honestlyreal

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.