honestlyreal

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.