with the same technology. This can be seen in Facebook campaigns and petitions alike, where the reasons for joining in are overtly moral rather than realistic or practical (who's not going to "support" the oppressed if it doesn't actually mean doing something) and the barrier to pledging this support is as low as possible.

The only reason to worry about this trend is if it turns out to be an illusion of power. The bank fees campaign apparently changed the bank's mind. Other "campaigns", such as that to bring back old chocolate bars, support a "realistic" view of power in a network age. But in both of these, the "campaign" is little more than customer canvassing. Opinion and popular hype don't necessarily lead to "reality" - a problem that Samuel L Jackson encountered.

So popular opinion is all well and good, in some circumstances. But at the end of the day, are we setting up our politics to be an easy-riding, least-responsibility, one-click "discussion" shadow?

Debatepedia: Mapping the Rational Argument

2007-09-28T11:46:00.001+01:00

It's all quiet on the Sphereless front... Congratulations and many thanks if you're reading this, maybe via some long-forgotten RSS subscription. I'm hoping to get a few more posts out soon, if time allows.

For now, I'm hugely excited by Debatepedia, which piggy-backs on wikis but takes a much more structured approach. The idea is very similar to something that's been kicking around in my brain for too many years now (as well as others'), so it's great to see something in the e-flesh, and that's being actively maintained. (Not sure about the name though, especially if saying it out loud...)

Have a look at an example debate - say, on file-sharing - and you'll soon get the gist of it. But for the lazy, the basic idea is that you list the "for" and "against" arguments relating to particular questions. This helps break down the discussion and present a much wider array of arguments (ooh, look, coding speak sneaking in ;) to a reader.

I think this is hugely important, as too often I think people are put off debate due to the over-emphasis on certain points. For example. terrorism and safety are often used to force certain legislation through, at the expense of other arguments, and morals other than "Aie! Save myself!" This approach would (hopefully) lead to a more rational debate, and a more "considerate" (of the argument and, perhaps, of each other) society.

The second important thing is that the arena is mostly impartial. Like Wikipedia, it works because it defines a clear set of rules, and a clear aim for what should be recorded. Wikipedia records facts, not opinion. Debatepedia is the opposite, in a way - to the point where it's the same: It lists arguments as facts, such that the whole of the "logical" realm of debate is available for all to see. "For" and "Against" are equal in a sense, and this impartiality/completeness is good for encouraging participation. Strong advocacy puts many people off participation too, I feel.

One of the interesting things that comes out of the site, then, is the way it highlights the difference between "rationality" and "emotion" in politics. Don't get me wrong - I don't think you can necessarily run a debate without involving both of these. But the current climate of "debate" all too often gets the 2 mixed up - often deliberately. Emotive arguments are often backed up by supposedly "rational" statistics, for example, and we end up going round and round in circles until we're not sure what to think any more. Perhaps by jotting down the rational side of things, we can then make more informed decisions according to how we want the world to be.

Is a wiki the best way to decide which argument is best? I'm not sure about that. It'd be easy to take a technological route and add some kind of voting or rating set-up to the system, but personally I'd much rather see this kind of thing used as a tool for informing debate. Clarifying the rational, as Debatepedia does, gives you a better way of thinking about what's involved in an issue, and helps you to see things from a point of view that was muddled or obscured previously. But the philosophy and motivation behind choosing from these options - the emotive side - is far more complex, and subject to just as much rationality and irrationality as ever (a point that the Greeks turned into Rhetoric and Democracy to begin with).

It'd be great to see a simplified version, with a hugely "dumbed down" (read "user friendly") interface, and centred on one particular issue - a small trial. "Local" instances could even be used within small groups, to map out otherwise-murky and ever-twisting discussion over the course of a day or two, for instance.

I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this one.

Citizendium, and the necessity of Public Domain Knowledge

2007-05-02T11:43:00.001+01:00

There are those rare, unforgettable times when a cat gives birth to a dog. There are those even rarer times when this blog gets posted to. But it lives on, akin to some low-budget B-movie terror that just. won't. die. Apparently cosmic forces have aligned themselves once again.

Larry Sanger has launched a fork of Wikipedia called Citizendium ("sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um", apparently). (Picked up via smartmobs.) The aim of the fork is to encourage a greater role for experts in contributing to and editing the knowledge base. Larry has written an accompanying essay over at edge.org titled "Who says we know: on the new politics of knowledge". I thought some thoughts on it were relevant here, as knowledge is one of the bedrocks for participation and discussion, and is increasingly more important for political debate.

To summarise the article a little (ok, quite a lot)... Larry breaks his essay up into 4 sections: the first outlines the nature of knowledge, and the evolution of authority over knowledge (i.e. who gets to say what is knowledge); the second looks at the pros of getting both the (non-expert) "public" and experts involved in contribution; the third defines "dabblerism" and explores the difference between the "wisdom of crowds", and the necessity for experts - or at least why the former may not necessarily apply to content publishing; the final part takes issue with the moral arguments for egalitarianism put forward by wikipedia supporters, ultimately highlighting that experts are still a necessary dependency for wikipedia, and as such, should be more closely integrated.

The debate is interesting to me as I'm looking a lot these days into the role of knowledge within political discussion, especially discussion of scientific matters that seeks - or is forced - to include the less expert, less formally-trained demographic. Over at the related discussion, George Dyson notes H. G. Wells' vision of a global encyclopedia, wherein the knowledge of humanity is made available to humanity. While there are differences between the version foreseen by Wells, and what's happening in Wikipedia, I think certainly the new electronic networks we now rely upon have opened up forms of knowledge assembly that weren't possible before, and it's these collections that are now shaping the structure of discussions.

Sanger notes that one of the main differences between experts and non-experts is the dimension along which content develops. To broadly generalise, but somewhat truthfully I believe, non-experts contribute breadth of topics more easily, while experts are in a position to provide depth to subjects. This is partially why comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica is like comparing Charlie Parker to the Beatles - each draws on a fundamentally different group of contributors, for a different aim. In that sense, there's a gulf between the two, which is why it's good that efforts such as Citizendium are at least willing to explore it.

This difference in aims, however, highlights an important part of political progress in the last 15 years or so, and mirrors to some extent sociological efforts to "undermine" the universal authority of scientific knowledge, as undertaken by Brian Wynne and Sheila Jasanoff. Sanger alludes to this new social, democratic nature of information-led decision-making when talking about Wikipedia, and its effect on where we get out information from:

"No doubt the main philosophical reason for epistemic egalitarianism is, like the reason for egalitarianism generally, the now-common and overarching desire for fairness. The desire for fairness creates hostility toward any authority—and not just when authority uses its power to gain an unfair advantage, but toward authority as such."

This fairness becomes embedded in processes - which we, as a public, then relate to more closely with than the information itself. To borrow from McLuhan, "the medium is the message" - in other words, how knowledge is collated is more important than what that knowledge says. Or, in a way, wikipedia is more relevant to us, as a "public" (rather than as experts) because we can identify with the mode of production, even if the knowledge contained in the structure is less "validated".

Furthermore, I think this is a theme that ripples through the wikipedia discourse. There is often - especially in the Citizendium discussion - far too much emphasis on collective wisdom, and emergent knowledge: the idea that opening up the structure to many people means that so long as everyone does a tiny bit, something great reveals itself. There is an important, over-looked flipside to this, which I think is often left implicit, or shied away from in discussion among"experts" - this vast silo of information is also available to anyone. The smartmobs link adds that the ability to fork these databases is highly important, but it's this same openness that again makes Wikipedia more relevant to the public than other sources.

Think about it - where else can a member of the general public gain access to such a realm of information easily? While Wikipedia is compared to Encyclopedias by those concerned about authenticity, and to other mechanisms such as expert peer review by academics (interesting that the peer review systems must now be differentiated), both of these are prohibitively expensive to the likes of Mr and Mrs Average. Encyclopedias are costly and take up space, and going to a library takes time. Academic journals are insanely expensive, and even once access is gained, there's very little in the way of a formal system to inform unknowing readers which journals are "good" and which are "bad".

The push towards a "knowledge economy" is a sharp, two-faced drive for "progress". The term itself implies a paradox. We are all "part of the economy" as individually we stand to gain from it - mainly financially, but also technically, and therefore socially (supposedly). But it is also clear we are talking about a specific form of economy, namely "knowledge capitalism" - a perhaps-inevitable offspring to follow mercantile capitalism and industrial capitalism. Under this scheme, knowledge is owned, it is a private good, subject to intellectual property regimes and dramatic fortification. If this paradox becomes reality (a paradox in itself, maybe), then we apparently stand to gain from knowledge in some way, but not to actually control it - or even have access to it.

From a pro-discursive engagement point of view, this is surely unacceptable. The increased privatisation of knowledge actively restricts the knowledge available from a public perspective. In other words, knowledge is a resource, and if the supply of this resource is limited, the discussions that we are able to have, from a non-expert, non-professional perspective, are similarly curtailed.

From this, we can sketch a point of transition, where we currently stand trying to work out where we're going. Implementation of greater public engagement relies upon both ubiqitous networks and ready access to information - the "how" and the "what". Huge efforts to incorporate the former are being undertaken on a daily basis. But where's the corresponding drive to incorporate the latter? Why is Wikipedia still seen as a "bad source to cite" in academia circles (which it is), rather than a tool for knowledge amongst those who are outside all other "knowledge elites"?

That's not to say that Wikipedia is necessarily the best tool for the job. Citizendium is one attempt amongst many to improve that. But in terms of free access to large amounts of information, it's the best thing we currently have. A path is formed by laying one stone at a time, and no doubt further development, such as "epistemic responsibility" (as put forward by Gloria Origgi) would emerge somewhat spontaneously and rather quickly following initial steps.

The sad thing, I think, is that if this isn't at least attempted, collective information sources will effectively be "de-fanged" under a more private approach to information, taking with it the bite that is necessary in our public engagement circles.

See you in a month ;)

Diebold goes to court after losing sale

2007-03-27T16:51:00.001+01:00

Interesting business tactics #3152: Take your customers to court when they opt to buy someone else's voting machines. Have Diebold been taking lessons from the RIAA?

Greenpeace Win Nuclear Consultaton Challenge

2007-02-15T16:32:00.001Z

This is a big story: Nuclear consultation 'was misleading' proclaims Judge, following a legal challenge on the government by Greenpeace.

A judge ruled that the consultation process before making the decision last year had been "misleading", "seriously flawed" and "procedurally unfair".

For too long, public "consultation" has been subject to bad information from the government (think Iraq Dossier). This ruling seems to strongly highlight the difference between what government want to do, and how much they permit discussion to take place. I suspect the attitude examined in this ruling isn't particularly unique, and goes a long way to explaining the general dismissal of politicians as willing-to-listen.

Climate change is a huge issue. The solutions may well include nuclear power in some form, but the point here is that we can only reach the right solutions through greater discussion. Tony Blair rubbishing suggestions about cutting long-haul flights, for instance, very much clamps down discussion, by letting it be known that these things aren't open to debate.

Some people would like to think that the future of the country/world has been decided for us already.

Politics: Honing in on the Social Enthusiasts

2007-02-15T16:12:00.001Z

Slashdot links to an article about a US presidential candidate setting up in Second Life, the virtual world reminiscent of Snow Crash. What's intriguing here is why John Edward is doing it - not for any features or particular press coverage (he says), but for the kind of people that inhabit the space.

The new social networking craze has, in a way, re-embodied the thing that many feared the Internet would threaten in the first place - social interaction. OK, perhaps "re-captured" or "re-structured" might be better phrases, as I'd go so far to say that the kind of interaction taking place is fundamentally different - location, and all the issues that stem from it, is absent. The community here is self-selecting. Thus, the kind of community that emerges will be different.

While SL users do not have the same numbers as, say, MySpace, they have communication skills, and a desire to communicate, that, I humbly say, exceeds that of MySpace users.

This highlights an interesting facet of politics within a liquid network of networks. The question faced by a politician is: who should I address - the people who are interested in politics and who are likely to vote, or the masses (the majority, one would suspect) who can now be reached, but who aren't so interested? To be so crude about it, quality or quantity?

Mass media has meant that the latter has become more "efficient" over the last few decades. But can we now expect this to shift dramatically as group formation gets easier, and (more importantly) group selection becomes more readily available? Or is Second Life simply a one-off novelty party, which it makes sense for politicians looking to be "hip" to tag along with?

Certainly, the strength and "fluidity" of groups is one theme that I'll definitely be following here for a while.

Update: After reading David Wilcox's piece on local on-line centres and "confident citizens", I wonder if there's a similarity. Just because people aren't in a certain place (whether it be the centre, or a 3D virtual world) doesn't mean they're not social, or not politically interested. Nor does socially "enthusiastic" necessarily equate to politically enthusiastic - in the same context. That is, we may be political in one group, and completely apolitical in another. Perhaps it's more important to focus on appropriate engagement forums, than making efficient ones? (Going into Second Life to garner discussion because people are there is efficient from a candidate's point of view, but ignores all the people who aren't there, or who can't get there.)

Is it all about getting the right mix of setting, attitude and topic?

Pseudonymous Politics

2007-02-06T14:35:00.001Z

Danah Boyd muses about the abolition of walled gardens, taking more searchability as a thread to weave together contextuality and identity - in other words, perhaps we need walls to define context, to define identity. But more transparency (mostly through searching, but also - I would add - through stronger network externality effects*) seem to be the way the net is going.

I think this has important and interesting implications for on-line discussion, as it provides a nice basis for thinking about what identity means within political debate, and how it could be handled on-line. For example, my local issues forum has a "real name" policy - one assumes that by using a "real" name, not only are people are more likely to consider what they say more carefully, but also that the link to off-line deliberation is "preserved" to a greater extent.

But now compare this to other forums. In my experience, isolated identity can also prove to be a strength - of the community, and therefore also of the discussion. Despite - or through - a foundation of anonymity (though certainly not mandatory), the cypherpunks mailing list flourished in terms of arguments, to an extent that I would hope many practitioners of politics would be proud of. Perhaps the technical nature of the crowd acts as a counterbalance to some issues that arose (e.g. from the use of killfiles to discussion of the plausibility of content analysis to gauge identity), but the point remains - arguments do not depend utterly on knowing someone's "true" identity.

Naturally, if we reconstruct democracy in some selected image (rather than merely growing it and seeing what emerges), then issues of identity over "legitimacy of participation" arise. A forum on the Internet is inherently global, so how do I make sure that only local people can participate? True identities are one way to help encourage this. But no workable solution will be foolproof, nor need be. The question then, the decision to be made, is over whether pseudonyms help or hinder discussion. And, perhaps more vitaly, what the aims of the discussion are (which may not necessarily be simply to arrive at a decision).

I'd like to see some research into this - say, comparisons between deliberative groups that were pseudonymous and groups that weren't. There might be some out there, but I haven't come across it. Perhaps some hypothesising/observations might help air some thoughts:

Pseudonyms have a reputation of their own. People like pseudonyms as this reputation is separate to any previous/alternatives (perhaps a "local reputation"). The upside of this is that people are more likely to focus on arguments than on personal attacks. The downside, of course, is that there is less come back, so people may be encouraged to lie, etc. However, both of these are initial concerns in the evolution of a group - assuming that all pseudonyms within a group are new. How the group grows will affect how newcomers are reacted to (which will probably depend on a further mix of local reputations, and argument). In this sense (an important one, I feel), the group is more likely to see the ongoing discussion in an objective manner.

People may feel more attached to their pseudonymical identity, as it is their "creation". Thus, just as people invest time and money in building up a character within a game (such as World of Warcraft), they may also invest time in building up their newfound identity.

Anonymity within discussion may help people to "come out of the woodwork" if they feel it is unattached to the rest of their life. While there may be some effect on what people say, I would expect that only a minority of people actually go out of their way to be troublesome. This would probably be easily countered by the number of people who would feel encouraged to say things they wouldn't normally say under their true name.

Just a handful for now, to raise the question - there are certainly huge issues over legal accountability, technical surveillance, etc tat go alongside. Certainly, the target audience is a huge consideration. Hopefully in a follow-up post (and to get back on topic...), I'll have some thoughts over what this area of nymity means for a political sphere in which groups are often the most persuasive forces, and where one person may participate in many groups.

* As we become more and more connected, do we increasingly flock to less sites in greater numbers?

Democracy and Web Commercialism - one and the same?

2007-01-31T15:28:00.001Z

Been wanting to post this relatively minor piece on the Web 2.0 Bubble Popping for a while now, so here it is. By way of introduction, I'll paste this part of the post:

So, does this mean that Web 2.0 is dead? No, but what we have already is a clear winnowing thanks to supply and demand. Startups are launching by the boatload and getting funded too. ... These days it's cheap to start an online venture.

At this point I'm reminded of recent discussion over at David Wilcox's blog on the launch of social networking for "social entreneurs" (my inverted quotes, see also the follow-up). While the two threads aren't a one-to-one match (criticism for how a social networking site presents itself is not necessarily related to the hyping of an industry at all), there are important issues here to consider in terms of how "we" (the public, to get back to the blog's theme) interact with each other, and kick ideas about. After all, the recent craze for social networking is not a new inspiration, but one that goes back to the dawn of human communication.

It is, I think, fair to say that the split between the citizen and "service consumer" is fuzzier and less distinct than ever before; the implicit assumptions of "Web 2.0" - that business models can be built on top of community and "user-generated content" are merely the two ends of the consumption/interactor line meeting and forming a circle. Efforts emerging to "regenerate" civil discussion sync up (to the detriment, IMHO) with competitive/commercial networking services in several ways:

1. They have to target some already-networked, niche "market" (or section of society) to get off the ground. Network externalities mean that efficiency under the Web 2.0 banner depends on exploiting and reinforcing existing links. Market specialisation, "unique selling points", all these things mean that functionality must be targeted now, as more generic services (even including e-mail, etc) provide more general communication mechanisms already.

2. This specialisation increases the focus of the service and, hence, the ability to grab a headline momentarily, but reduces the overall usefulness of the service - in other words, competitive edge ends up damaging itself. This can be compared to the increasing specialisation in increasingly obscure subjects within higher education - the need to carve a gap is fine for the purposes of 1 system, but not for the wider picture.

There are probably more similarities than can be drawn, but the point is this. I don't think I'm off-target by drawing similarities between the rise of "Web 2.0" (user participation) and the progress of participatory democracies (citizen participation). The question at the end of all of this, then is: what are the implications of a participation "bubble" bursting? Implications for local government? For national government? And for "engagement" services trying to get off the ground? Are they all at the whim of a larger, market-driven approach to what we might consider "sociality" to be these days?

Does the new-democracy bubble pop alongside the web2.0 one?

Engagement, Media and Broadband in 2007

2007-01-04T12:01:00.001Z

Clay Shirky's post on YouTube vs HDTV is making me think a little. This, I think, is the crunch point, the crux behind YouTube popularity:

People like to watch, but they also like to create, and to share. Doubling down on the watching part while making it harder for the users to play their own stuff or share with their friends makes a medium worse in the users eyes. By contrast, the last 50 years have been terrible for user creativity and for sharing, so even moderate improvements in either of those abilities make the public go wild.

Very astute. Comments on the article also rightly point out that "For each level of service its own delivery mechanism", which is very important.

So we have 2 models here: the "top-down" model (or the "Total Controlled Content Delivery Package" as Clay puts it) - embodied in HDTV and DRM, and the "grass roots" model symbolised by YouTube. If I were to hazard a prediction for 2007 and digital politics, it'd be that political parties will tap yet more into getting users to generate content. Forums are no longer enough. "Create your own Tory movie" will be the Next Big Thing [tm], probably on a site called BlueTube or something. In other words, the rich, user-provided media that all the new Social Networks want to tap into is what the parties are after: eyeballs, attention, celebrity awareness.

Not everyone, of course, can or wants to create movies or mash-ups. Still, the "campaign" hits the headlines and thus the attention of those who want to tap it. Politicians, however, are in an interesting location - they have some influence. (Some.) Are they going to be able to tap into national policies and ideas in order to capitalise on this "new wave" of political/audience engagement? That is, in much the same way that many companies (banks, shops, etc) created their own, branded ISPs in the 90s in order to tie together medium and message, what methods might be used to draw "creators" into the fold of the elected?

The biggest disappointment, technologically, for me at the moment is the lopsidedness of (mainstream) broadband. This in itself seems to embody the "top down", consumption led model that HDTV shares. By concentrating on download speeds and providing relatively poor upload speeds, it is assumed that users will exchange small amounts of data (say, numbers - "cash") for large amounts of data (rich media). However, does this help or hinder political engagement at a more "down to earth" level? Does such an assumption re-inforce a view that political services should be "big" providers in order to be fully functional? What would the on-line political arena look like if we have more symmetrical transfer speeds (equal up and down rates), and perhaps more decentralised storage systems (making it cheaper to set up a rich service, in terms of storage)?

Getting people connected is important, but we also need to examine the kind of services permitted by the type of connections being used.

A Cynical and Detached New Year?

2007-01-03T15:02:00.001Z

Happy new year from Sphereless, 2007 looks like it's going to be an interesting one.

Old article from BusinessWeek last month: Who Likes Consumer Generated Ads? Not Young Adults

Survey respondants between the ages of 18 and 24 are more likely than those between the ages of 25 and 64 to say a company that uses customer-created advertising is less trustworthy, less socially-responsible and less customer-friendly.

What does this mean for the future of user-centric services and for involvement in politics (where the same trust/distrust balance-split is likely to occur in some form)? If the younger generation are more cynical when large organisations and corporations "reach out", is it likely that they'll turn instead to more "local", smaller groups?

Of course, while small may be beautiful, there's nothing to say that small is reputable. (But then, there's nothing to say that big is either...) But that's the nature of life. What small does mean is that these things get harder to track, as scale and evolution (jumping from one small group to another, and the creation/dissolution therein) increase the complexity, mirroring that of the networks coming into play.

From an Academic (capital A) point of view, this is annoying :) as it makes it difficult to really understand what's actually happening in reality. From a non-Academic point of view, though, I can only hope that this combination of cynicism with scepticism ultimately benefits us. The danger is that we (as an "older", "involved" generation?) continue to ignore the complexity, either by assuming that the world fits into a 2- or 3-party (FPTP) election system, or by assuming that a limited range of ideas are effective for an incerasingly "connected" audience.

The discussion of containing technology and making it available to the masses is part of this assumption, IMHO. The discussion that isn't happening is the underlying relationship, between the increasingly complex (yet still "designed") nature of the technology being harnessed, and the "consumption" nature of the apparently increasingly detached youth. In a way, this harks back to science education, which is really merely symbolic of this divided relationship that we have yet to address in any meaningful manner.

In other words, should the "public" be able to use the technology, or should it be able to understand it?

Linksplunge: YouTube to TheirTube, techno-teens, $100 zooming

2006-12-12T12:36:00.001Z

Some links via unmediated...

1. NYT reports that the rot is setting in... YouTube Adds a Layer of Filtering to Be a Little Nicer (via lost remote). According to the article, comments for (some?) CBS videos are now not only moderated, but also displayed on a different page - although the example given in the Lost Remote post doesn't seem to display that way for me. Maybe this behaviour is different for those signed into YouTube? Or have they changed it back following the press coverage?

Either way, the dichotomy of corporate and anarchy is underway. The old question is, will people start to flock away from YouTube as a result? If one partner have started the trend, it can't be too long until others start setting similar agendas with Google, and before you know it, all the interesting stuff is underground. Again.

2. Interesting - although not too surprising - figures on the technologisation of teenagers, with some insightful observation of where all this networked technology can actually lead us:

"So much technology makes teens feel they are playing a starring role in their own reality TV show ... Teen life has become a theatrical, self-directed media production."

3. And finally a link to a Nooface article on the $100 laptop interface, which will apparently have a zoom metaphor to leap between an application, the desktop, the user's social group, and the neighbourhood social group. I haven't seen this approach before, but I'm sure it must have been used elsewhere. The idea is, I think, a nice way to separate it out, although I'd also be interested to see how the different layers are re-integrated, too. I can certainly imagine some nice desktop apps that might use the metaphor in a side-window for IM contacts/general networks, etc.

Code v2.0 released

2006-12-12T12:02:00.001Z

Code version 2.0, the revision of the book by Lawrence Lessig, was launched yesterday under a Attribution-ShareAlike license, which means you can copy it and use it in derivative works freely (with credit/same license). The book's revision was conducted through a wiki, so it'll be interesting to see how it differs. One to add to the Christmas list, methinks. (Yes, you can download it for free, but there's nothing like a real tome from real tree...)

The first book is highly recommended, and does a great job of establishing some context and the relationships between all the various factors (technical, political, social) that influence what shapes our networks take. Lessig starts out, IIRC, by making the point that there is nothing inherent in the technology that makes it decentralised, uncontrolled, and that we really shouldn't assume that there is. Worth a read.

Distributed Deliberation vs Distributed Surveillance

2006-12-07T13:54:00.001Z

Networked technology does not operate in a discursive vacuum. The structures in place that make it possible for people to communicate globally, and for communities to integrate locally, are the same structures that also permit more stringent hierarchies, and greater tracking. As Lessig pointed out, there is nothing inherently "communitarian" or, if you like, "anarchist" in our network infrastructure; code can be changed, and routers can be controlled, such that it's perfectly possible to have a "distributed" network of tough hierarchies - in effect, everyone can sit at the top of their "domain".

This is worth bearing in mind for matters of civil discussion. Arguments over the best way to implement, and to encourage people into these debates is of limited value if the alternative, and often encapsulating contexts are ignored. Seeking to bridge some of the (intentional) divide with the Into the Machine blog, I think the interplay between what we often call "democracy" and, in this case, surveillance - monitoring - needs to be explored further.

This USA Today article (via SmartMobs) points out how issues of injustice are brought to a global attention, through the ubiquity not of networked discussion and basic awareness, but of video devices. The article calls it "cell-veillance", but the idea of "sousveillance" (viewing from below) has been around for years.

What strikes me, though, is the association made between this sousveillance and "justice". Jeffrey Cole, in the article, states that:

"Video empowers the individual against big brother"

This is, apparently, the "era of citizen journalism".

The language of "empowerment", "citizens" and "bottom-up" (as in grass-roots, not christmas drinks...) is one familiar to practitioners of more participative, deliberative democracy. At the heart of both (and revealing the source of the overlap in lingo) is a desire to hold those with power to account, to avoid mis-use of resources and misrepresentation. The difference, then, lies in the extent to which we, as individuals, relate not just to each other, but to ourselves. There is a difference between being merely a publisher - being in the right place at the right time, and pushing information out - and being a participant.

In participation there is feedback. There is understanding through debate, agreement and, most of all, disagreement. But furthermore from a policy perspective, there is also often a result. Not only (one hopes) do people come to a mutual decision or viewpoint, but also there is opportunity for a more reflective, more reflexive process wherein the nature of the debate itself can be extended and transformed.

I am, unfortunately, a cynic however. There is far less evidence of this participation being taken up than there is of surveillance - in all of its forms - being implemented, in the UK at least. For many reasons, our fixation with CCTV and other modes of panopticism is rapidly becoming embedded as a cultural value, a symbol of our isolation and dependency on technology as a solution rather than a facilitator. From a "grass-roots" perspective, this is very much "fire to fight fire".

This is not to say that electronic deliberation and distributed surveillance are, necessarily, mutually exclusive, by any means. However, the modern human is a fickle and busy creature, and the issue of personal responsibility to society (in contrast to Blair's re-definition of the "social contract") is one in which many people now seem content to avoid. Much, if not all, of the ideas surrounding the on-line reconstruction of society are centred on how to attract and keep people's attention.

Video's are being used more and more in matters of discussion - although generally for either attention grabbing or for structured input. But how should the "divide" between video as "content" and video as "surveillance" be addressed? Should there be greater integration between our surveillance systems and our debate systems (hmm, can't find a link to the town showing CCTV footage on a local public TV channel now...), such that we have the chance to discuss events with some context? Or does this risk establishing more surveillance as a "legitimate" mode of self-governance? There are, after all, still many places that rely on CCTV as only a disuasive tool rather than as "evidence". Or, indeed, that don't rely on it at all.

This post is getting quite long now, so I'll wrap it up and maybe continue some thoughts in another post. The main point, from this blog's perspective, is that while there are many efforts to engage with ordinary people in the political sphere, we should also recognise that this is not an isolated effort, and that "openness" and engagement can at the same time come from quite different (and, in many minds, more "cost-effective") tools. Rolling the more "voyeuristic" tendencies of people into discussions may not be so "ethically" grounded, but can it offer a path to increased interest in discussion?

Comments and criticism welcomed, indeed encouraged...

Profiles vs Blankets

2006-11-24T16:01:00.000Z

Gah, haven't managed to get back to those posts I promised yet - they're planned, in the draft stage, but - y'know, time and all that.

However, thought I'd post following an FT article on web 2.0 networks (subscription required, hoom), which possibly gives the most focused account of what this upgrade supposedly entails that I've seen yet (after the AJAX/UGC/Yadda confusion kicked off).

In true market-oriented fashion, the concentration this time round is on how to sell to the people using these services. Just as people were working out how to make money from the Internet 10 years ago, now they're trying to work it all out again - that is, what's left over now that the real money is made from providing the service in the first place...

The article gets a little muddled here, and flip-flops between service provision, and viral marketing as in tapping-into-social-network-influences. But it does serve to highlight the shift in communications that's occurring, and which organisations, including political ones (as traders in attention), are trying to get a handle on.

From a business point of view, marketing could be set (says the article) to become much more personalised, and more flexible - that is, more rapidly adjustable to the whims of modern culture and modern individuals. "Public Profiles" make information available that previously had to be assumed or inferred, and act as a "grease" for coupling, indicators for potential hook-ups and, hence, potential sales too.

Whether this will be taken advantage of from a political stance, though, remains to be seen. Is there a line in terms of communication (personal contact vs blanket broadcast) that still separates the political party from the commercial business?

Friday Slashdot Linksponge

2006-11-03T11:31:00.000Z

Hum. As so often occurs, the frenzy of real life has intervened in the good intentions of a new blog. Curse you, limited waking hours and overdue bureaucracy! Anyway.

Back to the themes I wanted to elaborate upon from my last post in the near future. In the meantime, here are some links via Slashdot with appropriate commentary, to keep the RSS Ping monster satisfied...

A Business Week article on "Digital Mudslinging" and politics on the Internet reminds me of McLuhan's notion that "the medium is the message". These days, it seems more likely that elections are decided by the impulse of the electorate - whoever manages to lodge themselves in the goldfish-like memories of the fickle masses wins. One can imagine quite easily this leading to an eBay-style "attention sniping" race, to see who can "inject" the final, viral piece of mockery into the population at the latest moment. Maybe Flashverts can help here...
An interview with Berners-Lee regarding a new initiative called "Web Science". This is, in effect, an attempt to define a new field of study - an attempt which is intriguing, as I can't work out if this is either an attempt to construct a new space, or just the naming of an emergent space - I would guess the latter, though. Anyway, there are some very interesting ideas in here that I need to return to - the idea of fractal society (or, rather, a fractal technosociety - society itself has always been fractal).

Particularly thought-provoking for me is the distinction between "web" sociality and "non-web" sociality. Defining disciplines is always problematic in terms of ignoring the links between a discipline and its surroundings. The article mentions that "they want to bring together lots of different disciplines", but it makes it sound like this is just as a way of understanding, or modelling web sociality.
Finally, while I don't particularly wish to focus here so much on electronic voting, an article on Diebold attacking an HBO programme is kind of interesting. I'm not in America, obviously, but I get the impression that public discussion over the transparency, security and reliability of electronic voting really hasn't taken place as much as it could have done. (Same with, for example, postal voting in the UK...)

The question here, then, is whether TV programmes that bring more of said discussion to the table should be encouraged - even if potentially subject to the hype that TV often entails - in order to get the issue raised more, or whether the issue should be treated with censorship and legal pressures.

Personally, I suspect it's currently a no-win situation. Neither clamping down nor hyped TV programmes particularly encourage further, non-"celebritised" debate. Diebold, following business interests, would probably prefer a quieter scene as, just like everyone else, they're ultimately acting in their own (financial) interest.

That'll do for today. Hopefully some time next week I'll get back to the effects of Web 2.0 and the death of a "public" Internet, etc. Enjoy your weekend :)

Changes in the Communication Landscape - Part 1

2006-10-18T17:28:00.000+01:00

I was debating in my head whether to put this here or elsewhere, but as a) it deals with issues introduced in the previous post, and b) concerns the "hyper"-fragmentation of the public sphere that one could say the Internet produced, I think this is the right place. In many ways, it's simply the extension of the last post and so the link isn't so important. I should also, then, warn you now that this is a post "to be continued..." There are a number of points that I want to take up, and I think it's only fair to break them up into several posts, rather than provide one extra-large one. As such, this one serves as an introduction, while the next few will pick out some more specific implications over the next few days (hopfully).

Discussion with David and a report describing Web2.0 as a "catch-all buzzword that people use to describe a wide range of online activities and applications" provided the initial impetus, nonetheless. I've also been reading some Baudrillard which has got me thinking along lines of simulation, replacement, power defining itself in terms of its own death, etc.

So the last post started getting into the attitude that accompanies a drive towards "revolution". Or, indeed, the attitude that is the struggle for re-invention that ends up being defined as "Web2.0" - and it's this hope for re-invention, this determination to detach "our"selves from the problems created over the past couple of decades, that confuses the issue of defining just what "Web2.0" is.

But now I wonder if the "problem"* of Web2.0 itself is larger even than that - larger than just creating a confusing border between "old" and "new". At this point, though, I don't believe it's a coincidence that the issue is emerging just at the same point in time that debate over both new forms of network neutrality and independent networks is reaching a potentially critical stage.

The fundamental thread that ties the two together - along with many other aspects of modern computing and networking - is that the Internet is maturing rapidly. It has reached a point of no-return in terms of usage, and in terms (more importantly) of dependence on it - and both Web2.0 and a move towards differentiated control recognise the fact that we need to find new ways of managing the sheer volume of "Net".

It is at this point that we need to consider the implications for what we hazily refer to as the "public sphere". For all the cries of its death and the bitter mutterings of web developers around the world (myself included ;), the technical "immaturity" of whatever Web1.0 was meant that it was hackable to the many. It could perhaps be said that the ability for browsers to display horrible, munged-up code meant that you didn't have to get too technical to get a web presence and, as such, 98% of those interested could knock something together in some sense. Simple web-hosting (often via an ISP) gave a bog-standard - and hence highly flexible - space for these creations to come to life. This amateurishness was one extreme of the "hyperfragmentation" of the public sphere mentioned above - the sudden possibility that anyone could publish whatever they liked, even if it looked crap and didn't parse. And it was this same sloppiness that led to many others (myself included) getting extremely excited about the possibilities this new technology could offer.

So now we need to compare that to the Internet we're creating today. The evolution and maturation developed from this initial slapdash approach has, in my view, led to an extremely different kind of participation. That's not to say it's any better or worse, but the fact that it's different may mean that we need to re-assess what we believe to be possible, and what we think is currently occuring. But I should emphasise that it's this maturation - not new technology - that we need to take as the context for this.

I think this is a good place for a break. I hope that the next couple of posts will deal (again ;) with the separation and expectations of Web1.0 and 2.0 in this context, as well as the control over the kind of communication we, as our "own" little spheres, engage in.

* "Problem" is one perspective, but in reality, "evolution" is probably a better, less-biased term.

Tech Race against the Masses

2006-10-17T12:14:00.000+01:00

(Hmm, the Blogger wysiwyg editor might have screwed the formatting on this one up a little. Will post and find out... ;)

David Wilcox has done a great job recently of explaining the importance of new social tools, and at the same time noting the confusion around "them". I put "them" in quotes as it really refers to a culture, or even a vision that draws a distinction and defines "a new sort of digital divide", as David puts it.

This got me thinking a bit about the role that "we" as techno-chasers have, and reminded me that Language is Power. Why do we define things as "Web2.0"? Why are we so keen to engage entire communities, nay entire populations with "radically" different concepts and technologies? Who do such definitions serve and, more importantly, what do they mean to everyone else?

David mentions "Silicon Snakeoil", but I think the current trend encompasses more than mere snakeoil - I think a lot of the "new-tech" posturing comes about from a real desire to see change, an attitude and approach to politics from an extreme problem-solving point of view. That is, "we" define terms such as "Web2.0" and "e-citizen" to:

a) provide some continuity between the "old" and the "new" - the Web in one case, and what it is to be a citizen, in the other.

b) simultaneously set a "breakpoint" that declares a boundary, and claims that what we're doing right now is fundamentally "different" somehow and therefore "better". This is, of course, partly motivated by a keen desire to appear as "worth something" - an important point when getting paid...

But this suffers. For firstly, as David points out, it's very difficult to define exactly what we mean here - what is the difference between old and new? One could say, instead, that the difference is more hope than reality, more a teleological drive for a new country than an actual identification of a shift in how the world works. This, I think, is where the "hype" comes from.

Secondly, the terms are defined within a subculture. The biggest problem I see is that this "hope" is being exported into a "wider" culture that doesn't necessarily understand, or even need to understand the same point of view that the subculture sees. In other words, why should I become an e-citizen, rather than, say, simply a citizen that happens to use the technology around them. Do I care if my local council use "Web2.0" technologies when I didn't really realise there was a Web 1.0? Thus, by attributing a name to what we see as the "future", there's also some possibilty that people will be put off as well.

Capitalism has seen some considerable success in getting people accustomed to change - but onyl so long as they don't have to do anything. Buy, use, upgrade, repeat. So far, this has translated relatively well into one-line technologies (central servers make things easier, although areas such as firmware and security updates are still "slow" in comparison). But politics is about participation. As such, we should be asking whether enforcing rapid, radical change upon people in order for them to participate is necessary to "reclaiming" politics. In parallel, then, we should also be asking what effect on the non-subcultured, non-"2.0" populace we are having by declaring that everything's changed, and that we need to change in order to remain citizens.

That's not to say we should revert to some pre-internet Athenian-style form of debate, of course. It just seems, sometimes, that we can be so fixated upon clearing away the "old" (off-line discourse, and now Web 1.0) and re-inventing the "new" from the ground up, that it's easy to forget that people will usually quite happily put up with defects in the mechanism if it lets them focus their energies on the issues that matter to them.

Where do we draw the line between improving the infrastructure, and getting some real work done? ;)

And so it begins...

2006-10-15T10:45:00.000+01:00

So this is my latest blog, "Sphereless". After some thought, the name came out of some work I was doing a few months ago for a Masters dissertation, which concentrated on Habermas' idea of the public sphere - one of the questions raised in particular was whether we are partaking in such a sphere, or whether a single domain has given way to a multitude of smaller, isolated sphere. Or, alternatively (there's always a third way) that sphere just doesn't exist at all.

Then I was reminded of a collection of Foucault speeches on parrhesia called "Fearless Speech". One spoonerism, and dropping the "Feech" bit, and "Sphereless" came about. It seemed to fit with the idea - or the question - that we need to reconsider what we consider the "public" in an age of personalised, yet networked technology, and indeed perhaps it should really be read as "Sphereless?", question mark and all.

So there's the name. What about content? Well, I finally decided to 'fork' out this theme - politics, the "public" and technology - as its own distinct "thread" for a few reasons. Firstly, as a place to focus, direct and explore my own thoughts and observations on it. This aspect is becoming, I think, increasingly more important as I head into a 3-year programme of studying such things (yay for Academic Bloggers). Secondly, I think there are some really important and, most of all, under-examined trends and progressions being made in this relatively fuzzy of areas. And by giving the subject its own "space", not only does it make it easier for others interested in the theme to follow, but perhaps it also lends an air of "gravity" to the whole field as well.

Oh, and thirdly, I wanted to play with Google's new beta blog stuff :) You'll have to forgive me this indulgence if you're viewing on browsers other than Firefox and IE - the beta Blogger homepage notes they're still working out some kinks. I'll hopefully give it a decent test in some non-standard browsers to see what's going on anyway (plus get round to changing the "out of the box" design at some point, too).

Anyway. That's an introduction. Posts to follow...