While it may be that the Geeks shall inherit the Earth, you will have to forgive me for thinking that government would never be conquered. Arcane IT systems, technophobes as far as the eye can see and one data breach after another, it appeared that there was little hope the government geek looking to rewire the red tape and truly transform government through tech.

But no! The once small and closed community of government techies appears to be growing and opening up with geeks popping up in high places, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style. Driven in no small part by the appointment of “IT enthusiast and blogging pioneer among MPs” Tom Watson to the role of Cabinet Office Minster for Transformational Government in January 2008, the profile and priority of all thing geeky has rocketed in what has been a pretty tech unsavvy government thus far.

Not that he would admit it, but Tom may in fact have much to thank to the Conservative Party for under the leadership of David Cameron. With their aspirations to be the party of the future and drawing on lessons from America no doubt, the Conservatives have embraced the power of the web. Cameron wholeheartedly adopted sites such as Twitter, Facebook, his own personal YouTube channel WebCameron - and even pipping the PM to the post to appear at Google’s Zeitgeist conference last October (a performance quickly followed up by Gordon Brown in May 2008). All of which has given Tom Watson some real leverage within government to begin to build an agenda for change of his own.

Information is power

Even before the appointment of Tom, 2007 started with a bang with the launch of the Power of Information Review in January of that year, reporting in June 2007 one month after the publication of the equally high profile Transformational Government strategy . Both represented a statement of intent by government in relation to tech and the opening up of “public” information. Since then, and even more so under Tom’s watch, the PoI review has taken on talismanic-like status for those looking to unleash the change potential of IT and data in government.

The review’s terms of reference focuses the team’s efforts on three key questions:

• How can government further catalyse more beneficial creation and sharing of knowledge, and mutual support, between citizens?
• What more can and should be done to improve the way government and its agencies publish and share non personal information?
• Are there any further notable information opportunities or shortfalls in sectors outside government that those sectors could work to rectify?

While it is not entirely clear (to me at least) what the ultimate outcome of the review will be nor what the timescales are, we can be sure that such an impressive list of heavy hitters in the worlds of online and government are highly likely to deliver the goods (whatever those goods may be).

While this end point may be unclear, there is now a collection of projects to get us there. Here’s a quick run down of the current top three:

1. Show Us a Better Way: Asking the question “what would you create with public information?”, Show Us a Better Way is a competitive call for ideas to crowdsource the most creative idea for a new product able to help with the communication of public data. Keen to put their money where their mouth is, the Cabinet Office have put £20,000 up for grabsfor the winning idea as well as starting the ball running by making some initial department-based data sets available for download.
2. Building Democracy: Not strictly a PoI initiative but certainly related, Building Democracy revives the successful Democratic Engagement Innovation Fund after a successful first round of projects. Led by the Ministry of Justice in partnership with the PoI Taskforce and the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills, Building Democracy has £150,000 available to 10 projects that will “help people to address public issues and influence government”. While not directly an online or data related initiative, inevitably many of the ideas coming through address engagement issues through similar means.
3. Public Sector Information Unlocking Service: The less snappily titled of the three, the Office of Public Sector Information’s Public Sector Infromation Unlocking Service again looks to the wisdom of the crowds to point out the government’s blind spots when it comes to easy to access data. Put in a proposal, gather votes for the idea from like minded geeks and OPSI will do the rest (or try to anyhow - no promises mind!).

Reviewing the review: all power to the politicians and their policy wonks

As I said at the start, these initiatives represent exciting times in the world of government modernisation. There aren’t many (if any) countries that can boast this kind of innovation and enthusiasm shared by ministers and officials alike, not only using but actually understanding and implementing the very web 2.0 concepts of mash ups, crowdsourcing and collaboration. Praise is due.

However, I can’t but feel there are contradictions in much of the approach to date. Much of the work of the Power of Information Task Force (and equally so the OPSI initiative) does not on the face of it reflect the core principles and aspirations of public enlightenment through open data and the social web.

While there is no doubting that Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo’s original PoI review was a significant and game changing piece of work, both the PoI report and every report since (including much of the current Power of Information blog) has been pretty impenetrable stuff unlikely to influence many beyond the existing edgling geek community - who themselves need no persuasion!

On the face of it (but not being on the inside clearly I could well be wrong), little attention seems to have been paid to spreading the word beyond the geek community as part of a consistent and coordinated change programme in language that would both be understood and appeal to the people who will ultimately make this a reality - the politicians and their policy makers. The business case for opening up public sector data is clear, it just now needs to be put into terms that appeal to the hearts not just the minds of a far wider audience.

While the Power of Information Review may not all be intended for mass consumption, with diagrams such as this appearing on the blog, is it little wonder that most people may see the exercise as irrelevant to their day jobs as policy makers or operational managers. Where is the sales pitch highlighting where open data can benefit the bureaucrats and their ministers in achieving the outcomes or efficiencies they are looking for? More needs to be done to both sell and support successful emergent projects such as the Hansard Prototype showing how free data can support better outcomes, accountability and engagement with government.

It appears that now might be the time to ask what all this is for. Are we clear why we believe mapping crime data not only represents innovation but also a useful thing to do? Many of the ideas to date in the Show Us a Better Way Initiative could be said to merely represent a socialised system of performance management. Instantly out of date information presented to officials and the public alike through more accessible modern web tools remains instantly out of date data. The government’s performance management model is beginning to crack (as highlighted by the growing perception gap) and not even web 2.0 can save it.

We have monitored and managed based on a picture of the past, perhaps now is the time to look to ways of engaging with the present and react accordingly. The real strength of the web is not in dressing up static data, but rather helping government to get closer to people’s lived experiences in real time, engaging in conversation and debate - something that the Building Democracy project seems to get. It may well be time to encourage more life world than systems world thinking (explanation for another time, but hat tip to Barnet Council colleagues for referring me to Habermas for this one), with simple tools like Google Alerts or Addictomatic as good as anything for this.

Recommendations

To my mind, five pieces of advice come to mind when thinking through some ways of moving the debate onto a different footing, moving beyond (or should I say building on) the geekery and out into the world of policy wonkery and service delivery (they all begin with ‘c’ - humour me on this one!):

1. Compulsion - as those of you who regularly read this blog will know, I’m not much into top down anything so it may seem strange that I am recommending compulsion. But it strikes me that if there is one quickfire way to bust this issue, it is by compelling public bodies to liberate their data. Having previously regulated for Freedom of Information, why not now regulate for Truly Free Information, especially when we’re not even talking about personal information? Competitions have their place, but more for culture change and awareness raising purposes not as the only measure to cajole politicians and officials into action. And they certainly have more value than the rather bonkers and burdensome “data unlocking service” (surely government should have to make a case for NOT making OUR data public rather than the other way round!). There comes a point when a push needs to become a shove. The data default should be set to open, end of.
2. Culture change - the POI review and taskforce could and should be used as a driver of culture change in the use of data in government. More important than talk of ‘meta-data’ and ‘presentation layers’, the project team (sorry Task Force) should be out and about shouting from the roof tops to anyone who will listen selling the positives of data sharing rather than just fearing people out with the risks and empowering people to understand this agenda and engage with it to deliver better outcomes. While the bloggers meet up to discuss the Civil Service Guidance for Online Participation was a step in the right direction, ironically the team should be focusing on the mainstream communications channels to involve as wide and diverse an audience as possible in the review.
3. Capability - while compulsion and culture change will take us a long way down the track to Truly Freed Information, what there is also lacking is the expertise across government to make this vision a reality (a few pockets of excellence excluded). With central government struggling, imagine how difficult it is for the health, local government and police sectors to find and recruit people capable of managing and publishing this data in a way that is useful to data mashers, policy wonks and citizens alike. Often it is not that government officials actively choose to hide data, but that they don’t have the imagination, creativity and skills to open it up in a way that is both useful but also protects people’s privacy at the same time.
4. Cut the confusion - we are at the start of a significant period of change in society in relation to how we view and use technology and the internet. With so much flying around, it strikes me that we are not being sufficiently clear about what different things mean, how they relate and equally importantly how they don’t. Power of information, the social web, online participation and engagement - the list goes on. And while these things are interrelated, they are also distinctly different and this needs to be made clear as they are often lumped in as one. Messages and accountabilities need to be clear and simple - who is doing what, why are we doing this and what is expected of officials to turn the exceptions into the rules.
5. Get current - quit with the dressing up out of date data and get with the here and now. Learn from brand buzz monitoring techniques, engage, listening, interact and move with the times rather than plan next year’s services on last year’s data. Or else why bother liberating it at all?