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My Police

Or MyPolice. Or mypolice.org. Or mypolice.org.uk. Or OnePlace. Or TotalPlace. Or governmentonceagainallovertheeffingplace.org.uk.

You may have read about the ‘confusion’ caused when Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary crashed like an elephant from a great height on the small social innovation project already known as MyPolice.

That the good Inspectorate a) failed to spot the existence of the MyPolice incumbents, b) demonstrated a complete inability to change anything when it was noticed, and c) thought that two entirely different propositions having exactly the same name wouldn’t confuse people are all pretty damning in their own ways.

There’s certainly a powerful irony in ‘inspectors’ of the area of policing stumbling around in the dark like this. MyPolice, though young, is well-known, has a strong web presence (dominating Google search rankings, including the top three results), and has worked assiduously to build relationships with police forces and officials from the National Policing Improvement Agency.

The innovative MyPolice proposition (that’s the small start-up one) captures the zeitgeist of engagement. Call it Web-/Government-/Police-2.0 – or whatever bit of jargon you must – it recognises that conversations and feedback are rather more important than tranches of statistics. The other one, the HMIC one, is firmly in the old-school camp of “here’s lots of information we’d like to give you”. (I would love, by the way, to know just how much demand for these types of statistics services actually comes from real people – and how much comes from officials keen to demonstrate at their year-end appraisal that they’ve done a bit of communicating telling people what they do.)

So where are the feedback mechanisms in HMIC’s offering? There aren’t any. You can give them some general feedback on the website, but your response to their findings in your area, your perceptions of performance, community safety, or policing priorities? Keep them to yourselves, because HMIC aren’t listening. Massive missed opportunity there, then.

And the other wisp of zeity geist floating around at the moment? Open data. Remember that? Data.gov.uk and so on. Well, there’s lots of data, qualitative and quantitative, sitting in the HMIC service. But can I get at it in a raw format, take it to do my own comparisons and analyses and so on? Will I find links to a place on data.gov.uk where it’s all been made available for this sort of thing? Take a wild guess. So that’s nicely connected to one of the principal government information strategies, then. Missed opportunity number two.

I fear it gets worse. I had a peek at HMIC’s homepage a few days ago, just before their /mypolice was sprung upon us. It featured a little thing called OnePlace. OnePlace was another major breakthrough* in the public understanding of government’s performance. Here in one place are all the statistics you need (well, ‘need’ may be stretching it a bit; ‘want’ would be stretching it several miles) about your area. It’s backed by HMIC and other public bodies – and has a heavy Audit Commission imprint about it. It even looks suspiciously like a new website that’s been tucked inside Directgov wrapping paper – but no new websites are allowed, so that can’t be the case*.

You can find police information in there if you try, but it’s not immediately recognisable as the same as that now in HMIC/mypolice, as opposed to The One Place. It talks of Police Authorities, rather than police forces – perhaps that’s the difference? Surely to most people ‘police’ means ‘police’? It also offers “compare my area” features – but these leap off into comparisons about councils and all sorts of other stuff. Frankly, I don’t understand what it’s trying to do. And this is my area of alleged professional expertise.

I was unimpressed by OnePlace at its launch. Another stack of money spent on something with dubious value, little usefulness, and no feedback capability. But I held my peace. The departure of one of its ‘partners’ to now create their own AnotherPlace (beautifully publicised as it has been by the branding cock-up) has nudged me towards public comment. If they hadn’t chosen MyPolice as a name they might have got away with the – in my view – greater crime of wasting yet more money on broadcast-only web sites. Can we have that chunk of OnePlace public money back now then? I thought not. Quis Auditoriet Ipsos Auditores?

I’m not even going to start on TotalPlace – have a look for yourself. It looks like another new .gov.uk website, incidentally. But it can’t be, of course. Must be my eyes going funny after all those statistics.

Take head in hands. Find nearby brick wall. Bang until all this starts making sense.

*irony alert.

UPDATE 1 April

HMIC have now announced they are dropping the mypolice branding, URLs and so on. Which is great. I withdraw the points above on flexibility. But perhaps not about agility.

Am also happy to clarify that I’m not knocking the TotalPlace proposals – just bemoaning the need for yet another ‘branded’ initiative.

The points about OnePlace being quietly dropped by HMIC, being pretty useless, and HMIC missing the point entirely on open data and interaction, remain.

Interestingly, Gordon Brown’s recent announcements on Building Britain’s Digital Future ruled out the creation of any new government websites which didn’t provide for engagement and interactivity. We can play all the games we like about URLs, but in spirit, HMIC’s effort was certainly a new website. And would have failed that test.

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11 Responses

  1. whisky says:

    The cops are sometimes known as p**s and also talk sh**te

    Good picture, it all rings true

    Your situation is no different to the other 60 million people who have to suffer stali’s little boys and girls from the public sector

    Let’s hope they all come crashing down with the cuts

  2. Loudmouthman says:

    In my local Parish Council there was a concerted effort to consider a Website provider that would cost us at least £1500 a year for our website. It took me several meetings and explanations to point out that we could get a better , far more able and standards based website by using WordPress which would cost us nothing more than the £90 a year hosting fee we were currently paying for. I won my argument but its clear that people believe you have to spend money on websites and they have no real understanding why they believe it.

  3. Anonymous says:

    Government don’t get IT. Plain and simple. Keep posting and hopefully a bright young minister will read your post and Do Something or Tell Somebody and something might come of it. Its all we can do.

  4. William says:

    Cheers for link to HMIC web site feedback. I left this there:

    > Every day you leave this matter of mypolice.org.uk squatting the existing mypolice.org domain prolongs the impression of an arrogant or clueless and indecisive bureaucracy stumbling around without any grasp of the effect of the Internet on public services.

    How about:

    1. issue an immediate apology for confusion and distress caused

    2. put a link to mypolice.org from your home page and from mypolice.org.uk pages to show absence of malevolence and a desire to get things right quickly

    3. find a new name eg policestats.gov.uk for what you’re trying to do, which the online community would like to be able to be supportive of

    4. make a statement about how this very poor decision was reached and the extent to which those involved (whether officials or an external agency) will be beneficiaries of taxpayers money in future.

    5. give the mypolice.org.uk domain to MyPolice as a goodwill gesture.

    It was an error on their part to leave it available, but your behaviour is inexcusable, especially for a public body, and above all for a public body whose bevaviour shd be “whiter than white” if we are to restore trust in the police.

  5. William says:

    Meanwhile….

    OnePlace may be one steaming great heap.

    But TotalPlace may be totally different. The web presence may be mediocre here, but what os really happening is important. Bringing senior reps of all the different local services together to view the issues and budgets in an integrated way is definitely worth trying. There’s much more to this than meets the online eye.

  6. Anonymous says:

    Well said William, I couldn’t have put it better myself. MyPolice with their endless enthusiasm and efforts need this issue to be resolved….fast!

  7. Paul Clarke says:

    William – fair point. I am not suggesting TP won’t deliver sensible joined-up thinking. The comment is just on the branding. Yet another catchy title, making a big promise of connectivity. I worry about the brand fatigue: do we really need all this branding? Why not just deliver the value, and let that speak for itself?

  8. Anonymous says:

    I’d like to support William’s proposed set of simple remedial actions HMIC could take.
    I don’t see why any of the proposed actions would be difficult or costly for HMIC, and any loss of existing SEO benefit could easily be outweighed by newly friendly links from the twitterati following this issue.
    Come on HMIC – you can do it!

  9. Steph Gray says:

    I’m not entirely sure I understand your point(s) here, Paul. That government has too many sites? That the rules get broken? That government organisations don’t listen to civil society groups? That open data will solve this?

    You know that I’m a big supporter of working with online communities and ensuring government supports digital innovation from outside government. But that doesn’t mean that government shouldn’t try too, or that civil society efforts are *necessarily* better (even though they often will turn out to be).

    In June 2009, MyPolice.org won SiCamp. It’s a great idea, with passionate people behind it and some hard work behind the scenes – yet as of March 2010, there’s still not a lot to show for the site that I could see just now. If HMIC launched their own service without prior awareness of the ideas already out there, that’s a shame, but not worthy of the vilification they’ve had from some commentators. Ask plenty of startup founders who’ve been beaten to market by a competitor what they learned and they’ll say: ship early. Patient Opinion is an excellent service and survives despite the existence of NHS Choices because its unique value is widely recognised, and – I think – they were first to market.

    OnePlace is trying to do something ambitious and complex, and to my eye, does an OK job of it with some neat little tricks. Sure, there’s room for improvement. But it’s a good idea, clearly taken seriously. And it’s on Directgov, as it should be.

    Sure, Government schemes have deeper pockets than civil society projects, though they’re also generally subject to more technical, regulatory and political constraints. Hopefully, the rise of data.gov.uk will put services both on the inside and the outside on a more equal footing in terms of source data at least. And I’d hope that publicly-funded projects of this kind developed these days would make big efforts to develop APIs or a delivery platform which supports re-use and enables the service to be refined from the outside.

    So I do agree with you about extracting value from public money, and that services like this depend on genuine interactivity to be truly useful. But lots of other things matter too. And I can’t help feeling that some constructive competition between the folks on the inside and the folks on the outside will get us to a better result in the end.

  10. Anonymous says:

    You’re right Steph – there are many agendas and topics interwoven here. And the currents are complex. I’m far from being a government basher for the sake of it. I know all too well what life looks like from the other side.

    But if I could distil my various points down to just one, it would be my disappointment in the lack of imagination so often shown in new online development by government.

    Picking a nice new branding, and publishing some statistics under it might have been what the web was about 10 years ago. But now? When we have the tools to do so much more in terms of engagement, feedback and smarter ways to share the underlying data?

    Given the “About the site” page on Oneplace says: “Welcome to Oneplace. This is a new website that…” I do think it has been conceived as a new site, rather than genuinely integrated into its surroundings. I might have reservations about the whole approach to rationalising sites (that’s for another post, perhaps in a few weeks’ time) but I’m just calling out what I see on the screen today.

    And the obvious user journey I took on Oneplace – to find out about my own area – led me swiftly to a marvellous page telling me that there were neither red nor green flags relating to my area. That small part of England known as Surrey. Nothing to see here, as they say. So I moved on. It didn’t look neat to me – just a search engine delivering thin content and no follow-up for me to engage, challenge, support or find out more.

  11. Carriebish says:

    Nice post Paul. Could I just correct one thing – HMIC was actually aware of the original MyPolice before it launched its pale imitation so it’s not true to say that they ‘failed to spot the existence of the MyPolice encumbents’. In fact, they emailed the ‘MyPolice encumbents’ in advance of launching to warn them to expect extra traffic to their site due to the similarity of the domains. It’s outlined here: http://www.mypolice.org/?page_id=4

    It’s not a case of benign confusion or clumsiness but more a case of breathtaking arrogance on the part of HMIC.

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