Month: October 2009

Despite being a pseudo-statistician startupper, I was fortunate enough to meet a few readers of this blog at LocalGovCamp. Martin Greenwood’s giving a long keynote – 30 minutes – on the role of websites in providing local services. Here’s my notes.

---

When you phone your council out-of-hours, you’ll get a phone message. In December 2007, only 21% of councils referred you to their website in their voicemail message; it was 41% by December 2008, which is an improvement, but still isn’t really good enough. The only reason not to refer people is if you don’t think your website’s good enough – so how do we fix this?

An example of an excellent website is Salford‘s. It has extensive metrics – 16m hits in September! – but lacks the one which really matters; “did you find what you were looking for?”.

According to SocITM surveys, 17% didn’t, and 22% did only partially – and that corresponds to about 16,000 visitors! hat’s more, 71% of councils don’t participate in these SocITM website takeup surveys; they don’t even know the scale of the problem. In any case, this is a lot of people. 40% of those people would then, according to surveys, prefer to phone to get the information – that’d be 6500 phonecalls a month, or well over 200 a day. Each call is frustrating and inconvenient for customers. What’s more, it takes a lot of council resources, especially in a time of budget constraints – a phone call costs over ten times more than a Web visit to deal with (£3.22 vs 27p), and face to face meetings are 20 times more expensive.

The answer has to be making Council services self-service as far as possible: but these self-service channels have to work first time. To make this happen, Martin argues that this requires:

• Clear priorities and strong governance in Web strategy
• Integrated management of all customer channels (Web, phone, in-person)
• Engagement with the customer community
• A management structure built around customer service, not communications or ICT
• A focus on the customer journey rather than “design and applications”
• Active management of the Web service
• Continuous improvement in content management
• Systematic website testing: especially a focus on the tasks people are using the website for and on hard conversion metrics for task completion

This means Web teams will have to think differently: according to Gerry McGovern, the hardest challenge is understanding how people work, not how the website technology works!

This session’s chaired by Dominique Lazanski, alongside Hamish Nicklin from Google, Nominet‘s Phil Kingsland, Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group and Phillip Virgo from EURIM.

They start with a question from the chair:

How does Government regulation help, or hinder, the growth of the digital economy in the UK?

Phil Kingsland replies first, with the observation that trying to regulate something inherently international like the Internet is intrinsically difficult. Thus far we’ve had self-regulation, and much of the contentious activity on the Internet isn’t in itself new behaviour – it’s been happening offline before too, and there are already laws which cover it.

‘Sometimes, bad things happen on the Net’, says Jim Killock, but like Phil he observes that what you do on the Internet is already subject to national law. What’s more, people self-police bad behaviour: just ask Jan Moir. From there, he goes straight to net neutrality, citing Skype as an example. Next up: digital music and price gouging by the established record labels, as a bridge to making the case for copyright reform, and from there to a generalised call for IP reform. We’re hitting all of the ORG talking points in order, and that’s his five minutes.

Hamish from Google has to follow that. He argues that the Internet has been so successful because it’s been free and open; he believes regulation can be a good thing as long as it accords with those principles. Very short and sweet!

Philip Virgo starts with a confession: he was one of the original architects of software copyrights in the UK. He then says he believes that they outlived their usefulness ten to fifteen years ago, which is quite a statement! He then talks a bit about global commerce – he transition from physical to electronic trading actually happened 30 to 40 years ago, and more recently it moved to the Internet. But, then, what is the Internet?

The man’s a quotemaster:

What’s the colour of the underpants of this wonderful emperor we’re talking about?

Anyway, he says it’s impressive engineering, overlaid with governance principles imbued with the spirit of Haight-Asbury circa 1967, overlaid with lots and lots and lots of lawyerese. (Sounds about right to me.) It’s also the latest evolution of the world’s most complex machine in the world – the global telecoms system.

We’re surfing the cyber-crud…

says Phillip. Apparently 22-player online football games are huge in Korea, but the Internet connections aren’t good enough here to support that – so instead, all they can do is download pirated music… (That’s a new argument for net neutrality, I reckon.). He’s worried about the way we’re ceding the lead – particularly in IPV6 – to China; he’s come back to that twice.

Jim Killock really doesn’t like the music industry very much. That’s probably not a surprise!

We’re moving onto the Digital Britain report now. Jim starts; on mandatory disconnections for illegal filesharing, which cropped up in EU legislation:

If you caught someone littering, you wouldn’t ban them from the street, would you?

Quality rhetoric, and he’s understandably riled by the lack of due process. Hamish from Google brings up technological solutions – can you prevent rights violations from happening? YouTube’s rights-detection software is an example here, letting rights holders dictate how their IP is used. Jim’s okay with that within a bounded service, but uneasy with that on a global scale: he calls it mass surveillance of the Internet for copyright enforcement. Spotify comes up; apparently it’s, singlehandedly, drastically cut P2P traffic.

And Twitter intrudes! Hello out there. @glynwintle asks about three strikes: everyone immediately dismisses it. Phillip Virgo now brings up teenagers in Lambeth eking out their money by getting songs from cheaper Chinese music download sites (which he claims may or may not be legal).

Phil brings up the Internet Watch Foundation, and the way they’ve managed to eradicate child abuse images from UK hosting, as a success for self-regulation. In general, in fact. he thinks the public interest is best represented by self-regulation.

Jim is worried that the government doesn’t get to the public interest because they’re too busy listening to industry lobby groups; Hamish wants to see the Internet stay open and free because that’s best for commerce.

And Phillip gets the last word. He talks about the children’s session at the Internet Governance Federation, saying they grasped the issues by the throat:

No-one over the age of thirteen should be allowed to vote on any Internet regulation.

And that’s that! Fascinating session.

Tom Steinberg of mySociety follows Adam Afriyie with the last keynote of the morning session. He starts with an announcement – that, with the Open Society Institute, mySociety are seeding similar organisations in Central and Eastern Europe – and a disclaimer: that his new advisory position with the Conservatives will not influence mySociety. After that, he tells us that he’s going to talk about two of mySociety’s projects: Fix My Street and What Do They Know?

Fix My Street makes it easy to report potholes, smashed phone boxes, broken streetlights and the like. It creates transparency – for example, because it asks people if the problems they report got solved, we know that the fix-rate for reported problems are about 50%. (And if the problem’s not fixed, it tells you which councillors you need to go and speak to!)

It was originally funded by the Ministry of Justice, but that money’s long run out: it’s now paid for out of mySociety’s own pocket. It also, though you might not expect this, has a pretty good relationship with councils, which is a lesson in itself: these kinds of things won’t necessarily be rejected out of hand.

What Do They Know? (funded by the Joseph Rowntree Trust) makes it really easy for members of the public to make Freedom of Information requests. That’s important because it empowers people, particularly if they don’t have the might of a full-on newsgathering organisation behind them.

One question he poses is where to take these services in the future. Tom suggests that they need to do a better job of explaining the compromises of government: for instance, in the case of Fix My Street, actually telling people when “we haven’t fixed this yet because we’re doing all of these other important things first”.

Finally, he proposes three conclusions:

• Firstly, that it can be cheaper and more effective to create transparency by putting a nice user interface on top of an existing process rather than re-engineering the entire process. What Do They Know? works on top of the existing FoI infrastructure, so FoI officers don’t have to learn a new system – they can work the same way they always have.
• Public data isn’t a good in its own right: it must have a social impact to have an effect. Almost all the websites mySociety operate need data which is under (trading fund) licenses, so even though the software’s open, you can’t run your own copy of mySociety software without buying copies the data.
• Good sites are made by good people. Matthew Somerville and Francis Irving get name-checks here: Tom argues that until Government can attract really good developers, it won’t have great systems.

And, with that, lunch!

Iain Dale, Mick Fealty, Stephen Tall, Craig Elder from the Conservative Party and Adam Parker from Realwire kicked off the blogger session at Government 2010 with five minutes each. Here’s something on each of those! Mick went first:

To state the bleedin’ obvious, there is a sea-change ahead.

Mick observed that, thus far, the Internet has been very poor at generating nuanced, useful thinking or innovation: online consultancy is viewed as a box to tick rather than as something which helps better decisions get made. However, what blogs and social media have done well is quick, light response – agile responses to changing circumstances.

What he’d like to see is a move from ‘closed-source’ to ‘open-source’ analysis of policy. A lot of policy at Westminster level gets made in think-tanks, but that approach is just too expensive to work for local and devolved governments. Furthermore, think-tanks work in seclusion: they have no room for consultation with, or contention from, the public. He suggest that if that process could take place in fluid, moderated communities in public, then that could change how policy is made for the better.

Next up was Craig Elder, online communities manager for the Conservatives. He says that what’s going on now is “old politics on new media”. There’s a worrying feeling that what’s said on new media is not going to be taken seriously: with, for example, Number 10 e-petitions, everyone points at the Jeremy Clarkson for PM campaign, but that happens because of cynicism about whether anyone’s listening.

He thinks that we can change that through creating the sense that citizens are empowered, particularly through data – for example, online crime maps which let the public see whether the money spent is working. On the other hand, does the number of Ministers on Twitter herald a new age of engagement? Not really – in a sense, it’s “Twittering while Rome burns”. Is this really the best thing that ministers can do?

Trafigura, though is a testament to the interrogrative powers of the blogosphere: proof that there’s potential here, but it’s very early days yet.

Stephen Tall, of Lib Dem Voice, then spoke on the power of unofficial consultations – they get to different audiences from official ones, and some (like Facebook groups) have the potential to convert “slacktivists” to activists. Steve Webb’s been holding surgeries – with 200 participants! – on Facebook, and:

Official council consultations are crap, and no-one responds to them anyway.

Apparently. (He later pointed out that Whitehall publishing only the data it wants published won’t empower people: to do that you have to go local, go in depth, and publish all the data.)

Inevitably, Twitter came up again – the first Twitterer during Prime Minister’s Questions was Jo Swinson, who got flak for abuse of Parliamentary privilege. It’s subsequently taken off, though: there were 96 tweets from MPs during the last PMQs. Still: is this really a worthwhile use of MPs’ time?

Finally, he proposed three tests for whether social media projects are worthwhile. Are you able to get more information out to people in a digestible form? Are you genuinely engaging with them? Are you empowering them? That’s what really works.

And, lastly, Adam Parker, of Realwire, introduced himself as “Jarvis Cocker on Question Time, only without the talent”. Way harsh, especially after his first point: that it’s not social media’s fault if the conversations are dull! If we want people to be engaged, we have to first be interesting. What’s more, not everyone’s on the Internet, not that many people are on Twitter or read Iain Dale’s blog. So, social media’s biggest impact in the short to medium term is going to be where it influences, or sets, the mainstream media agenda.

In particular, when it comes to politicians and parties engaging directly with the electorate, he’s not convinced. Retail brands are being forced to participate in social media in order to defend their market position and brand image. In other words, they’ve got an economic incentive; will social media ever be a real force in politics until it hits politicians at the ballot box?