BCC: My colleagues who I need to know that I am taking this seriously
Subject: URGENT: Action needed!!!
Dear Readers,
It has come to our attention that readers of this blog have NOT been reading the blog early enough in the morning. To make matters worse it has been reported to me that some readers of the blog have not been reading the blog consistently.
I have also heard of some readers who only skim read the posts.
This is obviously NOT acceptable and I write to you asking for this to be rectified straight away!!!
As such, I expect an immediate response from all of you covering the following points:
WHAT YOU WILL DO TO RECTIFY THE SITUATION
BY WHEN
I should also remind you of comments made in previous communications on this topic. As the boss has said recently:
‘Please enjoy today’s post.’
I am not going to report back to my boss and tell him/her/it that this has NOT been fixed by each and every one of you!!!
<Insert name of defenceless admin officer>Localgov:I would like to remind you that you are meant to be RESPONSIBLE for this issue. Please inform all readers as to their duties regarding this. I also expect a full report from you accompanying a new procedure manual for monitoring the reading habits of the readers.
ALL: Let me REASSERT that I expect this situation to be fixed within the next <Insert random timescale> and will not accept any excuses.
IF YOU DO NOT FIX THIS I WILL BE FORCED TO ESCLATE THIS TO YOUR BOSS’S, BOSS’s, BOSS’s BOSS!!!
WLLG
PS. This is obviously not that urgent or I would have picked up the phone or come and seen you in person. But I am angry, running out of the door and won’t have a chance to bug you about this for at least four days and I needed to make everyone in the organisation know that I am taking this very seriously indeed.
Welovelocalgovernment is a blog written by UK local government officers. If you have a piece you’d like to submit or any comments you’d like to make please drop us a line at: welovelocalgovernment@gmail.com We’re not angry in real life… Honest!
There's a new website in the civilservice.gov.uk domain - but because it's at a subdomain, of course, it doesn't count as a 'new' site. (That's an observation, not a criticism; I'm as guilty of doing this as anyone.)
Created by DWP 'in their role as leaders of Govt agile adoption on the ICT Strategy CIO Delivery Board', it's a community site which sets out to provide a space for 'people in the public and private sectors to discuss, share and get advice and answers on adopting agile in UK Government projects'. As such, it ticks a box from the ICT Strategy Implementation Plan.
Naturally I'm delighted to see they've built it using BuddyPress. It looks like a fairly 'vanilla' installation for the moment, running using the free BuddyPress Corporate theme, with minimal customisation. I've also spotted the Q&A premium plugin in there too. The IP address reveals it's the handiwork of Harry Metcalfe's DXW crew.
They're doing the right thing by just charging headlong into it; it seems like all the Facebook-esque functionality - personal profiles, groups, forums (?), friending, etc - has been enabled. Some of it will work, some won't. But since it's all in there already, you may as well give it a try.
I'd also endorse the decision to work with a ready-made theme: I recently looked into developing a BuddyPress theme from scratch, and soon gave up on the idea. It's terrifying. If you really want to customise the look & feel, do it as a Child Theme.
The fate of any BuddyPress is dictated by the momentum it builds (or fails to build). The site, or more accurately its membership, needs to provide good enough reason for people to come back regularly, and contribute while they're there. I wish them well.
We've got a BuddyPress-based government project of our own in the works; the development work is close to completion, but we're facing a few bureaucratic hurdles. I'm hoping for progress in the next couple of weeks; naturally, I'll blog about it in due course.
The main problem with Government IT, many will say, is that contracts (and so power, revenue and so on) is concentrated in a small number of very large vendors, mostly in single prime contracts. Even when they're not in single prime setups they are in dual prime (e.g. MoJ has Atos and Logica, Home Office has Atos and Fujitsu, HMRC has CapGemini and, wait, Fujitsu and so on). So the fix, we are told, is to no longer allow such single prime contracts and, as a consequence of deciding that, break the market open to new players. Job done.
A new model has been crowned that goes by the name of "towers". In another time, it might have been called best of breed. Essentially, several different suppliers are chosen, each of will be skilled in a specific tower - where those towers will be functions such as hosting, applications development, security, desktop support and so on (some tower models have seven such towers, some as many as thirteen). Such towers sometimes exist within the context of a single prime model but, this time, it is the contracting authority (i.e. the government department) who will own all of those contracts. They will, the thinking goes, have complete visibility of all of the prices and eliminate any "margin on margin" that results from the prime holding subcontracts. The result? A better deal will be had by government.
There is a very special kind of tower though. We might call it the sine qua non of the tower model. It's various called the service integration tower or the SIAM (Service Integration and Management). In effect, it's the old prime contractor (though not necessarily one of the companies that holds those contracts now) re-appearing as the company that manages all of the different towers, but doesn't actually hold the contracts.
If we know, then, that the prime contractor model was so broken that it needed to be replaced, are we sure, I wonder, that the new model is going to fix all of the problems inherent in the old world? Well, let's see:
- Lack of transparency ... fixed to some degree ... the contracting department will now see the cost of each of the components of the service. That doesn't mean that there is full transparency within each contract of course. Whilst everything is "open book" there are a million definitions of what that means.
- No margin on margin ... fixed to some degree ... the absence of a prime means that one layer of margin is gone, but there will be other layers within the towers (particularly where small companies are encouraged to play by coming in under the "safe" wing of a bigger company)
- Shorter contracts so more regular competition ... fixed to some degree ... Whilst G-Cloud encourages one year contracts (the framework forces such contracts though there is nothing to prevent renewal at the end of the period), the new models seem to encourage durations somewhere between 3 and 7 years. Better than 10 years but still gives plenty of room for prices to keep up (the regular iterations of G-Cloud services will provide very useful benchmarking though as is already being seen)
- Lack of innovation ... uncertain ... it's probably true that big IT companies struggle to bring new capabilities to bear but I suspect that it's equally true that government has struggled to adopt such interesting developments as became available. Splitting contracts into smaller chunks doesn't necessarily make them lighter weight and easier to change, but it might if government carries on with its plans to change the protective marking of data (and if the 50% of new spend via the public cloud promise is held on to, there is certainly scope for more innovation, but I don't see that as related, particularly to the towers model)
- Greater involvement of SME ... Uncertain ... Breaking what were very large contracts into smaller, shorter contracts should certainly allow new players into the game, but it's not clear if small players will make the cut. The recent PSN framework perhaps demonstrates that with only two small players involved - though that's still two more than before. Without a wholesale shift away from complexity towards commodity, small players will still struggle to navigate the arcane bureaucracy of most government contracts and so will likely need to shelter uner the wings of the bigger players for some time to come
- Better delivery ... Uncertain ... I guess we have to wait and see. There will, though, be several schools of thought. The large players will say that they can only deliver if they have control of everything; others will say that the more complex the interactions between the contracts, the harder it will be to deliver; still others will say that competitive tension between the suppliers and the knowledge that the contracts are much shorter (or that individual pieces of work can be competed) will improve performance all round. How the SIAM looks and works may turn out to be the key here - how they operate, influence and drive change could make all the difference to delivery (for better or worse)
- Lower risk or, at least, better and clearer risk transfer ... Also uncertain ... With many more moving parts and overall control resting with the customer, aided in some way yet to be determined by the SIAM, the risk picture certainly looks more complicated from the outset.
The net of that is that, in my view, it's unclear if this new model solves the problems of the old model. Much of whether it does will be in the detail of the contracts and the behaviour on the ground, by which time it's too late to do much about it until the end of the first contract term - and at least that is a shorter period than it has historically been.
What worries me most about the new model is not whether it fixes any problems of the old model but how it will actually be put together. There are three stages that need to be got through, each of which will be more challenging than the equivalents ever were in the old model.
1. Buying it all. With the prime model, there were many potential suppliers at the beginning, a few in the middle and 2-3 near the end. Negotiations completed with just one. With the new model there will be multiple, parallel, inter-dependent commercial negotiations underway. That will put a huge burden on the client side buying team. In the past those teams have been heavily supported by external parties; that may not be possible this time, although some will put the SIAM or an equivalent in place first to mitigate that problem. Of course, several parts of government will be doing this at the same time putting pressure on customers, suppliers and potential partners.
2. The transition. There have been relatively few changes of contract over the last ten years. HMRC moving from EDS to Cap is one, for instance. That was largely a one to one transition. With the new models there will, if the point of the model is realised, be multiple transitions to manage - staff will be parcelled up and moved to any one of perhaps a half dozen suppliers (some may go back to the customer), systems will move to any of several data centres, support for apps will move (supplier, location and perhaps even country) and so on. That's going to take a lot of management. Departments may say "that's what the SIAM is for". Suppliers may be giving work away for one contract at the same time as they are taking work on as a result of winning another contract. That could get interesting.
3. Running day to day. All of those moving parts, everyone looking at each other when a problem occurs, many pointing fingers away from themselves. How to diagnose a problem? Who moves first? Who pays service credits? Who proposes, funds and benefits from improvements? What happens in a crisis? All to be figured out. Again, some will give much of that role to the SIAM.
I used "SIAM" in each of those paragraphs deliberately. I get the feeling that it's the role that everyone thinks will fix the problems of the past. Yet whoever operates there will not have contractual leverage unless they are, actually, the client themselves (that is, the owner of the contracts). At the same time, the SIAM looks a lot like a prime, without the ability to take on / share / divest / pass back risk. It isn't, in my view, as simple as breaking up the contracts and creating a phantom integrator who somehow brings it together.
I wonder if the analsysis - and the sharing of understanding, lessons learned, best practice etc - is in place to support such a comprehensive and largely parallel implementation of the new model. It's going to take a lot of work from all parties to make it work and, even then, it may turn out to be no better than the old model in some ways. It may be worse in some, better in others. But we'll be in it, across the board, by then. So best to do all of the thinking now.
This isn’t going to be a long post, as I don’t really have any answers…just a series of questions and assumptions…
My question is how relevant is a Text Only version of a website?
There maybe an obvious answer to this - Is this simply an admission that your website by default isn’t actually usable and accessible?
I’ve been thinking and chatting to my team about content strategy, user experience, HTML 5 and responsive design and how this will change the way we think and design websites from the ground up…It is all very exciting but we also need to think the now, how do we build stuff today and what should we be including.
In Devon, our current corporate website has a text only version and if I’m honest I think it is a pretty poor presentation of the content and fails to really offer any advantage…and if we have simply designed a usable and accessible site all along we probably wouldn’t think about text only…
Our stats show that the text only version isn’t used much, if at all on most days…so this brings me back to the question…How relevant is Text Only?
I’ve been feeling pretty cynical lately about change in government. Here we are with the biggest financial train wreck in the post-war period, this is the moment to seize change and alter the way we do business. But this isn’t what’s happening. I get that. Change is hard. And change is particularly hard when it challenges your fundamental beliefs about the role of the citizen and the state.
So when I was invited by the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions to participate in a digital engagement summit, I was excited by the prospect of a visit to Stockholm but less optimistic about the potential to deliver transformative change.
In Sweden, things are still pretty plum. The state does a lot for its citizens. They seem pretty happy with life, smug even? And I have to admit, things look pretty nice. Everything’s well maintained. Allotments in the UK look like shanty-towns, frankly an eyesore. In Sweden the gardens look like little slices of heaven, veggies interplanted with fruiting trees and flowers. The sheds are habitable, at least in warmer weather, and you can see that people hang out there and enjoy nature.
But the Swedes are concerned about direct participation with local democracy. And congratulations to them for recognising the fundamental intrinsic value of local democracy and being concerned about things like this before the problems get too great (aging population, declining tax base, immigration, education – plenty of problems round the bend). And congrats to them as well for bringing people with expertise and experience in online engagement from around the world together for a summit to talk about these issues.
Challenges
On the bad side the Swedes were in search of a solution without being ‘problem-focused’. Too often I saw this in my own work with local government. We need an app, we need a tool, we need more engagement…whatever it is we need a thing. Solutions aren’t worth much without a problem.
They were also too focused on the e-democracy, forgetting the democracy. No blame – this is something I’ve been guilty of myself. Start with what you’re already doing to engage with people and augment with digital – or in other cases and with some communities – start with digital and augment with face to face.
And finally, they had some cultural blindness issues. We ALL have this. Kudos to them for recognising this and bringing in people from outside. This takes incredible courage. Their civil society has been crowded out by an all encompassing state. A networked society relies on networks. Networks which are resilient enough to take on some of the tough tasks like elder care in your own neighbourhood and making hard decisions about where resources should go.
Commonalities
It was great working with people from across Europe and wider and it was great to finally meet people like Tiago Peixoto who was doing amazing things with professional networks online in Facebook (almost?) before anyone else as well as his expertise on participatory budgeting.
Despite everyone being invited for their expertise on e-engagement, there was so little focus on specific tools of social media. There was far more emphasis on organisational culture and development, the role of local politicians and the role and responsibility of active citizens.
But it was also fantastic to see that others were feeling cynical, too. That it isn’t just me. That things aren’t moving as fast as they could or indeed should. The E-participation summit provided a energising spark for most of us and I hope it helps light a fire in Swedish local government, too.
The social media guidance is made up of six principles:
Government should
Communicate with citizens in the places they already are
Use social media to consult and engage
Use social media to be more transparent and accountable
Be part of the conversation with all the benefits that brings
Understand that government cannot do everything alone, or in isolation
Expect civil servants to adhere to the Civil Service Code (online as well as offline)
Writing in the foreword to the guidance the Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude notes “When civil servants, policy makers and service delivery units alike, open themselves to dialogue with the public they can glean a much better understanding of the real needs and concerns of citizens. They can keep up to date with the latest thinking as well as being a listening post and avenue for real time reassurance and information”
In his foreword, Sir Bob Kerslake (@sirbobkerslake), Head of the Civil Service, points to the role that social media will have in changing ways of working “The workplace of the future will have to be less rigid, less hierarchical and a lot more flexible. Participating in social media is a good way to learn how a modern workforce engages and communicates”
The work done on the social media use guidance, which was a commitment in the Government ICT strategy published in March 2011, has not been done in a vacuum. It iterates from previous guidance from the COI in 2009, from discussions and debates with public sector colleagues at events like UKGovCamp, policy contributions from those interested in the digital space (though not necessarily working in government) such as @Puffles2010 presentation on The Impact of Social Media on Whitehall (.ppt file 8MB), Teacamp debates, Steph Gray’s (@lesteph) Digital Engagement Guide, the many interested Twitter users as well as from our own staff here in GDS @GovUK.
Part 2 of the guidance on helping Departments overcome technical barriers was developed by the Home Office and provides a very valuable snapshot of some of the significant challenges that will need to be overcome in the coming months.
For those who are regular users of social media there will be little new, but for some of our civil service colleagues who may have experienced both cultural and technical barriers in the use of social media at work, we hope it will be used as a means of empowering them to explore what social media offers, whether that is consulting and engaging, improving their policy practice or simply listening to better act on the concerns of citizens. The world of digital engagement is evolving all the time and we anticipate that this guidance will not be something that remains static but will continue to iterate over time.
We welcome continued contributions and feedback on how government can engage with social media with a constant focus on trust, users and delivery. The guidance on social media use is now on the Cabinet Office site.
Emer Coleman is Deputy Director for Digital Engagement at the Government Digital Service
There’s no doubt about it, mySociety sites store a lot of data. And once you have that much data, you can start finding the answers to interesting questions. Questions like:
Which public bodies receive the most FOI requests?
Which county gets the most pothole reports?
Which train routes are people complaining most about?
Which MP has spoken for the longest cumulative time in the history of Parliament?
There are less obvious questions, too – how about:
Which regions of the country are most likely to include bad language when submitting a form online?
How many times does the Speaker have to interject, “Order, order!” in an average week?
Which words are most spoken in Parliament, and which have only become popular in the last five years?
What topics do people submit the most Freedom of Information requests about?
Just how often does a UK citizen get so fed up about dog poop that they take action?
We reckon there are almost limitless stories in our data, waiting to be teased out. Some of them will be surprising, fascinating, or just plain funny. Some may even be potential front page news. So, we’ve invited journalists who have a particular interest in data, or indeed in any of the areas we work in, to come and have at it at our first ever mySociety Data Hackday.
Not a journalist?
Journalists aren’t the only ones with bright ideas, so if you’re reading this and there’s a burning question that springs to mind, leave a comment below. Given all these reams of data, what would you be looking for? We’ll add the best ideas to our list, and we’ll be reporting back on everything we find out.
Actually, I am a journalist!
There are still a few places, so if you’d like to attend, please drop us a line. Note: we will expect you to get stuck in! We will run the data, but you may be sifting through the results, looking for significant stories, and sharing your findings. Bring a laptop, and plenty of ideas.
If you can’t attend, but really wish you could, let us know what data you’d like us to run, and we’ll add it to the list.
If only creative juices were available by the bottle
Some articles we write come easily and flow from mind to fingertips. Other times however, things are a tad more difficult. It was as I sat down to write today’s post that I found I was in need of a little inspiration. I found myself browsing the web, rereading things others have written and researching a few leads I had in the back of my mind.
It was at this point that I was struck by the resemblance of this process to that which I face regularly whilst sitting in the office. Being known as someone who is ‘creative’ and ‘comes up with ideas’ is both a help and a hindrance, and there have been many times when I’ve found myself in meetings merely to act as a catalyst for thought and discussion or been looked at with expectant expressions after a problem has been presented and a solution requested.
It can feel akin to being told to dance on demand, or demanding that a comedian makes someone else laugh. The expectation that because they are able to act in a certain way at certain times means they can switch it on or turn it off on demand is overwhelming, and can limit the creativity on offer. It also puts all onus for creativity or inspiration on a small number of people, taking the burden and expectation off of others to do so.
Often we need a little help to be creative and innovative, and it’s easy to turn to those people you know who fire out ideas (good or bad) like OK magazine throwing out scandals. But where else can we go for inspiration? What else is out there to inspire or guide us and to then support us to do things differently or approach a problem from a new angle?
If asked, many would say that the K-hub is a good place to start. The successor to the now defunct Communities of Practice, the K-Hub aims to bring together experts from all over the country to swap war stories and to showcase their good work, as well as to share relevant documents with others. For many this works very well, although personally I prefer the more relaxed and conversational tone found in the public sector Yammer group (or it’s social media or internal comms counterparts).
The trouble with these however are that they are only known by those who know about them. If you type in ‘inspiration for my work in the council‘ into Google you certainly don’t get either of these up, and even when you refine your searches it’s difficult to find anything solid. Organisations such as NESTA try to showcase good work, as do the major periodicals, but again these are showcasing the work others have done rather than allowing you to easily chat with others about you ideas. Of course, for some any form of centrally organised advice is simply anathema to them.
Combined with this reticence to ask for central support there’s the issue of ‘well, we’re different here’. Everyone is convinced that they and their local authority are unique; and of course they are both right and wrong. We are all unique, which at the end of the day makes us all the same.
In any of these unique organisations are these people who are seen as inspirational or inventive, although often they are no different in principle to everyone around them. The difference between them and those who feel less able to tickle their creative bone is that usually they are a little more exposed to the ideas and conversations of others. Whether this is from lots of meetings and discussions with others, desk based research via the wonder that is Google or by using social media in its many forms, the aim of the game is to be abreast of developments even if at first it doesn’t appear that they are useful. After all, few of us could come up with brand new developments if we were locked in a room and totally cut off from the world – most of us need to bounce off others in order to learn, test and grow.
In my opinion this is why conversational tools work better for creativity and innovation; it’s the difference between being inspired to do something and being supported to make it happen. For example, if I was a painter I could be inspired by a trip to a gallery, but it’s only through talking with other artists and perhaps taking some lessons that I could start developing as a painter. Of course I could just dive in and try, learning as I go, as long as I can afford to make all of those errors to then learn from.
Admittedly, creativity and innovation is something some people can do more easily than others – some can find threads, keep them in mind and blend them in their minds until something bigger and better presents itself. The more threads which are available and the better ability to combine them in new and interesting ways, the better the tapestry produced.
But even those of us who like to keep our heads down and deliver what’s expected should still be encouraged to keep our eyes and minds open. No matter how simple or repetitive a process there are always ways of improving it. All that’s needed is for those involved to be receptive to ideas, even those outside of their immediate spheres of work, and to spot opportunities amongst the day to day business and the courage to act on that inspiration.
And once you’ve been inspired, I’d encourage you to share your ideas with others in whatever way you can; after all, you never know how others will then weave them into their own tapestry.
Welovelocalgovernment is a blog written by UK local government officers. If you have a piece you’d like to submit or any comments you’d like to make please drop us a line at: welovelocalgovernment@gmail.com
Think of Free Software as being a social movement fueled by ethics, while open source is a development methodology
Why is it important to know the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software in government?
Its easy to imagine, having worked in government myself, how anything that is termed ‘Free’ might make some people uneasy. It raises concerns, ethical issues and for some reason triggers discomfort.
I myself, experienced a backlash for offering a free social media course for public servants. Having been invited to consult and speak at various social media in government events and work on projects for high profile government organizations, I didn’t think that my offer would trigger any uneasiness. However this was the first time that I had used the term ‘Free’ for a project and little did I know, that would be the downfall of it.
Being a researcher, my gain for offering free advise is so I get to share my previous research findings and improve on it in a constructive manner and have an opportunity to understand the current and future challenges that government faces when dealing with social media. And in return, I would have publicly outlined a social media strategy based on a practical view of the situation in my blog.
However that never happened, because people are afraid that when something is free, its too risky, it cannot be trusted and of less quality.
Is Free = Risky?
Wrong, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Sometimes people give something out for free because they are passionate about it or would like to volunteer and contribute to a cause for the betterment of the society. Same goes with the term free software. The open source software term sometimes gets used interchangeably with free software and at the back of some peoples mind, free often means, less quality and not to be trusted.
So its important for people to understand the difference here.
Open source software is software whose source code is freely available (i.e., without any requirement for payment or any other obstacles) for anyone to inspect and study.
Most open source software is also free software. Free software is software for which everyone has the right not only to inspect and study the source code but also to use it for any desired purpose without monetary or other restrictions.
Free software is always also open source, open source software does not necessarily have to be free software. That is, software can be open source without granting its users the additional freedoms that free software guarantees. Source
What is a Source Code?
I think one of the other thing that we must understand before we go further is, what is a source code? The source code is the glue that is holds a software together. It is the life of the software, it is required for the software to live and breathe. Without it, the software will be non-existent.
Source code is the version of software (usually an application program or an operating system) as it is originally written (i.e., typed into a computer) by a human in plain text (i.e., human readable alphanumeric characters). Source code can be written in any of the several thousand programming languages in existence, but it is usually written in one of the dozen or so of the most popular (particularly C, C++ and Java). Without source code it is very difficult to study, modify and improve software. Source
What I would like to highlight here is that last statement…
Without source code it is very difficult to study, modify and improve software.
And with proprietary software, that is what you DON’T GET.
The future cannot exist without the past. Re-thinking digital public services.
I think the fundamental key to how government and citizens can benefit from open source softwares is not a hard one to crack.
In history, we often educate and better ourselves based on lessons we’ve learnt from the past. We understand the past, to understand the present. We understand the present, to understand our future. For OSS’s, agility is key and not having the ability to see or understand the past source codes and learn from them, can be detrimental to the delivery of digital public services.
Imagine, if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. The military often finds itself in this position with taxpayer funded, contractor developed software: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system and control of the software source code. This is optimal only for the monopoly contractor, but creates inefficiencies and ineffectiveness for the government, reduction of opportunities for the industrial base, severely limits competition for new software upgrades, depletes resources that can be used to better effect and wastes taxpayer-provided funds. Source
Computer security expert Bruce Schneier points out, true security is never achieved by attempting to conceal any security defects that a program may have, but rather by allowing anyone interested to seek out these flaws and eliminate them.
Open source software makes this possible. Many government agencies will not use a piece of software in a security-critical application unless the agency itself can examine the source code for flaws; in the case of proprietary software, this often means difficult and costly negotiations allowing the agency access to the source code. If open source software is available to fill such a need, source code is available at no extra cost to the government, and in many cases the software is already more secure.
The information and cultural revolution
We are on the verge of a information and cultural revolution. We are on the precipice of putting all the pieces together to sew our shared transparent social fabric. The UK Government has been keen to be as transparent as possible in recent years because the belief that transparency not only makes it easier for citizens to communicate with government and receive public services, but also create efficiencies and innovation where once thought not possible. This has been proven true with the open data movement.
Some people may think that technology advances will and can happen with or without them. But the truth is, for digital public services, the government purchasing authorities can make technology advances in public service by making the right the decisions to lower the cost, increase the reliability, security, and inject the ability to modify software to suit specific needs. The biggest challenge here is getting technology to be more USEFUL to us and the only way that will happen is if we make them better and our source codes can start learning from past errors.
Procurement Challenges in Government
Often enough, the battle of getting OSS into government falls at the first hurdle. As Dr. David Wheeler of the Institute for Defense Analysis said at ‘The Government Open Source Conference’,
Too often, government procurements are worried only about the current budget cycle. In software procurements, this can be deadly. Future costs are almost always higher than the first-year costs. The mismatch between software lifecycles and hardware lifecycles can play havoc with a TCO analysis. Perhaps most important, if you aren’t accounting for switching costs, you’re missing a huge cost driver: how expensive will it be to exit the solution in question? Source
Luckily enough, Wheeler also mentioned of a way of overcoming the procurement dilemma that suggest that RFPs are “wired” for a proprietary solution.Wheeler reminded the audience that in many cases, the RFPs aren’t wired deliberately. It’s far more likely that the procurement officials are simply unaware of the open source alternatives and inadvertently create requirements that preclude their use. He recommended responding to the Requests for Information (RFIs) that preceed most RFPs. This way, the officials can be exposed to the open source alternatives. Source
The relationship between Open Standards, Open Data and Open Source Software and how we can recycle digital waste and save taxpayers money
Talking about the exiting a solution, have a listen of this video why Open Standards is important and why OSS can save taxpayers money.
Benefits of an Open Technology Development (OTD)
OTD is an approach to software/system development in which developers in different military, federal, commercial and possibly public organizations can collaboratively develop and maintain software or a system in a decentralized fashion. OTD depends on open standards and interfaces, open source software and designs, collaborative and distributed online tools, and technological agility.
I would like to point you to this document and highlight the Open Technology Development (OTD) key benefits written by the US Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks & Information Integration) (NII) / DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L).
Key benefits of OTD are:
Increased Agility/Flexibility: Because the government has unrestricted access and rights to the source code developed with taxpayer funds, that source code can be made discoverable and accessible to program managers, civil servants and contractors alike, increasing the potential of matching a need or requirement to an existing source code base that provides a large proportion of the solution that can be improved or enhanced to meet a new mission. Likewise, pre-existing government-funded components from different programs can be assembled without unnecessary costs and delays untangling intellectual property rights to determine what is and is not allowed. Instead of having to start from scratch to develop or enhance a capability, the government can reuse what it has already paid for and that works and draw from a broad base of developers and contractors who are familiar with the source code and component and can rapidly assemble, merge and modify existing systems and components with other existing source code.
Faster delivery: Because developers only need to focus on changes to, and integration of, existing software capabilities instead of having to redevelop entire systems, they can significantly reduce the time to delivery for new capabilities. Even when a module or component is developed from scratch to replace an outdated one, such re-development benefits from open interfaces and standards that have a proven track record in the systems with which it interacts. Enabling cross-pollination of source code that is owned and paid for by taxpayer funds, development and deployment time can be significantly reduced.
Increased Innovation: With access to source code for existing capabilities, developers and contractors can focus on innovation and the new requirements that are not yet met by the existing source code capabilities. This agility is particularly important because of a projected shortfall in the number of U.S. citizens with engineering and computer science degrees who will be clearable to work on military projects in the coming decades [National Academies 2008]. As a greater proportion of software engineering degrees are held by foreign nationals, and U.S. programmers are lured by innovative and lucrative work in the private sector, the military will face a long-term shortage of software engineers to work on military-specific systems. The Defense Department must therefore focus on the long-term challenge of generating higher levels of innovation out of a more limited pool of human talent and skill. It will be important to leverage that human capital by having engineers focus on the 10% of source code that actively improves a system without also being required to re-create the 90% of capability that already exists.
Reduced Risk: creating new capabilities from scratch is riskier than re-using existing capabilities that are already proven and well understood. By re-using existing capabilities in the form of government-owned source code, interfaces and systems, developers can spend more time and resources on the riskiest parts of the implementation.
Information Assurance & Security: One of the biggest values of open source development is enabling wider community access to software source. In this manner bugs become shallow and thus more easily found. Wider access to software source code also is key for forming and maintaining a software security posture from being able to review software source code to seeing what is actually present within that software.
Lower cost: The first cost to fall by the wayside with OTD is the monopoly rent the government pays to contractors who have built a wall of exclusivity around capabilities they’ve been paid by the government to develop. They may have internally developed source code (IRAD – internal research and development) that’s valuable, but in an OTD system that code has been modularized so the government can make a rational decision about whether they want to re-license it for a new project or pay to develop a replacement. The entire value of the government’s investment hasn’t been voided by the mingling of IRAD into a government-funded system as a means of ensuring lock-in to a particular vendor. With unlimited rights and access to government-funded source code, the government can draw on a broader pool of competitive proposals for software updates and new capabilities that leverage current systems. The elimination of monopoly rent, combined with greater competition, will drive down costs and improve the quality of resulting deliverables, because any contractor who works on a system knows that they can be replaced by a competitor who has full access to the source code and documentation.
As Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said “The gusher [of money] has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time.” DoD needs a more efficient software development ecosystem – more innovation at lower cost. OTD squeezes financial waste out of the equation by reducing lock-in and increasing competition.
Discover more at the Open Gov Summit 2012
The Open Gov Summit 2012
Given all the information we have today and the one I have presented here, it is imperative that we take the next step and start discussing how we can really invigorate and create sustainable softwares and transparency in government. You can do this today by registering for the Open Gov Summit that will be happening on the 30th May 2012.
Government and institutional speakers include among others: Mark O’Neill, Proposition Director for Innovation and Delivery at the Government Digital Service, Tariq Rashid, Lead Architect at the UK Home Office, Graham Mallin, Head of Enterprise Architecture at the Met Office, Graham Taylor CEO and Co-Founder of OpenForum Europe and Gerry Gavigan, Chair of the Open Source Consortium.
We have recently been doing some work in Wolverhampton with the Local Neighbourhood Partnership (LNP), talking to their neighbourhood wardens about how they can use Twitter to communicate on their patch, the sorts of conversations they could be having and showing them practically how to use it.
As I live in Wolverhampton, sit on the board for my local LNP and use twitter in my neighbourhood with @WV11, one of the examples I used when training them was live tweeting from our meetings.
Bi-monthly in each LNP area there is a PACT meeting, Partners and Community Together where ASB officers from the council and housing associations, and other departments come to talk and answer enquiries, youth services deliver reports on the youth provision and the police attend and local policing priorities are set based on residents local needs. I, as @WV11, have been live tweeting/social reporting from my local meetings for months and last night as a result of our training an LNP in another area tried social reporting for the first time from their PACT meeting.
What was great following the #OXPACT tag (which you can see on Storify) wasn’t just that they were trying out a new way of a communication – that we had taught them – but also local councillors were picking up the information and spreading it to their networks too. On their very first attempt at sharing information in this way they were responded to positively and made their part of Wolverhampton a better networked, more informed place.
I hope many more of the LNP wardens in Wolverhampton will be picking up on this and trying it out in their areas and that sharing information in this way spreads further in other cities too!
[&lt;a href="http://storify.com/Essitam/following-wv11-s-footsteps-oxley-lnp-live-tweeted" target="_blank"&gt;View the story "Following WV11's footsteps Oxley LNP live tweeted from their PACT meeting" on Storify&lt;/a&gt;]
For those of you who have seen the UKGovCamp Grants website, you may have noticed that there was an event called Open Space South West that I put a bid in for and luckily I was one of the many events to get some financial support – So right up front I’d like to thank Steph and Dave and those organisations who helped create the pot of money in the first place.
It was originally down as South West Local Gov Camp – but I wanted to do something a little different to try to reach a slightly different and more diverse audience.
So it will be different to the usual govcamp events, therefore it is called Open Space South West instead – simple as that
I’ve put in some basic details below, whilst I get a website sorted in the next couple of weeks which will have links to the tickets and speaker details (yes some speakers).
Open Space South West – the hashtag = #OpenSSW
Date – Friday 14th September
How is it different to a GovCamp event? Some of the key differences are:
It is a Friday (yes a work day) – the 14th September to be precise – 9.30am – 5pm
It will be at Coaver Conference Centre, County Hall, Exeter.
It will have some speakers who will be providing a 15 minute inspiration/challenge
It will have a delegate contract
Some more details on the delegate contract As a delegate my commitment is to turn up, listen, challenge, participate and take responsibility for my own personal learning and development outcomes and to share my learning openly via the event or other linked website(s).
Partners / Supporters / Sponsors
If you would like to provide support then get in touch via the comments – Specifically I’d welcome contributions towards getting additional wifi sorted (£800) in return you get your logo on the wifi login screen and I’d also welcome some additional contributions towards lunch and refreshments.
There isn’t as of yet any informal “night before” or” after event” activities planned, but again if anyone wishes to make some contributions towards those that would be very welcome – again get in touch via comments or direct message me on twitter.
I’m not planning at this stage to have free gifts, t-shirts or goodie bags but I’m open to offers if someone wishes to help with this?
The following organisations are already providing support in various ways – so a BIG thank you to them.
After attending the Westminster Skeptics ‘Geek Manifesto‘ event the other night, I’m now leafing through my shiny signed copy of Mark Henderson’s new book.
This isn’t a review (I’ve not finished reading it yet!) but the book carries a powerful case for rationalism in politics. The author tends towards a sort of post politics-ism that I’d not go along with, but this is a quibble for another time.
The discussion among the Skeptics was interesting though, and I wanted to capture one issue:
How can Geeks engage in politics? Should they stand for election? Few do. Should they continue sticking up for their own – defending Simon Singh with The Quacklash or fighting cuts to research funding- that they sometimes do so well?
Henderson identifies a new, growing player in political life: The scientific commentator – writers like Ben Goldacre, Tim Harford. He also sees a possibility of science-minded community banding together to become a Mumsnet type of political force – one to be courted by aspiring Prime Minsters.
Personally, I’m not convinced about that last suggestion. It conflates ‘has a science background’ with ‘active rationalist’ a little too much for my liking.
Flicking through it, I can’t see the kind of intervention from Geeks that I think would be the most useful – the clear-thinking candid friends of democracy. So here’s my suggestion.
Henderson makes the point that “what politicians think is less important than how they think.”
I’d suggest that it isn’t necessarily the role of politicians to think, or at least not to concentrate efforts on thinking that could be better used elsewhere. Politicians role is a pragmatic one. Sure, they have to deliberate and to represent and do it in a principled way. But they’ve also got to behave in a strategic way. The toughest task that Burke or Rousseau set politicians was the need to represent the nation as a whole, or The General Will while being able to bring morality and principles to bear. Like it or not, they have to apply their judgement almost entirely to the competing claims made by interest groups rather than sifting through representations from dispassionate rational commentators.
One of the biggest problems that politicians face (and the one they often solve in the way the mediate between demands) is an over exposure to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Politicians meet a lot of people who are certain about a lot of things, and certainty and knowledge are often found in inverse proportions. As Bertrand Russell put it in his article ‘Triumph of Stupidity‘;
“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Or as Yeates said in his Second Coming;
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”
Or as Darwin put it;
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
(That’s enough quotes – Ed)
It’s very rare for Politicians to have an interlocutor that can defensibly describe itself as representing the public interest. The best arguments for Parliaments is that they create a kind of distributed moral judgement that helps to mediate between a range of outrageous claims.
There is surely a sub-set of the scientific method that seeks to take competing evidence and provide a summary and commentary upon it – isolating dishonesty, identifying biases or signposting the logical fallacies.
Take the tricky subject that Henderson dwells on at length: The sacking of David Nutt. Sure, politicians need a briefing on the medical issues concerned. They need one on law and order as well. They also need to evaluate the various claims that rest very heavily upon them, for example;
“If you legalise Ganja, the Daily Mail will see to it that you never get elected again.”
This is an important scientific claim that is as pertinent to this issue as any other. It needs to be tested. If it’s true, then legalisation is unthinkable, whatever other issues are on the table. Politicans commit their lives to a wide range of positions. If adopting one policy effectively stops their political party from being re-elected, they’d be fools to run with it.
We’ve spent the last few months listening to Lord Leveson unearth the shocking truth that newspapers exert an unhealty and anti-democratic influence upon public life. That newspaper owners bully politicians into serving the interests of newspaper owners. Who knew?
Politicians need Geeks to anticipate the big issues that are going to come up in future. It has to be one that the participating geeks don’t feel very strongly about. They need to get together to compile an agreed text that politicians and commentators alike can use as a guide to the issue. They need to request from politicians a copy of all representations that are received on that matter and they need to map them – do a bit of wikinomics, perhaps, maybe using debategraph or data-visualisations to add meaning and context to statistics that are used.
This is something that would need political scientists involved as well, because no legislation exists in a policy vacuum.
It should also attempt to understand the political and democratic circumstances in which the issue is being decided. Too often, we castigate politicians for refusing to accept a hospital pass. For a legislative change to happen, any rational bystander has to be able to look at such a piece of compiled evidence and say ‘if I were that politician, I’d vote for that change.’
I think that there’s an exciting project in there somewhere.
But for now, let’s think about Geeks running the world again. Here’s Jarvis:
What’s the point of being rich if you can’t think what to do with it? ‘Cause you’re so very thick. Oh we weren’t supposed to be, we learnt too much at school now we can’t help but see. That the future that you’ve got mapped out is nothing much to shout about. We’re making a move, we’re making it now, We’re coming out of the side-lines. Just put your hands up – it’s a raid. We want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won’t allow us. We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of – that’s our minds.
GDS was pleased to welcome a group visit from the Norwegian Government last week. The following is a guest post from Heather Broomfield, Open Data manager at Difi - the Norwegian agency for Public Management and eGovernment.
Last week a delegation from Norway visited GDS to see how they are realising their goal of ‘delivering their digital products that meet peoples needs’. Prior to travelling we were all familiar with Martha Lane Fox’s DirectGov 2010 report and particularly liked the ‘Revolution not Evolution’ motto. We wondered to what extent this was being realised. In GDS change is in the air from the second you walk in the door, it didn’t take us long to realise that something really different was happening here. A few hours in the building made it clear that this revolution is actually taking place. ‘Revolution not evolution’ is not just a fancy line in a public document.
Digitising transactional services has been a major focus in Norway for a long time and we have been very successful here. However, we are currently bringing our service delivery a step further in order to vastly improve digital communication with our citizens – putting the user more in focus. Our mandate for this is provided by the Norwegian Government’s recently launched ‘Digitalisation Program’. ‘ Digital first choice’ is now at the forefront of Norwegian Public policy. In order to continue our journey in realising this, GDS was an obvious place to learn and share experience with.
We have so many ‘Takeaways’ from our visit, four of the key ones are included here.
Design Principles
The GDS Design Principles have attracted a lot of attention in Norway, particularly in Difi. We are hoping to adopt them within our organisation and were very excited to hear more about these and see how they were implemented within the organisation. From our discussions on the day it is clear that these are adopted and abided by within everything GDS does – again not just fancy terminology.
Open Innovation
Public sector organisations are often tempted to rely on internal resources – but why when there is such a wealth of knowledge out there which we can avail ourselves of? GDS recognises this and is a great example of open innovation in the public sector. Openness pervades the entire organisation. The value of social tools is maximised to engage with external communities – be these external developers who have a bug fix or a citizen with some input about gov.uk. A win-win situation – Government innovation is greatly enhanced and the citizen is engaged.
Cooperation within the public sector
Building the network of trust extends not only to external users, but also internally within the entire public sector. GDS has a single point of contact within each public sector organisation. Members of other public bodies are actively encouraged to participate in the process. Rather than steam rolling through changes in the system, GDS endeavours to cooperate and bring about the cultural change throughout the public sector and not just within GDS itself.
We may fail but we fail small
To create change we are not always going to avoid risk, as a natural extension to this we must operate in an environment which can tolerate a certain amount of failure. By adopting the iterative, open approach these failures are minimised – we may fail but if we do we fail small! By accepting that no solution will be flawless the first time round, room is made for errors and time allowed to make corrections.
Whether it’s ‘Digital by Default’ in the UK or ‘Digital First Choice’ in Norway, our goals are the same. We may have different challenges and opportunities – such as culture, demography or budgets. However, learning from each other, collaborating and most of all knowing that we’re not alone in driving this change in our respective countries is vital. Thank you GDS for sharing with us and inspiring us to keep pushing forward with creating this change and ensuring that ‘Digital First Choice’ is not just fancy terminology here in Norway. You guys are living the dream!
There are some stories that are too good to pass up without further comment; even if they have little relationship to local government.
This from Yahoo news is one such gem. Under the headline ‘25,000 men need an obstetrician or gynaecologist every year’ the story, originating from the Telegraph, reports that:
Official figures from the NHS appear to have proved that old adage true, as they show that Britain has tens of thousands of ‘male mothers’. They discovered that 17,000 men were recorded as having been admitted to hospital for obstetric services -a specialism for pregnant women and their babies – and 8,000 to see a gynaecologist; while another 20,000 apparently needed to see a midwife.
They also identified a steady increase in the numbers of children and teenagers attending geriatric services, to over 3,000 between 2009 and 2010, and more than 1,600 adults over 30 using child psychiatry services.
The problem for the NHS, and for other public bodies who use statistics like this to run their services, is that bad data like this can then lead to bad decisions. Increasingly public services rely on large quantities of statistics.
This is entirely rational. After all, public services don’t have profit to base their decisions on and the other ultimate means of determining success are elections and they are fairly blunt instruments.
If statistics are so important to public services and yet these statistics are prone to be impacted by human error, as the above statistics were, what can be done about it? Here are a few suggestions:
1) Don’t rely on macro stats to run your service: Large sample sizes are really helpful when trying to create narratives and understand the context of your service. However, if you are trying to make day to day decisions then these massive statistics are not going to be that helpful. Much more helpful is a series of manageable and current statistics
2) Publish your working: Statistics can go wrong and human error is always a risk. But if the data that underpins the statistic is open to everyone it becomes much easier to notice if something is wrong. It also makes it easier to trace back and identify anomalies
3) If your measures are incredibly complicated then you’re probably doing something wrong. A simple measure that a member of staff can easily understand is less likely to go wrong than something that requires multiple datasets to be combined together or requires large amounts of calculation.
4) Don’t use contrived statistics for benchmarking. Trying to create statistics to meet someone else’s requirements is a sure fire to make your numbers unusable for your own service and also incredibly complex.
5) Treat your statistics as the beginning of the conversation not the conclusion to it. Only an idiot would have introduced male only gynaecology services but in some other areas the statistics can be equally misused without the right answer being so obvious. However, if we use the statistics to start the conversation then at least we are not bound by the errors within them.
Oh yeah, and don’t forget that numbers are only as helpful as the humans handling them.
Welovelocalgovernment is a blog written by UK local government officers. If you have a piece you’d like to submit or any comments you’d like to make please drop us a line at: welovelocalgovernment@gmail.com
On Friday the Governors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will decide who will be the Bank’s next President. I’ve interviewed four of the candidates and the interviews are now online for you to listen to.
“the heads and senior leadership of all international institutions [to] be appointed through an open, transparent and merit-based process.”
Despite this commitment, over last few months European Ministers have been horse-trading behind closed doors to try to get one of their nationals into a number of jobs which are up for grabs: as well as the Presidency of the EBRD, Ministers have to find a new Chair of the Eurogroup, someone to head the Eurozone’s permanent bail-out fund, and a new member of the board of the European Central Bank. But European Ministers have not been able to reach agreement, so for the first time ever the EBRD Governors have not been presented with a fait accompli. Five candidates will be in London this Thursday to be interviewed for the role, and the Governors are expected to make a decision by the end of the week.
At the Center for Global Development we believe this appointment should not be based on nationality, in some gigantic trade-off between unrelated institutions, but on the basis of merit and substance. We hope to make our own modest contribution to this by offering a public forum for the candidates to discuss their vision for the future of the EBRD.
Over the last couple of days I interviewed the four candidates who accepted our offer. We’ve put the interviews together in a Development Drums podcast. You can listen to this online, or download the podcast to your MP3 player, either from the Development Drums website or free in iTunes. We will also be publishing a transcript of the interviews.
The four candidates who agreed to be interviewed are: Thomas Mirow (at 03:58), the incumbent who has completed one four year term as President and is seeking re-election for the second term; Jan Krzysztof Bielecki (at 17:40), former prime minister of Poland; Suma Chakrabarti (35:45), a senior British civil servant; and Bozidar Djelic (at 47:43), the former deputy Prime Minister of Serbia. The fifth candidate, Philippe de Fontaine Vive Curtaz, is vice president of the European Investment Bank and did not choose to participate in this process.
In the interviews, the candidates talk about the implications for the EBRD of the planned expansion to the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean. They respond to criticisms of the EBRD for not doing enough on gender. And they talk about how their own professional background equips them to be an effective leader of the institution.
The interviews reveal some striking differences of view between the candidates. For example, the candidates offer quite different opinions about the extent of change that will be needed in the organisation to fulfil its new mandate in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. Candidates also had quite different views about how they would respond to the criticism of the EBRD’s approach to women.
Given the differences in substance between the candidates revealed by these interviews, nobody should be in any doubt that the choice of the next president of the EBRD will have important real world consequences.
There is alot to love in the latest bout of extreme transparency blogging from the GOVUK team. Sharing the results of the feedback and user testing for the Inside Government product gives a real insight into the challenges they are facing and how they intend to front up to them. It also lets those of us with no chance of running such extensive testing (let alone getting the level of feedback they received) some useful pointers and things to think about.
[aside: in the post Ross discusses the fact it is *two* products - a CMS and a front-end website. This is obviously correct but in my own projects we are constantly conflating the two and I need to work harder to make sure everyone understands the dividing lines.]
The task completion comparisons they have done against existing CMS are particularly interesting and I like the way they have stripped things down to a very straightforward task driven interface. I especially like the idea of this if/when there is a more distributed publishing model – something I think alot of organisations are revisiting at the moment.
I still don’t believe that using Markdown is an appropriate solution for when a product like this spreads beyond early adopters (and judging by the comments on the post I am not alone) and I wonder if a whole new CMS needed to be built or whether this kind of editing UI could have been built into a more common open source CMS so it could be more widely shared? That said I haven’t used it and given the people involved I have confidence that decisions were made for the right reasons so I’m not really concerned.
The fact that users felt that the Departments themselves needed to be more visible and were key navigation aids was interesting to me given some of the early thinking going on at the moment around the relationships between my organisations website and its sibling sites. It backs up our own findings nicely I think.
Also the fact that the design itself was well received is nice to hear as we are planning to be heavily ‘inspired’ by that design when we ‘refresh’ in early 2013
All in all lots to think about again – and particularly timely as my own projects start to ramp up over the summer so thanks again guys!
A person who should be able to say something about what happened in Libya is Dr Moez Zeiton, who indicates in a piece in the MIT Technology Review entitled “Connected Conflict – The Internet amplified but did not create the bravery that freed Libya” that whilst that Facebook may have helped promote the revolution to Western readers, it was less important to those in Libya itself.
This is yet another person who is bringing a bit of rationality to the debate – can we end it now?
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