honestlyreal

Congratulations Camden Council.

I’m in the process of fighting a case on behalf of #tweetbike about a little parking matter. That’s another story.

But at two stages in the appeal process so far I’ve been pointed to the online appeal process: http://www.camden.gov.uk/pcnobjections. Rather considerate design, one might think, offering a link straight to the objection page. Time-saving. User-centric. All that stuff.

However, if you’d used this link yesterday, you would have been redirected to a top level Penalty Charge Notices page. Which says at the top: “Make a Payment”, closely followed by “How do I avoid a penalty charge notice?” It’s hard to say which of these two are more annoying to someone who is specifically trying not to pay, and is clearly a bit past ‘avoidance’ help. Not a major crime (I suspect the link used to work, but after a bit of rejigging had become misdirected) but enough to cause a fair few people a bit of easily avoidable grrrr.

So I tweeted. Although I know some of the Camden guys, I deliberately didn’t point it at them, to see what would happen.

It got picked up.

And now it’s fixed. In less than 24 hours.

So, if you see something that’s easily fixable, do at least have a go at feeding back. It can work.

Yes, nice easy question. Should be a short post.

One of the debates that stuck in my mind at the UK GovCamp 10 came from a session hosted by Alastair Smith. Ostensibly about the ‘UK snow’* and what that had meant for the likes of local authorities in delivering services and information. At least that’s what I think it was about. One can never quite tell with unconferences.

The difficult issue of managing information in disrupted conditions. One of my favourite subjects, be it weather, strikes, train disruptions or pandemics.

“How to tell people about school closures” is an excellent example.

Why’s it so difficult? Here’s a little list:

It’s a highly localised decision. It’s taken by the headteacher of a school, often at short notice. What if they’re stuck in snow, or can’t communicate their decision to anyone? We’re talking about disruption here, remember?

It’s highly time critical: if the information is to be useful it has to be delivered in the very tight window between decision and parents’ departure for school (or rearrangement of childcare, or whatever) and almost by definition this will be outside normal working hours.

There are no obligations or penalties associated with how well it’s done. (There may be a motivating issue about OFSTED reporting of absence, but I consider that secondary to the actual information process, so am discounting it from this analysis.)

There is no consistent, expected place to find the information. In some areas schools brief local authorities, in others local authorities brief local radio, there are numerous instances of online information, but little in the way of standardised approach.

Kids are involved. Kids who may just have a conflict of interest were there to be any opportunity to game the information. Just possibly.

A variety of tools are used to try and get the message out: from notifications that are actively sent to parents (by SMS, email or phone) – so-called information ‘push’; to information made available for consumption (by web, radio or pinned to the school gates) – the ‘pull’ side. Some parents and schools have developed cascade networks, formal or informal, to pass on the message. Others haven’t.

Do we have any plus sides? Well, the only one of note is that snow closure is usually predicted, to a greater or lesser extent. Something I suspect that fuels even more ire when information management fails. Surely, we cry, they must have know this might happen? Why weren’t they prepared?

Accustomed behaviours are highly personal. Parents have become used to a particular information channel, be it the radio or the web, and any changes to that will cause even more confusion, at least at first.

All complex stuff – did someone say that public service information management was easy?

But where the GovCamp discussion got most interesting was when we tackled the nub of the problem – the overarching philosophy of whether it was worth trying to centralise information at all in such circumstances. Even at the highest level, opinion is divided between attempting to centralise so that information can all be consumed in one place, and ensuring that it is maintained as locally as possible to guarantee its speed and accuracy.

For there are classic trade-offs in this decision. There is no unequivocal ‘right’ answer.

Get it to a central point of consumption (or data feed that can be consumed elsewhere) by whatever communications protocols and brute force pressures you can: advantage – easy to find; disadvantage – very difficult to make foolproof, prone to error.

Or keep it distributed, and make it easier for people to get closer to the source of the decision to get the most accurate picture: advantage – saves money, fast-when-it-works, accurate; disadvantage – hit-and-miss, accessibility, findability.

The list of challenges above should make it clear why this is far from the trivial information management problem that some might assume. One chap in the GovCamp session maintained that all it would take would be a firm hand of authority to be laid on headteachers to comply (“or else their school would be assumed to be open”). I fear that view represents a hopelessly outdated approach to getting things done that actually work.

I’ll come off the fence. I think the answer to a problem like this doesn’t lie in ever more sophisticated linking and aggregation. Building big central solutions, even with a grass-roots crowdsourcing component, probably isn’t going to work.

Instead, my experience and my gut are combining to suggest that local is the place for this information. Ubiquitously local – on school sites, via SMS, on the radio, via local authorities. Keeping them in step is the challenge: but a challenge that’s more worthy of effort than building elaborate information pipelines and monumental repositories.

*if you’re wondering why this phrasing is used, there’s some background here – which might also show why I’m so interested in it.

I was wrapped up in the UK Government Barcamp on Saturday (and the prospect of having to smuggle my SLR past the Googleguards twice more than I had to filled me with no joy) so I didn’t get to the “I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist” gathering in Trafalgar Square. Gathering? Well, it wasn’t a flashmob, given its several-week notice, and it all seemed far too polite to be a demonstration

I had been much moved by Simon Pollock’s piece before the PHNAT event on why he wasn’t going. [Precis: if we all behaved with more civility, there would be far less tension between police and public, including photographers].

Though I think there are numerous illustrations, including “Sus law” histories, which show that maybe politeness isn’t always enough, it did make me think more about information gathering and the purpose behind it. Which in a way relates back to some of the things we touched on at the Barcamp.

Example – there’s a certain government department (which shall remain nameless) that has a different reception desk policy from most of the others. It routinely asks visitors to show some ID. Now, given I am: a) a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad; b) Inquisitive about What Will Happen If…?; c) a zealous activist for privacy rights (take your pick), my answer to this question is: Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I don’t seem to have anything on me at the moment. Bank card? No, sorry, not even that.

To which the automated response is: ok, in you go, but next time… (This ritual has been enacted on my last nine visits there, by the way.)

For it is a ritual. There is no function to the data request. It is a matter of form. A matter of belief, if you like: we do this to make each other believe that we’ve noted a process, and that diligence has been done. In short, this type of information (non-)exchange is really about feelings, more than form. And very likely nothing to do with function. And because the receptionist has reached an acceptable level of feeling – they asked, and then gave a suitable admonition – and because I have as well – I think the data request is meaningless and toothless – we go on our separate ways, content that honour has been satisfied.

It’s the same when the PCSO grabs the art student. This is a human exchange, first and foremost (and perhaps entirely). Do we really believe he’s going to get that data into a findable format so that a sensible risk assessment can be carried out based on the collated movements of that student? No, of course not. He wants to feel he’s done his job. Or that he’s in control. Or in the worst excess, that he’s been shown the right ‘attitude’. It is what Mr Patrick might refer to as a “weak tell”.

Eyewitnesses (including current and former police) often speak of situations escalating because ‘attitude’ was being shown. Of course I don’t dismiss the value of ‘feelings’ – good and bad – in genuine security decisions; it’s these weaker senses of it that I’m targeting here.

So, something to think about perhaps, the next time you are asked for any personal information, no matter how trivial it may seem. What function is really being served?

Is it all really about feelings?

ps. It’s b) by the way. Experiment to learn, always… Hell, I refused to give any personal details (other than necessary for payment) when buying a sofa last week; it worries me that through the routine gathering of marketing information we have largely eroded the general public’s concept of sensible privacy practice, but that’s for another post…

It’s easy to see why projects fail.

Why ‘open goals’ are so often missed trying to improve public services with new technologies.

Or is it?

What’s been happening in recent months?

Rewired State: generated 30+ ideas in one day for better use of public information to transform public services, many backed up by working prototypes.

Young Rewired State: yet more ideas, and real code, from 15-18 year olds.

Barcamps, Reboot Britain, Show Us A Better Way and many other initiatives: creativity, inspiration, passion, and even solutions.

The daily activities of hundreds of developers, policy enthusiasts, data specialists, lobbyists and real service users to make things better.

And through things like the proposal for a Rewired State-type event within government, we’ll no doubt see that the public sector already has many committed people with the skills to do amazing things with technology, processes and information.

Ideas and talent aren’t the issue, evidently.

Yet how many of these ideas are actually crossing the seemingly vast divide to become ‘production’ public services?

We have a few ideas about why this might be the case: not enough will to change; would it scale?; procurement never works like that in practice; sure, you can design smart new services but can you sustain them?… And so on…

And perhaps we’re right. We’re probably on the right track with some of these. But we don’t really know. And until we do know, we’re poorly armed to take on the systemic issues that really stand in the way of public service innovation. Only by having a well-structured agenda can the things that really need to change, be changed.

What we experience might be the consequences of perfectly rational decisions. Rational decisions that at a detailed level make perfect sense. But when combined into complex systems, such as those that procure and operate public services, can have very irrational consequences. It might be. But we don’t really know.

So how do we get to know?

Here’s a proposal.

Hardwired State?*

What it is

A small number of great ideas are taken on by a panel. Over a few weeks the panel meet regularly, virtually if necessary, and agree a series of steps which would, in theory, bring these ideas to life as real public services.

A small team follow this direction, and simulate the progress of this idea as it becomes a service. Any actual actions or financial commitments are simulations, but the decisions, and decision-makers involved, along the way are all real.

All progress is documented. As, perhaps more interestingly, are any blockages.

That’s it.

Who’s on the panel?

A minister, a senior civil servant, a journalist, an executive from a public services supplier, a developer, a community worker and an independent information management professional.

Facilitated very carefully, and with some clear rules.

Rules

Money is no barrier to progress. This is a simulation exercise. But it all gets counted along the way.

(Realistically, there will be some real costs involved even as a simulation. Questions of suppliers in particular will sometimes need funding to get an answer. This funding needs to be available, and recorded.)

Decisions are real: if something is agreed to, it’s agreed to as it if were actually going to be implemented, at a level of authority which would be required to do so, for real.

Behaviours: this is a potentially hard-hitting exercise. But it is intended to show systemic issues, not to show up individuals. Respect for the skills, talents and experience of all involved in designing and delivering public services will be upheld throughout.

This is “fantasy project management”, if you will. A one-off exercise to really demonstrate the art of the possible. And to inform an agenda for change that will unlock so much of the potential shown in the initiatives already mentioned.

What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, early 2010 probably isn’t the time to do something like this. Other priorities may occupy the attention of the movers and shakers who’d have to get behind this.

But it’s an illustration of one way in which we could get away from generating innovative ideas that don’t actually go anywhere. And take a whole-life look at the real implementation issues that have to be tackled to make a difference in the real world.

What do you think? Should we try it?

*The question mark is intentional, and fair. The outcomes of this exercise are not prejudged. The title is inspired by the paradox of unchangeable URLs (that serves as an excellent metaphor for making technology change happen in government). It’s almost as if the state has hardwired itself.

One interesting way to understand more about problems in systems is to find something absurd, and analyse it. So here’s something absurd.

It’s nearing the end of January. Tax return time for many. We know where to go, of course: Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. So try this:

http://hmrc.gov.uk

Oh dear.*

Things really are quite bad, aren’t they? It seems that no one ever predicted the bizarre scenario that a user might just be tempted to omit the increasingly-redundant ‘www’.

Quarterly, I do a VAT return. Despite knowing in my mind that the URL will fail, my fingers always forget. I have just a few moments of ????? then a little !!!!! and off I go. Putting in the www, and going on to what is actually a reasonably well-designed transaction.

No one dies. I waste a few seconds. I think it’s absurd. And life goes on.

But let’s stop and have a look at this in more detail. Technically, how long would the system reconfiguration take to make sure that a user – rash or wild enough to omit the www – still got where they needed to go?

A few seconds? A few minutes? No more than that, surely.

So that puts this issue (which has been known about for YEARS) firmly in the ‘absurd’ category. I remember it being discussed (along with potential hack workarounds) in March 2009 at the Rewired State Hack Day – although I can’t find a record there that anything came of this.

Why then, if there’s no technical impediment of any substance, are we still faced with this absurdity?

Although I’ve worked on various things with HMRC in the past, I’ve never found out the answer, so from here onwards is largely my speculation – but I hope it illustrates a few more general points about change. Particularly change as it relates to the mega-engines of UK government technology.

You need two ingredients for this change to happen, in the simplest analysis. You need:

- someone to be responsible for it happening, and

- a mechanism to put the change into practice.

Either of these fail, and you’re stuck with your absurdity. It may be that there is no one (of any seniority) who actually has as their formal role (that’s the one that performance will be measured against, typically) to ensure that top-level usability like this works. A big system like the HMRC website will have a zillion worker ants around it, many with very clear responsibilities for a particular piece of functionality. But something as obvious as the URL? You never know – there might not be. [Correction on this point very welcome indeed, by the way. If it's you, shout.]

So let’s assume (and it remains an assumption) that such a person exists. How is the change then made? In my experience that’s when things can get really nasty. Changes go into a queue. There’s always changes required to a system, large and small, planned and unplanned. There’s rarely sufficient budget and resource available to do everything when it might ideally be implemented. So things get prioritised.

It may be that this little configuration change to fix the URL is sitting in the bowels of HMRC, somewhere in one of these queues. I bloody well hope it is, by the way. But prioritisation is a funny business, and it is not inconceivable that this will never be deemed important enough (relative to other priorities) to be fixed. It may even be kicked into the long grass of “don’t touch until we do our next wholesale infrastructure/estate refresh in 20xx…”.

So, I hear you say, you being a rational, external, and FFS-roll-your-sleeves-up-and-fix-it type. Can’t we just get in there and do it ourselves? Can’t we buck this crazy system for the sake of something that will take no time at all and avoid MILLIONS of ????? -> !!!!! moments?

And that’s the real kick in the teeth. Because when we did all that clever procuring and contracting for the squillion-pound systems underpinning the website (and a lot else to boot), we made absolutely sure that it had Rules. Tight rules that were all about predictability, resource planning and keeping control. And those Rules dictate that under no circumstances will short-cuts be taken. These would take us into Unknown Territory, which might have Risks that could Jeopardise Things and lead to Terrible Consequences (and would have the Lawyers in and Feasting Merrily for some time from large Tubs of Blame).

I say ‘we’ above, because we need a certain amount of honesty about why we chose to do things this way. And that was about managing risks and costs. Viewed from that angle, it makes it very rational indeed to build Rules in this way.

Except when you need a small change doing which would make your very expensive system look immediately very much less absurd.

Go on, prove me wrong, HMRC. Pop a comment on here to pop my speculative bubble, and let us know who is responsible for this bit of user experience. Even better, let me wake up tomorrow, head to the #ukgc10 barcamp and have the massed hordes of government geek types admire the egg dripping off my chin because you flicked the switch that sorted it out.

Because I’d rather look stupid than persist with this sort of absurdity.

*You may find on some system/browser combinations, that there’s no error. You’ve been baled out by idiot-proof software that’s checked the www… version before giving up the ghost. And you’re wondering what the hell this post is about. Lucky you. But for millions of browsers, including mine here tonight on January 22 2010, it’s a big #fail.

—————–

Update: a quick suggestion from @nevali via Twitter – “you need a third ingredient: somebody who knows what the change actually means and is. this is usually most problematic”. Yes. I’d assumed that to be rolled into the responsible owner role, but it may not be. Point very well made.

So there’s this river. Big, deep, wide. Cliffs on either side and a tricky path down from them.

Stuff needs to get across it. It really needs a bridge.

But that would involve major engineering on both sides, and the discussions and standard-setting on that bogged down many years ago.

So we have the ferry.

It’s a good ferry. It’s not particularly big. Without the advertising campaigns perhaps many would not even know it exists. But it does its job. Ploughing over the river, back and forth, many times a day.

A lot’s been said about the ferry. Because it’s the only way across the river, there’s a tendency to talk it up. The local mayors are the worst. “Our ferry can carry anything, almost instantly,” they say. “The only limit is our imagination.”

Because, you see, they’ve come to believe that the ferry is a bridge.

And now there are these enormous pieces of pipeline, 100ft in diameter, that have to get across the river. They’ve been piled up on one of the cliffs for over five years now. “Our ferry can do it”, cry the mayors – “…if only the crew were a bit more willing.”

The Ferry Captain (who has been awarded all sorts of honours over the years, including a fancy hat that used to say “Ferry Captain”, but which at one awards dinner was changed – with a marker pen – to read “Bridge Captain” in drunken scrawl) does what she can to run the ferry safely.

But she shivers when she looks up at the giant concrete circles, and the comparative fragility of her boat bobbing below on the strong currents. “One day,” she says, “– one day soon, we’ll be strong enough to load that up,” pale as she says it.

The show must go on. And everyone, even the mayors, knows in their hearts that those pipelines are going nowhere. That it’s only a rather small ferry, on awfully rough water.

And it’s a lot more convenient to keep pretending it’s a bridge.

I’ll be at the launch of data.gov.uk this afternoon, and like many who’ll read this, have had a close interest – rather than direct involvement – in its genesis over the last year or so.

What is it? Simply put, it’s a first step towards delivering the government’s commitment to publish public sector data openly, and freeing it up to be reused. (This second point is at least as important as the first.) In theory, this openness will lead to many benefits, perhaps the two most significant of which are:

a. the development of useful applications; and

b. wider scrutiny of the public sector

It’s our data, after all – so the argument goes – why shouldn’t we be able to get at it in raw form and do useful things with it? What greater commitment to transparency in public affairs could there be?

So how have they done? Very well indeed. It’s been built with developers, not at them. Some excellent work has been done to set up and foster a discussion community. The frequency and depth of the postings there are a testament to this over the last six months. There’s been lots of reuse of existing standards rather than the setting up of a cottage industry to develop some new ones. It’s been done at what seems to be very low cost (I haven’t seen figures, but am aware that it was done without the benefit of expensive agencies or consultancies). It’s happened quickly, by the standards of government technology projects, and on time. Most of all, it’s just wonderful that it’s there at all – government has come an enormous distance in a very short time.

Are there any cautionary points to watch out for? A few. It’s not that clear to a visitor to the site just who its primary audience is intended to be. It is primarily for experienced application developers and those familiar with the language of data ‘in the raw’. But it will no doubt also attract the lay public who may wonder how they are supposed to use it. Jargon is used freely (though there are some good explanatory resources available if you look for them). Perhaps because it assumes a ‘geeky’ audience, it hasn’t been done to death in terms of usability – so a search for ‘crime’ returns a first result about firearms crimes in Scotland, rather than a dataset which may be more generally useful. Searching for something specific can be quite complex.

I have a suggestion about the actual content – the datasets – on the site. Not in terms of its quantity, or detail – these are marvellous. Nor over the choice of standards; I recognise that you can never please the entirety of such a diverse public information development community. No, it’s a more structural point. The term “public data” covers a multitude of diverse things. Is it about historic performance (e.g. how many fires of which type were put out last year)? Is it data about infrastructure (where all the schools are, geographically, for example)? Is it about real-time events (e.g. where has that bus got to, right now)? It’s probably the latter two that are the sexiest in terms of Really Useful Applications. Providing the datasets with some sort of categorisation like this might help to stimulate developer interest in the areas with greatest utility, but also shine a light a clear light on shortfalls in things like real-time data, if these turned out to be harder to open up (and they are quite likely to be!).

What are the overall challenges that face data.gov.uk and the free data concept on the road ahead?

James Crabtree on the Today programme this morning chose to focus on the issue of Ordnance Survey map licensing as a potential stumbling block (and has written more on the topic here). I disagree that this is the most significant strategic issue that the free data movement faces. It’s an important tactical one, of course, but one that can be overcome with instruments (such as legislation and organisational design) that we know to exist.

No, my assessment of the challenges is:

1. Will anything useful actually be produced? Do we actually have that much evidence to justify declaring this as a victory already? And here I’m measuring usefulness by the tough measure: is it used? Not in theory. Not by developers. Real use by real people and real businesses for real purposes.

2. What business models will appear when useful things are produced? Nobody works for free in the long-term, and we may find we pay for the new utility in ways we didn’t expect.

3. Where is the user need (as in the day-to-day problems the public would like to be solved) being gathered and fed into the development process?

4. And sustaining all this for the long haul? It’s great to put up snapshots of hundreds of datasets, but is it clear that they’ll all be updated regularly? If I am to develop (and market) something using this data, I want to be fairly sure that it will still exist in a year’s time.

Tim Berners-Lee spoke on the same programme this morning of the example of cycle accident data, which when published early last year led to a mash-up being spontaneously and quickly generated to help cyclists plan safe journeys. Disclosure: I happened to be the person who pressed the button to publish this data on the blog where it was surfaced (though am due no credit for its release – that belongs to unsung heroes like Richard Stirling in the Cabinet Office who did the heavy lifting with the delivery departments of government to get hold of useful stuff like this). A huge well done to him, and to the rest of the team (notably John Sheridan and Jeni Tennison, who took on the massive challenge of applying semantic web standards), and Paul Jenkins who helped to knit it all together. All under the direction of Andrew Stott, who has clearly made this a big personal priority. (Apologies to others in the team that I’ve no doubt missed.)

To recap – the only test of real success is: use. Not usefulness. Not theoretical use. Real use. Getting beyond the novelty application, the demonstrator, and the hobby lies at the heart of really untapping the potential of data.gov.uk.

I’ll raise a glass of Fentimans to the data.gov.uk crew today. But I’ll raise the whole bottle every time I see someone in their day-to-day life using what’s been generated to change their lives for the better.

In 2008 the UK government announced a competition for innovative ideas using (and reusing) public information: Show Us A Better Way (or SUABW, hereafter.)

The best of the new ideas would be picked for further development, as would a few existing, part-implemented ideas that showed promise.

At the time I had responsibilities for some of Directgov’s future development areas. Whatever came out of SUABW would have some interest, and possibly impact, for me professionally. There were two ways I could keep track of the competition’s progress – the hard way of remembering to check the blog from time to time, or the rather easier one of sticking in my own entry and getting on the update email list.

Fear not, I disclosed my day job throughout – and in any case I am assured the judging was done ‘blind’. (And I am writing this post firmly with my “external competition participant” hat on.)

To my surprise, a few weeks later I was told my idea was one of the winners. So, what was that idea? You can read the entry here. Prompted by a recent experience planning schooling for my own kids, I sketched it out in about two minutes and fired it in. A very simple concept…

We’ve all heard the estate agent babble. The neighbourhood chat. Oh, that house is just inside X catchment area – makes it worth much more. And would you believe that Y street isn’t, even though you’d think it is, as it’s only just a quick hop across the railway line on that footbridge – but they never think of these things do they?

So where does the horseshit stop and the horsetrading begin? Opening up this rather murky area of public information was the idea I submitted.

Let me elaborate on it a little; and in particular start with what the idea was not.

It was not a proposal for a new burden on schools, first and foremost (or indeed on local authorities). It was not a central government dictat to Do Something Entirely New. It was not an instruction to redefine catchment areas (or even to define them where they didn’t exist). It was not a proposal for a new website, or even for a new application per se.

It was merely a proposal for a centrally-sponsored (‘official’, if you like) map. Or more accurately, map layer, available freely to anyone who wanted to display it, or mash it up with other information to make something even more useful. With the map layer showing three things:

1. Those boundaries that had been declared by a local authority (or a school) as defining a catchment area they were prepared to publicise. Call this the ‘black’ on the map. And make sure it’s indexed with the relevant school(s), of course.

2. Those areas which – because of complex geography, allocation policy, local political decision (or any combination) of these – had no meaningful catchment area. Call this the ‘grey’ area. (I used the term ‘fuzzy-edges’ in my submission, in the rather optimistic hope that we’d end up using it to describe the difficult bits between the black areas.)

3. Leaving the ‘white’ zone: those areas where because of uncertainty, disempowerment, stubbornness or good old “lack of resources” – your schools and education authorities weren’t able or prepared to tell you either way.

See the trick there? This didn’t need to be a comprehensive information collection exercise. Right from the outset there would be benefits in seeing the bare facts of where information existed and where it didn’t. My take on the phrase “Power of Information”, if you like. And especially the power of “no information”.

It might be that, pushed hard enough by an engaged public and press, we’d end up with an entirely grey map of the UK. Fine. At least we’d have laid to rest some of the catchment mythology. But I knew that at least some areas were already publicly declared – here’s one example – so we’d definitely have some black areas on the map.

What wouldn’t be acceptable would be the white. Those yawning blank spaces that tell us that no one is prepared to say either that they do or do not operate the concept of a “catchment area”. Here, if there really is no authority prepared to make that commitment, we should be very concerned. And we should all be able to see the way things stand, plainly and publicly.

It’s not a resource-free idea, of course. Tracking down and supplying boundary data (or handling the management discussions that might be required to declare a ‘difficult’ position) would all take time. And therefore money. But it was an idea whose initial implementation could be very cheap – and then improve over time, with some official support, as its coverage became wider.

What happened?

The idea was well-received. I will let the judges speak for themselves if they want to comment here, but broadly I believe they thought: “mapping of catchment areas is a jolly good idea – lots of people would find that useful – let’s have it as one of the (half a dozen) winners”.

I had relatively little involvement in things from here on – fair enough – my role was to contribute the idea, but I did see that the very first fence – the re-presentation of those ‘black’ areas – wasn’t going to be jumped. Why on earth not? See our old friend, the derived data issue, for more on that. There are great complexities in the licensing required to reuse information on third-party mapping platforms if it has been based on information sourced from Ordnance Survey maps. Which in practical terms means pretty much all geographical data held by local authorities.

Instead, a tool was devised by which schools could (and I put a lot of weight on this word ‘could’) map their own catchment boundaries [if they chose], adding them to a map layer which could then be freely shared and used, etc. etc. The reuse of existing data wasn’t going to be attempted.

But that’s not the real reason why the idea died.

For that we have to look at the vexatious issue of how to follow-through service innovation in government. And the key word there is services. Ideas and services aren’t the same thing. An idea is something that can be hatched (or crowdsourced) centrally; but the centre isn’t the place from which services are actually operated and sustained. For that you need to engage the parts of government that look after the relevant service. For good, or bad, they are the ones in whose gift the implementation of ideas actually lies.

The team running SUABW did their absolute level best to run the competition and develop the ideas within the constraints they faced. But in moving the idea (as they inevitably had to) to the front-line, schools – under the oversight of another government department – the idea stopped being an innovation, and became a task.

I’d love to hear from that department about where they’ve got to with it, incidentally. I suspect it has joined a very long queue of higher service priorities. It is no longer an innovative idea, no longer part of a competition – just another candidate for limited resources. That’s reality. (If I’m wrong, and the idea is well on its way to being delivered, I will eat a suitably large chunk of humblecake.)

And as far as I’m aware, the fundamental problem with innovation in public services is this confusion between what constitutes ideas, and what constitutes service implementation. And why I’ve come up with some alternative approaches to crack the innovation problem; more on this later.

And why people so often misunderstand the difference between good ideas and things that actually work. For that you need to build bridges, and remove roadblocks – a metaphor which will be the subject of my next post.

Funny how the return of the snow brings back interest in this topic. And worrying how easily it gets dropped from view the rest of the time.

To recap: wheresmytrain focuses on one particular type of information:

the dataset describing where trains in operation are, precisely, and where they are planning to stop

- with the objective of making that information freely available for reuse.

It’s not about timetables, nor passenger information, nor fares – well, not yet anyway.

As Christopher Osborne has wisely pointed out, to make a comprehensive train information system requires a whole lot more than this. Are the trains full? How many carriages do they have? Are they running a shorter service than normal? Are the platforms busy? Do the platform lifts work at the station? And so on and so forth.

All highly valid questions, and the subject of a far more comprehensive exercise than this one.

Traditional public information programmes (and I’ve worked on plenty of those) undertaken detailed requirement gathering, and gather additional functions, stakeholders (forgive me for that word) and complications like so much moss. And often they bog down in the mud, and don’t actually deliver anything close to their original aspirations.

Which led me to think that there might be a better approach in this case. To keep scope ridiculously small – to a single line, in fact. An approach which wholly disregards much of the existing information infrastructure. That infrastructure seems to be bound up with innumerable contracts, rules and obligations to say nothing of the actual technical complexity of exchanged and aggregated datasets.

Hence the focus just on this one aspect of rail operations. I’ve done some asking around, from industry experts, to developers with track record in this area, to train staff themselves. One conclusion emerges again and again: in times of extreme disruption, the most accurate source of information on a particular service is to be found on the train itself – driven by the onboard GPS and the stopping station information input by the driver. (I accept that may not be true for every operator, but I welcome the conversation with more of them.)

I want this to be freely available for reuse. In fact I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t. They are our trains. Their positions and plans are no type of secret.

Once available – well, you probably know the rest – innovative use is made of the information. Scenario: you may not know (or care) what the late-running, reinstated 0805 to East Grinstead may be called now, but you do know that it is, right now, 3.2 miles up the track, stopping at your station, and your destination. And though prediction may break down, at least you can track its painful progress in real-time. You get the idea.

You never know, the train operators may even start using it to drive those hopelessly inaccurate platform signs we’ve all seen recently. I’m sure there are countless projects going on within the rail industry to do this sort of thing better. I really am. But, with something of a smile, I believe that the heavyweight information projects have failed to deliver to public expectation, and will continue to do so, run as they are.

Train and infrastructure operators lost the right to hang onto this information internally at the point at which they fed inaccurate information through their existing systems, to their passengers.

Even if such a feed does become available there will still be problems, of course. As soon as more than one organisation (and sometimes division) have to work together, disjoints happen. Where infrastructure is shared – problems. When decisions such as re-routing are made (and unmade) at very short notice – problems. No system on earth will keep up with every in-service failure, or last-minute crewing difficulty.

But, by keeping it simple, we can make things a hell of a lot better than they are now. If you want to help (in the next phase, by contacting and chasing up TOCs for more operational information and open discussion of the issues as they see them – ammunition supplied!) do get in touch.

You’ll have seen the billboards – they’re rather hard to miss. Share your opinion on education, on football, on anything you choose! Go on, let it all out. Hard to resist, really.

A massive poster campaign suddenly appears and we’re offered a vast public arena to vent, chat, post, share video. Like BBC’s Have Your Say on steroids. Wow! We’ve been after something like this, for ages, haven’t we? Haven’t we?

I’m not so sure. I’m a bit of a cynic. A skeptic. Suspicious by nature. The first question in my mind (not unreasonably given I work in the field of digital engagement between state and citizen) was: “Who’s asking?”

With Britainthinks it’s really not obvious. A political party? The TaxPayers’ Alliance? A think-tank or lobbying group? A charity? Perhaps even The Government??

The answer, courtesy of the Guardian, is here. OK, big deal: so it’s the traditional outdoor advertising industry showing off its power to harness opinion. A bit weird, to my mind, but thanks guys: you wanted to show you are still relevant to “national debate” (whatever that may actually mean) and I suppose, in a way, you have. I’m writing this, aren’t I?

What possible harm can it do?

Quite a bit, actually.

For the next obvious question one might have when considering participating is: “What difference will it make?” – Will your opinions, for all their careful crafting, actually influence anyone? Be taken seriously by someone in power? Have a chance of changing anything?

Probably not.

But, as we see on the site, we don’t even have to put up with the lame topics and polls suggested by the site authors – we can submit our own! At least we can create those areas that are of most interest and get things moving. Surely someone will notice. This is more like it!

But who is selecting those that make it into the public arena? – again a shroud of invisibility descends.

Why is all this light, pub-banter ‘engagement’ so bad though?

Two big reasons – firstly, the content execution is poor (notwithstanding the smokescreen about who’s actually behind it).

Simple ‘choice’ questions are a poor way to prioritise public spending and activity. Do you want higher taxes? NO! Do you want more schools? YES! Do you want tougher benefit rules? YES! Do you want *your* benefits cut? NO! Even trade-off questions simply cannot be meaningful without some presentation of the context in which they’re made. Guns or butter, anyone? Bullet-proof landrovers or kidney machines?

The most likely parts that will be picked out for further debate (and possibly action, but I doubt it) will be some of the poll findings. Here’s a good one. Who’d have thought it? Or this. 86.2% of statistics don’t bear detailed scrutiny, particularly if they’re shaped by advertisers trying to populate a site quickly, rather than professional pollsters or policy researchers.

The richer content – those impassioned user-generated videos – stays right where it is on the site. No sharing tools or social media integration that I can see, anyway. Not exactly going to go viral and capture the imagination of a nation that way, are they? Still glad you put it up there? Were those five votes of approval that you got on the site worth your time and trouble?

Secondly, the opportunity to galvanise a nation towards digital engagement is a precious one. To offer it, see the offer accepted, and then fail to deliver any meaningful outcomes is unforgivable. Who will be so keen to participate next time? When it might really inform a policy or a major public choice.

It’s a pretty good product, it would seem. No doubt about that. Superficially, it has a clear proposition, even if its aims are lacking. Which makes the whole thing even more frustrating.

But the point that sticks in my mind, having thought through the questions “What if the current government did this? What if this were part of a pre-election campaign, covert or overt? Is a newspaper behind this? Is this just trying to sell me insurance*?” is: what is the “trusted space” in which we’d actually undertake such opinion sharing?

Does such a thing exist? I am not sure. Someone’s got to run it. And to do so with absolutely no baggage is a much harder task than it may seem. Can a “declaration of neutrality” ever be more than a pretence? Perhaps the opinion blogs of the newspapers do this job far better? At least their participants understand what they’re involved with.

“Britain thinks”, indeed. Well, Paul thinks we deserve a bit better than this.

*Stranger things have happened. The “tea-bot” – a mildly irritating automated twitter feed that repeated any tweet containing the word ‘tea’ – was actually part of a Direct Line campaign. No, I have no idea why, either.