honestlyreal

I was thinking the other day about the things I learned at school that were really worth learning. Not the history dates, nor the chemistry formulae. Not even the mysteries of iron ore mining at Kiruna. (Gratuitous reason to use the photo above – I finally got to visit it this summer.)

No, the useful things that really made a difference to me were conveyed very simply, and stuck.

Step forward Mr Smith, woodwork and metalwork class, 1980. We have to draw up a specification for a table. I do an enthusiastic job of describing the perfect table, giving measurements, appearance, functionality etc. etc. I’ve got some brilliant ideas about tables, me.

Mr Smith likes the thoroughness, but meticulously adds his pencilled notes to each one of my design points. Although he gives a bit of acknowledgement to some of my thoughts on materials and so on, he’s basically tweaked every answer in exactly the same way. “…will be finalised by surveying what users of the table want (or need)”. I’m a bit downcast, as I thought I’d done it perfectly, but what he’s done is to open my mind to user perspective and iterative design. Just like that.

And then, in 1986, Mr Atherton did something extraordinary in A level Economics class. We’re doing interest rates, exchange rates, balance of payments and all that macro stuff. He poses a small question – what if X changes? And then leads me, absolutely brilliantly, through a massive series of “and then what will happen..?” questions. Eventually, as I find I’ve managed to loop together pretty every construct of an economic model in a logical sequence that actually makes sense, I’m unable ever again to think of a Big Change Thing without digging through all the “so what else changes as a result?” consequences.

So, Mr Smith & Mr Atherton. User-centricity and the fundamental interconnectedness of all the big things. In two quick lessons. Thanks. Profound, life-long, world-view-altering thanks. (I’d love to find a way for them to read this.)

If you had moments like this, what were they? And what would a curriculum that distilled all these and delivered them in concentrated form be able to achieve?

He came to me at dawn, from the fog.

Stood beside me. Said: “This I can offer…”

“Time: four hours more a day, yours to enjoy.

Take your lost mornings back. Many evenings too.

And more…relief from sickness, headache, insomnia, dread.

More energy, clarity, firmness of purpose,

maybe a little slimness, possibly a little fitness.

You’ll smell better, taste better, have better teeth

and perhaps be a little harder when required.

More certainty of what you like and don’t;

of who’s worth spending time with and who isn’t.

Perspective – seeing who you really are,

where you are, where you’re going and where you want to go.

Wonderful new relationships and maybe some healing of the old.”

I marvelled, head reeling. I said, “I understand.

This I want, but at what cost?”

He replied:

“In money, nothing. I’ll even give you a thousand a year.

But there are other, heavier prices to consider:

What if you’re not who or where you thought you were?

You’ll change – maybe more, maybe less

but accept it’s an unknown.

You’ll be a stranger at times

to those you love, work and play with.

You may have to leave them, even where you live,

or change your profession entirely.

In many groups, you’ll be an outsider,

a threat, an object of pity and ridicule.

You will see the sharp edges of things you’d hidden before.

And maybe for good reasons.

You may lose home, partner, even children.

You may walk alone for years.

At parties you’ll be awkward; in the pub, shunned;

branded the loner, the loser, the killjoy.

You may withdraw, or seek new diversions

but new directions will emerge,

and with them, a new you.”

I marvelled.

“Yes,” I said. “I want this.

How long do I sign up for?

A lifetime is unthinkable.”

“Of course it is,” he said.

“These changes may take minutes or years,

but you only have to commit to today.”

I nodded, and gave him the bottle.

A quick post on identity, written after seeing Dave Birch’s marvellous TEDx talk on identity, but rooted in a Nasty Thought about identity assurance (proving things about you to be true) that’s been troubling me for a while.

To summarise current thinking on this (but do watch Dave’s talk): old identity approaches are hopelessly flawed because they try to recreate a clunky, record-based model of Who You Are: as a list, or a database, of lots of things about YOU: from name, address, date of birth, fingerprints (and whatever reference numbers anyone – typically but not necessarily the government – want to sling in there), etc. etc.

Enlightened identity thinking says: bugger that – most of the time it’s not important WHO you are, merely that you can prove a certain thing to be true for a certain purpose. So a baby-faced boozer only needs to demonstrate AGE>18. A council service user may need to show POSTCODE=BN****. This is sometimes called “authentication, not identification”, and there’s a whole marvellous book about this by Jim Harper which is basically a bible for sensible, non-Big-Brothery approaches to these issues.

Reassuringly, these principles are found within the current strategy of both the US and UK governments. Which is ace. And to be wholly applauded. (There is a lot more to these strategies than just the idea of authentication over identification, by the way, but that isn’t the focus of this post.)

No more will you have to haul out a document showing that you buy electricity in order to rent a DVD. No more does your passport have to be hijacked to confirm you can start a job. All the machinery used to hold and prove things about you can be turned upside down: instead, you control what you share with whomever you need to prove something to. Provided there is a “binding” of something about you (maybe your face, or your fingerprint) to the fact that needs to be asserted, then you get what you need without having to BE any particular person.

If that thing about binding sounds a bit spooky, look more closely at this scheme. It’s been used to verify drinking age in pubs. The important bit is that there’s no central database anywhere that a (future!) malicious government can use to attach other “facts” about you. Or that can be corrupted or lost or misused etc. etc. It simply links some data points from a fingerprint to the fact that needs to be proven (age), and serves that up neatly and securely when required. But read up for yourself how it works. It’s well thought of and has the blessing of some who really do make a habit of tearing strips off dodgy approaches to personal data and biometrics.

But this post isn’t about clever new ways of doing things differently, and better.

It’s about a problem that will still exist. It’s about something that underpins many rather trivial, low-value transactions and life events.

Sometimes it’s not enough just to satisfy a particular information need for a transaction, like verifying an address, for example. Well, it is when everything goes right. But not when things go wrong. Because if things go wrong, and you want to take action, you want to underpin the information you’ve got with something else: the ability to tie the transaction back to a particular individual. Yes, someone with a name, an address, and lots of other things that the police and criminal justice systems know you by. So how quickly will Dave’s “no names” approach actually stand up in practice, in any situation where some future recourse may occur?

Because the one recourse you ultimately have is to take action which might involve a fine, an endorsement, even ultimately imprisonment. And these are things you can’t do if you only know AGE>18 or DRIVING TEST PASSED 1985, LICENCE CLEAN. Many things you can do “as somebody else” – like paying for something – but you can’t be banged up as someone else. That’s the “underpinning” bit.

The car hire company really does need to know who you are. Perhaps not to satisfy insurance requirements, or some other aspect of the up-front transaction. But just in case you disappear… Even for something as low value as a DVD rental… And if you bump your car into someone else’s, swap details and get an odd feeling about your opposite number, are you going to be more or less likely to insist on police attendance if they pull out a decent-looking driving licence for you to note down, or scratch it out in pencil on a Post-it note? Even peer-to-peer we use underpinning as part of our understanding of trust.

Our old-fashioned “hard identifiers” are hugely important in backing things up in these cases of trust and liability. It’s that thing where it’s much more important that the system is designed for things that go wrong, rather than things that go right.

Realistically, what will actually change if we move towards an authentication culture? Will we still fall back on the same old props to do that critical underpinning of trust? It’s a hole that I perceive in these concepts of individual-controlled information.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The BIS consultation on the next stage of midata has been announced. Obviously it’s a no-brainer that making nasty old companies do more, for free, for nice-us-the-consumers is a Good Thing, innit? Well, maybe… But it kinda depends how widely you look at the issues involved. I wrote about some of these last year.

Below is my answer to question 1: (in which I do that thing of tucking most of my exam answers into the opening statement, then just referring back to them for the next 20-odd questions)

Q1. Do you agree with the principles of midata? Have you any comments on the proposed approach?

The principles fall clearly into the “what’s not to like?” camp, at least if viewed solely from the customer perspective. As that is the most appealing perspective, it generally gets the most attention. But the issues behind these principles are wider: they set up a tension around a business’ freedom to manage customer relationships in a way that maximises shareholder interests.

All business processes reflect this tension to some extent: call-centres and automated call handling didn’t arise with the primary goal of improving customer experience, for example. The business-customer relationship is subject to some regulation, of course, such as fair trading provisions. So we are not starting from any point of ideological purity about state intervention in business, nor of the preferment of consumer rights over that of businesses.

Midata will place an additional cost burden on businesses (to make system changes), reduce competitive advantage (through enabling greater customer portability and reducing the exclusivity with which one business can build a consumer history) and generate consumer benefit in some cases. These effects are listed dispassionately: removing friction in a customer’s choice to move is neither good nor bad of itself. It is what it is: part of the fabric of a consumer-business relationship. Change it, and other things change too.

In my view the most pernicious bit of midata is the “mi” bit. It borrows from the language of personal data (which is itself a complex definition, but for simplicity think of name, address, data of birth etc.) and extends it to include “data about my transactions with you”. Fallacy 1 is to assume that because you have transacted with someone, you own, or have a right to, that information. Illustration: I bought a new tyre last year. My name was taken, and typed into a computer by the garage (thus creating an electronic record and avoiding a §1.10 exemption).

Do I have the right today to ask the garage owner to delve back and release to me the precise manufacturer code for the tyre and the type of credit card I used? Wasn’t our transaction confined to the exchange of money for a tyre? If a record of other information was created, wasn’t that the record of something else: an internal accounting transaction for the purpose of retail management? This is more than a philosophical point. Certainly, the claim that “the data was related to me, so it is of me” is a weak one.

But then there is the issue of electronic record-keeping itself. We see the argument made that because the internal transaction record exists, it is (or should be) a trivial, low-cost matter to release that in a format that is digestible by and useful to a consumer. These arguments are generally made by people who have never had to manage a development budget for IT system changes.

Fallacy 2 is that publication is a simple matter of pressing a back office system button and generating a non-proprietary, machine-readable file. (To say nothing of the wrapping of requestor verification and security that would be needed, even for the most innocuous-seeming datasets. Where we’ve been, who’ve we’ve spoken to, what we’ve bought – all these are part of a very private mosaic).

And we also need to be careful in our assumptions of usefulness. Utilities consumption is a very understandable use case: here, a very structured dataset which though complex in its patterns can ease the movement of customers between competing providers – matching need to product – removing the legwork otherwise required from the customer.

Does this also apply to more sporadic retail consumption, where there might be no realistic use case, but the burden of compliance falls on the business anyway? Costs may be pushed up, and passed on, even where direct benefits are not apparent.

And trying to draw sectoral boundaries to say that “power companies must, tyre companies don’t have to” will be an implementation nightmare. We may also see more companies anonymising their internal records through the use of a proprietary reference, rather than a name, for example, to try and duck out under §1.10. And if we try to argue that any computerised reference that can be pinned back to an individual constitutes electronic information about individual, as per §1.10, then suddenly anyone that’s paid with a credit card, anywhere, for anything (if it’s been recorded), falls into scope. Not the intention of the principles, I’d suggest.

So with these considerations, the principles should be redrafted to clear up this implied point about a “right” to any transactional data – but instead to set out very specific data types, industry sectors (and illustrative use cases – though naturally new ones will appear with data availability) along with a compelling impact analysis that demonstrates benefits outweighing costs. This assessment should continue through the early life of enacted policy: if customer benefits outweigh the burden to businesses, then it’s working.

But midata is far from the simple, crowd-pleasing “here’s a free thing which will save you, the consumer, money and have no external consequence” that’s featured in some of its public presentation so far.

A featureless airport departures hall.

Half-way along the queue is a rather dishevelled Tortoise, surrounded by heavy bags.

Achilles (for he’s back again): Oi, Tortoise!

Tortoise [po-faced and unresponsive]

Achilles: I said, OI TORTOISE. YES. YOU. BACK THERE. TORTOISE. TORTOISE NP150417!

Tortoise: WTF? How do you know my number? Thought that was just between me and the hatchery?

Achilles: See this print-out of your markings? [holds up said print-out] Got this off of Google; on CheloniansOfNote.com it was. That’s you, isn’t it? Blotch, blotch, stripe, worn patch, shape that looks a bit like David Willetts’ head? Yes? Got a few other bits of info here too, to help me recognise you and the better to meet your every need.

T: Um, so I see. But how dare you…

A: Hang on, my horny-carapaced friend. Shuffle up to the front here. Let’s have a quiet word about this. [Tortoise makes the painfully slow journey to the head of the queue, nudging his bags one by one with his nose.] This is what you wanted, see?

T: WHAT?

A: You told us. You did. Well, not you individually, Tortoise NP150…

T: STOP IT!

A: Ok, ok. Well, collectively, our customers said things like “Hey Trojan Air, time to wake up to the new world and start treating us like people. We’re not just lumps of flesh with wallets. We want you to throw away all that stiff, corporate formality. Get to know us. Empower yourselves. Adapt. Use a bit of bloody initiative. See us for who we are.” So we have.

T: Yeah, but you can’t just go gathering information like that about me, without my permission. It’s like me shell’s been invaded. Horrible. Oi moi!

A: Don’t go getting classical on me: these characterisations are only pixel-deep. Now, look over there, now, at the SleazyJet desk. See that queue? Hundreds of them. Hot and knackered, they are. And going nowhere for a couple of hours yet. Now, I know, and the SleazyStaff know, that there’s a nice little waiting room round the back. With just one very comfy seat in it. And air-con. They can’t tell everyone, it’d get rammed. But see that woman just there? With the huge bump? Could drop any minute. You think it’s ok for the staff to, you know, use their bloody EYES to spot her, and offer her that seat? Or are you going to go all “no, no, they must know nothing, they must treat us all-equal-and-anonymous like”?

T: Well, I suppose that’s a bit different.

A: So it’s ok to use my bloody EYES to infer stuff about my customers, so’s I can make their service better, but it has to stop when I use, what? A computer? A phone? A database?

T: Now you come to mention it…

A: Because isn’t that where mechanical process (oh so twentieth century) stops, and service begins? When we start inferring? When we use one of the very few gifts that mankind seems to be blessed with – pattern recognition – to judge that if someone is cross-legged and hopping from foot to foot, it might be politic to proactively remind them where the loo is? To check on our systems so that their seventeen letters of complaint that they keep getting woken for meals when they’d rather sleep haven’t been an utter waste of time? To infer, beyond this, that similar awakenings for important matters of Shop-In-The-Sky sales might also receive an unfavourable response even though they haven’t actually WRITTEN TO US ABOUT THIS NOR GIVEN US EXPLICIT PERMISSION TO EVEN GUESS IT MIGHT MATTER TO THEM?

T: Steady on, old boy.

A: Sorry. Emotive stuff, this. Which is why this post is written as a dialogue – less confrontational that way. Where were we? Oh yes – look over there! PoshAir have got one of their regulars arriving. He’s a FTSE-100 Chairman, he is. Yeah, I know. Miserable and anonymous, grey and crumpled, to you and me. But to him? The Grand Kahoona. The Large Cheese. He wants to be recognised. And look again: by the sort of chance that only occurs in allegorical blog posts, he happens to be featured on the cover of this month’s Kahoona magazine over there on that newsstand. Now, shall we ask their staff to shield their eyes so that there is no prospect of them contaminating their green-field minds with this inarguably public-domain factuality of who the fuck he is?

T: Yeah, but it’s invasive. He might not want to be recognised.

A: Isn’t that a matter for their judgement? They are, remember, humans. Providing a service. Let’s at least hope they have some basic lightness of touch. They do not have to march up and shout “Mr Cheese great to have you back it has been 34 days and 2 hours since you flew with us shame about the collapse of the zinc deal in Bolivia your usual gin and valium then?” A mere “Mr Cheese, good to see you again. Let us know if you need anything” isn’t invasive. Invasive is ferreting through information that’s not public. Invasive is phoning people up or emailing them out of the blue, forcibly taking their time away. This stuff here is just observation, inference and discretion.

T: Ah, but it’s where it could all lead, innit. That dossier on me that you’ve got behind the desk…

A: Dossier? Ooooh how very Le Carré! You got that out of that article, didn’t you? One of many using lurid language to play on everyone’s fears about “where it could all lead”.

T: Call it what you will. You are reprocessing data and creating databases and riding a chariot and horses through the provisions of the Data Protection Act (1998). And you know it.

A: I am, and that’s a very fair challenge. I am struggling to justify it – hey, hang on, pass me your phone for a minute.

T: No bloody chance. You know enough about me already.

A: I just wanted a quick peep at your contacts book.

T: That’s none of your business.

A: And yet you download all these apps to your phone and give them permission to access what must be hundreds, maybe even more, personal records and upload them to Morin Towers and gods knows where else, and remind me at what point did you register yourself with the Information Commissioner let alone do any of that “seeking consent” hoo-ha?

T: Yeah, well, that’s for organisations. I’m just Tortoise.

A: Tortoise With A Talent, Ltd, according to my, erm, “dossier”. You still think the boundary between individual and organisation is that clear, and in any case serves as any sort of robust moral framework for this sort of issue about data responsibility? You still content that the DPA (1998) is in any way fit for purpose for the world we now live in? A world of massive volunteered personal information? A world where even if you don’t put your own pics up somebody is going to tag your face and you will be able to do jack all about it and will just have to get over this unassailable fact?

T: I suppose. That’s all going to need clearing up when they refresh the Data Protection Act, innit?

A: Just. A. Bit. But in one final attempt to justify my creepy snooping, can I at least appeal to your libertarian side? It’s one thing to berate the state for acting like this, for gathering information and building megadatabases about individuals. Its civic hygiene may one day become suspect, its motivation potentially questionable, and it’s pretty hard to avoid. But this is a freaking airline. You don’t like what we do, if you think we’re creepy, then you’ll stop using us, and we’ll change the way we work to get you back again. Less of this Big Brother Watch angst; save that for those who really deserve it. Frankly Tortoise, there’s some cognitive dissonance going on here. I know (coz it says so in your dossier) that you hate all this state intervention stuff. You really want businesses to be able to do a good job with the very lightest hand of regulation ‘pon them. Now you’re making no sense with all this paranoid guff.

T: Ok, ok. The jig’s up. I guess what’s really going on is that a general, non-specific feeling of impending doom about personal data in the cloud (and in our hands/claws) is creating a toxic environment where any story that even touches on search, or social networks, or biometrics leads us to throw all common sense out of the window. I guess.

A&T: Oi moi! Ta’las! Tlê’môn!

Or let me be more specific: my problem with the TPA. (Also applies to the Tea Parties of this world, and other proponents of what we might term small-state, individual-freedom libertarianism.)

It’s this.

At the very highest level of political/economic reasoning, it’s not that barking, really.

They believe the state should be small. That it should only do what a collectively-organised, representative and publicly-funded state should absolutely have to do. That it should be held to account, and kept out of the way as far as possible of a healthy, free-functioning market. Even when that market may do somewhat unwholesome things. The freedom to choose our degree of wholesomeness is critical.

It’s a reasonable argument. I happen to think it’s flawed in any form of implementation, but so are lots of other ideologies. Doesn’t mean you can’t argue downwards from the concept, provided you keep an honest anchor in your base principles.

No, my problem with the TPA is the way they go about this arguing.

It’s difficult to engage public sentiment about nebulous concepts like the -cracies. And it’s really hard to have a meaningful debate about the problems found in large, complex systems.

So instead they focus on scare stories – on shameful, but usually rare, negative outcomes. On “non-jobs”, bad technology, poor management. Invariably in the public sector.

They will rush to find and publicise “the thing that sounds so awful that you could hardly believe it to be true”. Often because it isn’t true. Or is stretched and exaggerated beyond all recognition. As a technique, it is lazy beyond belief; calculating, demeaning and wholly dishonest.

The TPA’s true talent lies in finding themes that will grab a mass public imagination, and then plague it.

The complicated reality of organisations? What you really have to do to administer any enterprise involving hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people-based transactions (whatever sector you’re in!) – management challenges as old as organisations themselves?

No, way too challenging for them.

Arguments about the misuse of public money are made using attempted parallels with the world of the household, with the micro-business, with the near-to-home. An iPad? It’s an entertainment system. It should never be bought with public money! Happiness surveys? Pah – no need for them round kitchen tables in the real world – just talk to each other. Or better still, just lump it. (Seriously, I could use a thousand more words finding egregious examples of this style. But you have Google.)

There are some rare examples of good work – particularly around issues of privacy and the implications of new technologies for the relationship between citizen and state. That’s what I find so baffling – these attempts to engage on strong points of principle are utterly undermined by this succession of cheap jibes tailored for the smaller-format newspapers.

(What they don’t focus on very much, ironically, is tax paying. But that’s a side point for this post.)

And if you still find temptation in your path – if you hear that little voice of the Daily Mail leader-writer in your ear (he visits us all, in dark times) whispering “just cut X or Y, or crack down hard on Z, you KNOW it makes sense,” bear this in mind:

Most shades of political thought have been tried. Human ingenuity and systemic inertia generally mean that things mooch on pretty much as they always have been, despite the rocks that various “leaders” might try to lob in from time to time. So if you’re wavering between left and right, and seeing points of recognition in both camps (and you should – to do otherwise would be a worrying sign of lazy thinking), how about putting your shoulder behind the one that doesn’t, every time and very rapidly, lead to policies which are about being vile to people?

Is that simple enough?

Fate, and the vermin who buy and sell marketing lists, have a strange way of mocking. When money’s never been tighter, my name and address seem to have been tagged with the hilariously inaccurate description: “high net worth, definitely a target for personal wealth management services”.

And as a result, what deep joy the postman brought me recently!

Imagine my delight, Trevor Downing–yes, you Trevor Downing, of the Trevor Downing Wealth Management Practice, Market Square, Westerham TN16 1BR–when the following little cartoon dropped out of the envelope.

You might, possibly, have sent that to the wrong person, Trev.

I know there are retired Colonels up and down the South East who’ll be clutching their highly-decorated boners under their dressing gowns at the sight of such anti-tax grot–their gnarled old hands frantically squeezing a last drop of life from the old soldier, spurred on by the prospect of keeping the Chancellor’s filthy mitts off what’s left of their Service pension.

But.

It might strike you, as it did me, that there’s something pretty horrible about marketing your services like this.

Or like this.

Look at her, up there on her nice white fluffy cloud. Nice, white-haired, white Mrs Hayward. Managed to “structure” things so that she won the game: maximum kudos for exiting with that marvellous sign-off “TAX PAID ZERO”. How those heavenly trumpets must have welcomed her!

I know. Of course I do. It’s all perfectly legal; it’s just making sure the right amount is paid… yeah yeah yeah. But it’s not about that, is it? It’s about an attitude. The attitude that says it’s absolutely fine to fuck around and fiddle with every last shareholding–to make the cat a director of your non-existent-trading-entity if it makes the most of some allowance somewhere. I do know someone rich who puts their pet dogs down on their tax return as “guard dogs”, for fuck’s sake. Really.

That attitude. The one that crows merrily about how having 500k liquid is an inherited (often literally) right, and there’s no bloody way that any of that is going on stuff for the poor. Coz they’ll only waste it.

The attitude that scours a workforce of tens of millions of public sector workers to find the handful of egregious examples that they can then spatter over the papers to make Mrs Hayward and Colonel Cunt (Retd) feel that much more justified about their little visit to see Mr Downing.

And this:

Yeah. They won too. More entitled white arseholes sitting on some massive fucking white golf club sofa in the sky. Well done. Big whoop.

Ah, Mr Sensible. Mr Selfish Shithead Sodding Sensible. You didn’t need that NHS ambulance when you tripped on your cliff-top walk with the Crown Green Bowlers, now did you? Nah, that stuff happens to other people, doesn’t it? You don’t need streetlights. Not where you live. Nor state education, nor environmental health protection (Mr S eats in nice places). Mental health services (are you crazy)? Income support? Disability benefit? Winter fuel? No. NO. NO!

That’s all for other people, isn’t it? Trevor’ll help you keep it that way, too.

You just carry on clinging on to your selfish, misanthropic, lazy sack of comforting lies: the state’s a thief, “public”=”wasted”, the less you contribute the more you win, and anyone less fortunate than you can just crawl away and die.

Nice one, Trevor. Nice one, son.

Remind me again: what’s the purpose of opening up all this public data?

Ah yes, that’s it. To create value. And you can’t get a much stronger example of real value in the real world than showing people how to save money when buying train tickets.

Fare pricing is a fairly hit-and-miss business, as you’ve probably noticed. We don’t have a straight relationship between distance and price. Far from it.

The many permutations of route, operator and ticket type throw up some strange results. We hear of first class tickets being cheaper than standard, returns cheaper than singles, and you can definitely get a lower overall price by buying your journey in parts, provided that the train stops at the place where the tickets join.

The rules here are a bit weird: although station staff have an obligation to quote the cheapest overall price for a particular route, they aren’t allowed to advertise “split-fare” deals, even where they know they exist. Huh?

Why this distinctly paternalistic approach? Well, say the operators: if a connection runs late, your second ticket might not be eligible, and there might be little details of the terms and conditions of component tickets that trip you up, and, and, and…well, it’s all just too complicated for you. Better you get a coherent through-price (and we pocket the higher fare, hem hem).

There’s no denying it is complicated. Precisely how to find the “split-fare” deal you need is a tiresome, labour-intensive process of examining every route, terms and price combination, and stitching together some sense out of it all. And, indeed, in taking on a bit of risk if some of those connections don’t run to time.

You might be lucky, and have an assistant who will hack through fares tables and separate websites to do you that for you. But you’d be really be wasting their time (and your money).

Because that sort of task is exactly what technology is good at.

Taking vast arrays of semi-structured data and finding coherent answers. Quickly. And if there’s some risk involved, making that clear. We’re grown-ups. We can cope.

There’s no doubt at all that the raw materials–the fares for individual journey segments–are public information. Nobody would ever want, or try, to hide a fare for a specific route.

So when my esteemed colleague Jonathan Raper–doyen of opening up travel-related information and making it useful–in his work at Placr and elsewhere, put his mind to the question of how new services could crunch up the underlying data to drive out better deals for passengers, I don’t doubt that some operators started to get very nervous indeed.

Jonathan got wind–after the November 2011 meeting of the Transport Sector Transparency Board–that a most intriguing piece of advice had been given by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) to the Department for Transport on the “impact of fare-splitting on rail ticket revenues”.

Well, you’d sort of expect an association which represents the interests of train operators to have a view on something that might be highly disruptive to their business models, wouldn’t you?

So what was that advice? He put in a Freedom of Information request to find out.

And has just had it refused, on grounds of commercial confidentiality.

This is pretty shocking–and will certainly be challenged, with good reason.

Perhaps more than most, I have some sympathy with issues of commercial reality in relation to operational data. We set up forms of “competition” between providers for contracts, and in order to make that real, it’s inevitable that some details–perhaps relating to detailed breakdowns of internal costs, or technical logistics data–might make a difference to subsequent market interest (and pricing strategy) were they all to be laid out on the table. I really do understand that.

But a fare is a fare. It’s a very public fact. It’s not hidden in any way. So what could ATOC have said to DfT that is so sensitive?

The excuse given by DfT that this advice itself is the sort of commercial detail that would prejudice future openness is, frankly, nonsense.

I look forward to the unmasking of this advice. And in due course to the freeing-up of detailed fares data.

And then to people like Jonathan and Money Saving Expert creating smart new business models that allow us to use information like it’s supposed to be used: to empower service users, to increase choice, and to deliver real, pound-notes value into the hands of real people.

That’s why we’re doing all this open data stuff, remember?

One of the most fascinating angles to emerge from the LA Fitness story is the differing perceptions people have of the value of goods and services.

Specifically, much of the public support for the contract holder undergoing hardship seems to be built on the premise that “they haven’t used the service yet; why shouldn’t they be able to walk away without penalty?”

It’s an interesting point. If they’d stopped making repayments for a car, there is a clear link to a tangible asset that they’d have to give back. Similarly with a mortgage and a property.

If you stop a handset-included mobile phone contract early, you can argue that you’re not consuming any more services, but you have of course got the benefit of the handset in your hand (the costs of which have been met by some of the projected revenue take over the life of your contract).

And what about a loan? The recipient has had the benefit: the lump of cash up front–would a massive interest burden in some way justify their cessation of repayment? It gets harder in this case, maybe because the defensible “asset” becomes less tangible?

And the point which I think was largely glossed over with LA Fitness was that although the customer might not be consuming any more of the service (which in any case seems to be common with many gym memberships) this forms part of an overall price/usage/investment/repayment model on which the business is founded.

If contract providers face a greater risk of early termination without penalty then they will adjust their model by raising prices to account for that greater risk. We know that 24 month contracts are cheaper than 12 month ones: it’s not as if we can really make an assumption of consumer naivety on that general principle any more.

And the “projected value of the contract” is just as real as a physical asset in other ways: for example to the sales rep whose commission is pegged to ongoing “good” business. Try telling them that early termination without penalty is an action without effect.

Similarly, to accountants and investors, a stream of known future revenue is as real an asset as a car in a showroom. That’s how businesses work.

None of which means that discretion can’t and shouldn’t have been exercised in this case. The company’s initial refusal to recognise the impact that their blunt decision would have (perhaps magnified by the “not a real consumer service” points above) was foolish, and eventually they had no choice but to cave in.

They would have had all sorts of discretionary powers: in case of contract holder death or disappearance, for example, and should have used them.

But I am left with the question: would we be as consistent with support for a hardship case where other services (or even goods) were involved? And is this rational?

Or was a collective folk-feeling of frustration–with all those thousands of gym memberships that are paid for and never used–in some way acting as an accelerant for this fire?

What is it that really makes you sign a petition?

I’ve given a lot of thought to this question today. Triggered by one particular petition that has seen an 11th hour surge of promotion through social networks. And I can’t help concluding that the nature of “deadlines” and “targets” does itself modify behaviour in these circumstances.

There’s a big difference between the phrasing: “sign this petition, it’s an incredibly good cause and by far the most appropriate way to address it”

and

“Person X has worked really hard to get this important issue heard. It’s only Y thousand signatures from success, with Z minutes to go.”

especially when you can get real-time updates of how Y and Z are racing each other to the wire. It’s a bit addictive like that, all this instant feedback.

NB. I am intentionally not referencing that precise petition here. To do so will take the argument into different territory than I am addressing: which is about mechanics and behaviours of mass, public, direct representation. You can obviously search it out if you choose, but I will give short shrift to comments that focus on it specifically.

So what is it that persuades someone to add their name to a petition? I can see a massive range of factors. It could be because: they believe it will make a difference, they’re angry, someone has asked them to, someone has told them to, everyone else is doing it, or maybe that they just want to see it “be a winner”. There are no absolute “good” and “bad” reasons. This is just how things are. That’s the nature of mass participation.

But it’s that last one that’s playing on my mind. The combination of target and deadline changes the dynamic. We start seeing “edge effects” at work. I’d say that something achieving 90% of its goal with 24 hours to spare can much more easily attract attention that something at 50% with three months to go. We like “the cause of the day”. (Indeed Twitter in particular now seems to be one long stream of them.)

And if that is true, then that target effectively shrinks slightly, as a result of this last-minute acceleration effect.

Is that a good thing? Has it been fully accounted for in the design of the system? What would happen if the “score” were kept masked (other than to say it exceeded a minimum threshold for consideration)? I’d be really interested to know.