One of the most highly publicized Open Government initiatives of the last few years got a thundering wakeup call last week, when Ellen Miller – Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation – addressed succinctly, and with hard facts, the Open Data ‘Elephant in the room’. That is, the problem of missing or wrong data, contained within Government issued data-sets.

In her Gov 2.0 Summit presentation, Miller presented an Open Government Scorecard, with some frank views on the status of the movement, and the administration’s efforts to-date.

Her central thesis is that “the drive for transparency appears stalled”. This is because of a few reasons, but most relate to the Consistency, Completeness and Timeliness of USASpending.gov, and other Obama Administration Open Government initiatives:

• On the Open Government Directive – Miller believes its objectives are teetering on the edge: ‘The plans that resulted were little more than aspirational. In the first of those plans, 12 out of 30 agencies didn’t identify any data for future publication and altogether only 75 new data sets were promised… That was hugely disappointing. Enforcement of these plans has always been ‘soft.’’
• On Data.gov - ‘It started with enormous promise…But it’s still a pretty mediocre data repository and the types of data available remains an enormous concern.
• On Recovery.gov – ‘It’s hard consider it more than a qualified success.’

Her primary focus, however, was on the federal spending website USASpending.gov – initiated by legislation from Barack Obama and Tom Coburn. Launched nearly three years ago, it was intend to provide the public with information about how the federal government spends tax dollars. Miller explains how it’s a visually impressive website, but believe the effort expanded on three extensive redesigns should have been used elsewhere. While applauding the usability of the site, her criticism centers on the substance:

Unfortunately, its data is almost completely useless…

To backup this claim ,she announced the launch of a new project called ClearSpending – which ‘tracks and illustrates just how broken the data [in USASpending] is’. The intention is that through making the problems with data quality transparent and easily identifiable, it will help improve accuracy within USASpending.gov. The problems, however, are huge:

What Sunlight has found, and Clearspending shows in great detail, is that more than $1.3 trillion in federal reporting data from 2009 is unreliable. The data inaccuracies we uncovered account for 70 percent of the total $1.9 trillion in government spending data reported in that year. Some of the numbers are too big, some are too small and some are missing completely, while other spending data entries don’t have the detail that’s required or were reported months later than the law demands.

In her concluding remarks, she says:

The data powering USASpending is broken. You can’t trust any aggregate numbers you get from the site — answers to questions about federal spending that rise above the micro level. When we say things just don’t add up, we mean it…

We are beginning to worry that the Administration is more interested in style than substance.

‘More interested in style than substance’

This insinuation, however, has caused some in the Open Government movement to hit back, and challenge the tone of the speech. The first to address this was Gunnar Hellekson (Chief Tech Strategist for Red Hat), who pronounced the speech as ‘poisonous’, and neglecting the fact that citizens now have more information available to them than ever before:

The keynote was a remarkable turn: the administration was completely eviscerated by one of its closest allies..The fact that the US government is even attempting this is amazing.

He goes on to explain that imperfection and risk should be tolerated, and that while some of the data is ‘ridiculous’, this is one of benefits of data transparency i.e. public scrutiny:

Sunlight’s $1.3 trillion discovery is an example of the process working, not a failure…You’re just seeing how hard it is for one of the largest, most complicated organizations on the planet to keep its records straight.

His thesis is that Transparency and Open Data does not reform make. Rather, it provides the impetus and evidence based reasoning for changes to occur:

Sunlight has, I think, dangerously conflated transparency for reform. You get transparency first, and that compels reform. That’s the whole point. You don’t ask for perfection right out of the gate, it’s unreasonable….The solution is a long, difficult, complicated, and unpleasant series of reforms that produce better quality data. That requires patience, diligence, perseverance.

In Sunlight’s response, they agree that while perfection is the enemy of the good, many of the totals are not even close. They highlight that ClearSpending reveals 70% of the totals analysed were flawed. As such, Sunlight’s Tom Kitt worries it has to potential to ‘mislead a lot of people’, and affect trust in the entire initiative. In the end, his primary concern relates to timescales and the lack of urgency from OMB and GSA in fixing the data systems powering USASpending.

Tough love in the Open Government movement

Nevertheless, Gunnar recognises that “Sunlight has done the right thing here by doing real and substantial work”, others believe they’ve gone too far in calling out the emperor’s clothes. Derek Willis believes that:

Sunlight hasn’t earned the right to say that the government is “more interested in style than substance”.

This is because “It’s about the process, the culture, an entirely new way of doing things”. So rather than believing in the data, what’s more important is the site, the initiative, and the changes/legislation/directives that have facilitated this analysis. To coin an equestrian analogy (as Nancy Scola does when she says Sunlight are “prodding the Obama administration in the direction that it want it to go, like you do with a horse”); it’s better to bet on the horse, than the race.

In the end, he and others recognise the objective of the initiative, but perhaps feel more recognition is needed as to the success in creating platforms where all this data can be critiqued:

I’m grateful that organizations like Sunlight are pushing for greater access to accurate public data…But just as government processes can seem alien and counterproductive at times, so can those of transparency advocates.

Data accuracy – a shared issue

One of the most interesting aspects of ClearSpending, is not that it calls out agencies on data quality (this has been highlighted many times before), but rather that such an in-depth analysis could be undertaken in the first place.

Sunlight evaluated the data quality based on a methodology that has been used by the Government Accounting Office , and checked data against the Federal Awards and Assistance Data System. This kind of reconciliation helped to create ClearSpending, and is useful when understanding how other datasets could be checked.

The quality of procurement data released by governments is not just a US issue. When the UK government released extracts of the Combined On-line Information System (COINS), containing expenditure by UK Government Departments over £25K for the years 2008-2010, the guidance document explained (my emphasis):

The data on COINS are quality-assured and complete at the level at which they are required for the following purposes: fiscal management; operational publications (e.g. Main and Supplementary Estimates); and statistical publications (e.g. Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the joint ONS/Treasury Public Sector Finances statistical bulletin and the National Accounts).

Lower levels of data are not quality assured by the Treasury. Individual departments can to some extent choose the level of granularity that they use within pre-defined aggregates set by the Treasury. Lower level detailed data may therefore appear incomplete and be inconsistent across departments.

While, this did at least explain how some lower level data may-not be accurate, the guidance for local authority spending has no such caveats. This guidance, published on Friday, provides details for local government on how to comply with the Prime Minister’s call to publish each financial transaction over £500 from January 2011.

The guidance makes no remarks as to the quality of the data released. The principle stated is to ‘Publish raw data quickly’, rather than to try to make sure it’s accurate first. Indeed, Tim-Berners-Lee’s “Putting Government Data online” – to which the guidance refers – makes no mention of data quality either. It appears, that the emphasis is on publishing data – in any format (39% published their spending in PDF format only) – rather than checking its consistency or accuracy.

The remit of the recently initiated UK Public Data Transparency Board is to ensure tight deadlines are met for releasing key datasets, and that open data standards are adhered to. Their draft Public Data Principles make no mention of data accuracy or integrity. As such, it looks like this task – to ensure data accuracy – falls to the Gov 2.0 community. As Ellen Miller says:

For starters, we have to take on some of the responsibility for making this happen ourselves – I mean ‘us’ as in the community of Americans [read British] who are concerned about accountability…

Our job is to hold the Administration’s [read Coalition/Local Government's] feet to the fire – bureaucrats aren’t going to act just because someone asks nicely. Government isn’t going to change how and when it makes data available – even when a few good people on the inside want it to – because of a directive…

And finally, we need to admit that Gov2.0 isn’t happening until citizens are truly actively engaged in helping to demand and co-create it.

For the promise of Gov 2.0 to be realised someone is going to have to undertake the less glamorous tasks of checking data accuracy and verifying it against available datasources. Achieving this should not be a case of carrots or sticks, but should be up to government themselves. They should want to achieve high data quality standards, because it helps them, and furthers the purpose of the Gov 2.0 mission. When this happens, we’ll know that the Gov 2.0 movement has achieved an important milestone. Getting there won’t happen, however, until as Miller says “citizens are truly actively engaged in helping to demand and co-create it”. Now where’s that Open Data Quality bandwagon?

Related:

• Is Open Government Closing? (includes full video of Miller’s speech and interview with O’Reilly’s Alex Howard)

(Photo credit: smcgee on Flickr)

Promoting innovation through prizes and challenges has steadily become an accepted policy throughout many US government departments and agencies over the past few years. Consequently, research into what does and does not work, in the development of such initiatives is increasing important in advancing best practice in this area.

Earlier this year, the Case Foundation together with the White House Domestic Policy Council and Office on Science and Technology Policy, hosted a Promoting Innovation Summit to gather lessons and strategies on the use of prizes, challenges and open grant-making.

Benefits to using prizes and challenges

In his opening remarks, Jeff Zients, the nation’s first Chief Performance Officer, pointed to the transformative power of prizes and challenges:

The productivity boom has transformed private sector performance over the past decade, but the federal government has missed out on this transformation and lags far behind in terms of efficiency and service quality. The American taxpayer deserves more bang for their buck.

Earlier this year, Zients’ office prepared a memo giving guidance to heads of executive departments and agencies on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government. The memo outlines a number of benefits of such initiatives as tools for promoting open government, innovation, and other national priorities. These include:

• The ability to establish an important goal without having to choose the approach or the team that is most likely to succeed
• Enables sponsors to pay only for results
• Highlights excellence in a particular domain of human endeavor to motivate, inspire and guide others
• Increases the number and diversity of individuals, organizations and teams that are addressing a particular problem or challenge of national or international significance
• Improves the skills of the participants in the competition
• Stimulates private sector investment that is many times greater than the cash value of the prize
• Attracts more interest and attention to a defined program, activity or issue of concern
• Captures the public imagination and changes the public’s perception of what is possible

Challenge.gov

The memo also explained, how the federal government would make available a web-based platform for prizes and challenges. This would be used to support agencies in their execution of prizes:

This platform will provide a forum for agencies to post problems and invite communities of problem solvers to suggest, collaborate on, and deliver solutions. Over the longer term, the General Services Administration (GSA) will also provide government-wide services to share best practices and assist agencies in developing guidelines for issuing challenges. Additionally, GSA will develop, as expeditiously as possible, a contract vehicle to provide agency access to relevant products and services, including technical assistance in structuring and conducting contests to take maximum benefit of the marketplace as they identify and pursue contest initiatives to further the policy objectives of the Federal Government.

This platform – called Challenge.gov – recently went live to federal employees, and the General Services Administration (GSA) will open it to the public later this month. GSA explained the concept behind the site:

Challenge.gov is a new platform that allows federal agencies to post challenges, and at the same time, allows the public to find federal challenges. It’s now open to federal agencies to create challenges or showcase challenges from other platforms.

The platform behind Challenge.gov – ChallengePost – is already used by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Apps For Healthy Kids contest site. This has over 40,000 supporters and around 100 apps worth an estimated are worth over $5 million dollars. In exchange it is making $60k available in prizes.

Do’s and Don’ts

The Promoting Innovation report below is a summary of the lessons and shared learning discussed at the conference, and highlights some of the shining examples of the power and pitfalls of crowdsourcing ideas and innovation.

Whilst prizes and challenges can be powerful tools in driving change, the report highlights some definite Do’s and Don’ts. These include:

• Problems must be clearly defined with measurable outcomes and objective rules.
• Agencies must make sure authority and budgets are in place -  The Office of Management and Budget has recently issued guidance for agencies that are considering using prizes and challenges as a part of their fulfillment of the Open Government Directive.
• Challenges should be open and transparent – Agencies should not underestimate the effort it can take to ensure fairness amongst participants.
• Prizes don’t have to be money – The report notes how ‘a non-monetary prize that creates recognition can stimulate innovation – as can a contest that promises winning ideas will actually be used.’ As part of this, it highlights the President’s SAVE award in which the federal employee submitting the winning idea was given the opportunity to present the idea to President Obama in person, and have their idea included in the 2011 budget.
• Use the public for the right purpose – The are stories of inappropriate ideas rising to the surface of contests as the result of groups gaming a voting system or for other reasons. The UK’s Spending Challenge has been plagued by such issues, although it’s outcome is hailed a success by some.  The report suggests “voting systems often result in the most creative solutions being dismissed. It is not clear that making final evaluations is the right use of Web 2.0 tools when it comes to such contests”.

Challenges to implementation

The Promoting Innovation report, also highlights some of the key challenges agencies can face in introducing prizes and challenges. These include how to handle failure if the results are not what was expected, ensuring internal capacity and skills are available to administer such initiatives and managing the internal change associated with using prizes and awards to further policy goals.

While some of these concerns maybe mitigated through the use of Challenge.gov, McKinsey’s research on prizes highlights some of their limits and cautions against their use versus other philanthropic instruments. They explain that prizes are a good fit if there is a clear and achievable goal, and many solvers willing to absorb the risk of the effort:

Are there limits to the effective use of prizes? Of course! Good ones require clear objectives, a rich field of potential problem solvers, and competitors willing to take risks. Prizes work best when a field isn’t already flooded with funded research and the challenge is more to create a clever application of technology than a technology itself.

A rule of thumb holds that prizes are useful tools for solving problems for which the objective is clear, but the way to achieve it is not. By attracting diverse talent and a range of potential solutions, prizes draw out many possible solutions, many of them unexpected, and steer the effort in directions that established experts might not go but where the solution may nonetheless lie.

Along with this, Zients’ memo outlines many legal issues to be addressed by agencies in structuring prize competitions. These include compliance with Federal Advisory Committee Act legislation, Ethical issues and federal endorsement of products or services, Intellectual Property and many others.

Mindful of these concerns, Tom Kalil, Director White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, explained how agencies have the strong support of the President and OMB to use prizes and challenges as catalysts for innovation and policy formation:

I hope everyone who is here from the Federal Departments and Agencies will come away from this with a renewed sense that this is an important tool, that you will go back and talk to 5-10 of your colleagues to get them excited about this, and that if you run into people who say no you can’t do this, show them the OMB memo, show them that this is in the President’s Innovation Strategy, and know that you have not just permission to do this, but a strong affirmation from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, from the National Economic Council, [and] … from the OMB General Counsel’s Office.

Promoting Innovation Doc

Vivek Kundra on Prizes and Challenges

For more check:

• Summit keynote and panel videos, along with other interviews from the event.
• McKinsey report: And the winner is…Capturing the promise of philanthropic prizes
• Peter Corbett on How to create a civic innovation contest

This week’s launch of a new news information portal MerrionStreet.ie represents a new approach by the Irish Government to communicate with citizens.

The site – named after the Dublin street on which Government Buildings is located – is based on the WordPress Open Source software platform, and was built for the Government by Arekibo for a reported €40,000. The project took five months to pull together since the initial RFP was awarded earlier this year.

The new website provides the Government with a more dynamic web presence with the inclusion of news, photos, videos, Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as options for newsletters and web chats.

The Government describes the site as ‘providing a view of Government not seen before’. It explains:

In simple terms, MerrionStreet.ie will review the wide range of government activity and then report certain key events as news. All government press releases will be accessible from our website – either by way of RSS feed or by way of links to all government departments. But our central task will be to take a variety of events and report on them objectively, in the language of a news bulletin. We will also feature ‘Issues’ where useful thematic information, not tied to a particular date, is presented.

We use the latest audio-visual tools and Internet capabilities to hopefully bring these events to life. We have video, audio, photographs, text, links to other websites and much useful data which people can share. We are linked to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

The site explains how its objective is ‘not to create a competition with traditional media in terms of deadlines, scope or scoop’. Its hope is that it will be used by journalists and others as a reference point upon which to view the latest Government developments. Noticeable it says it will “not engage in political comment.”

Political comment

The site has already come in for criticism, however, with some describing it as a means for the Government to ‘present the most positive spin on its daily news’. In Ireland’s popular newspaper, the Irish Independent, Michael Brennan describes MerrionStreet as providing ‘an uninterrupted outlet for the Irish Prime Minister’s musings’:

Modelled on a news agency, merrionstreet.ie allows the Government’s highly paid spin doctors to “report” on the work of Taoiseach Brian Cowen and his ministers.

Fed up with being unable to control the bad news, which has been frequent, Mr Cowen now has an uninterrupted outlet for his musings, free from pesky analysis and less than gratifying comment.

Such sentiments have also been expressed on Twitter and in discussion forums with comments such as those below representative of a lack of trust in the objectivity of information being released:

@Paul_Duggan: So FF are are using the @merrionstreet as a PR tool rather than a state info service…

@john_mcguirk: Looking at this MerrionStreet.ie thing. Looks like taxpayer-subsidised propaganda to me.

@irish_eagle Wanna know what the Irish word for Pravda is? See http://www.MerrionStreet.ie #Ireland #ItNeverRainsHere

Anticipating this kind of criticism the site says:

MerrionStreet.ie is produced by a team in Government Buildings, involving the Government Information Service, Government Press and IT. Our objective is not to create a competition with traditional media in terms of deadlines, scope or scoop. Indeed we hope journalists find MerrionStreet.ie a useful reference point, and are free to report and use its elements.

Social media tools

The site utilises a number of Social Media tools including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. The team behind the site told Siliconrepublic they had seen what other nations, like the UK and France, had done in terms of embracing free social media tools and wanted to copy this approach. They cited Number10.gov.uk as a particular inspiration for MerrionStreet.

On announcing the new site, Government Minister Pat Carey tweeted:

New Government Comms. website launching tomorrow – merrionstreet.ie will mimic whitehouse.gov and Number10 websites. Will be a great tool.

The issue is that MerrionStreet does not embody many of the principles of these Government sites. The differences between the social media elements of Whitehouse.gov/Number10.gov.uk  and MerrionStreet are contrasted below.

@MerrionStreet

Follows 0 accounts, does not use hashtags or @replies and all tweets appear to be links to news articles. The current account is not utilising the platform in the manner in which it is intended i.e. as a two way communications medium.

@GSheehy: Right, enough is enough. Unfollowing @merrionstreet until format changes. No doubt someone will RT the interesting ‘exchanges’.

Nevertheless, SiliconRepublic reports that Taoiseach Brian Cowen will eventually be among the MerrionStreet tweeters and will include the initials “BC” in his tweets to indicate his authorship. We have yet to see any tweets of this nature, however. Instead, tweets have been confined to announcements of his press statements, rather than any personal messages.

@Whitehouse

Follows 107 accounts (mostly Government entities or administration personnel). It uses re-tweets, hashtags and has a real person tweeting from inside the Whitehouse. Many members of the administration have also started using individual accounts in an official capacity.

@Number10gov

Follows 474,600 accounts. It uses re-tweets, hashtags and has a real person tweeting on events from Number 10.

Along with this the strategy explains the value of hashtags, re-tweeting and adding value with exclusive content. If the @merrionstreet account remains a static platform to be used simply as an RSS feed for news stories, it will quickly loose followers, and its value and usefulness will be further questioned. Instead, it should follow the strategy outlined by the UK Government, and embrace medium as a means of engaging with nearly 500 followers.

The MerrionStreet.ie images page displays sets of photos from the site’s flickr account. The Number10.gov and Whitehouse.gov websites also have flickr accounts, however, their use of these accounts differs in one noticeable and important way – their Copyright policy.

MerrionStreet flickr:

All photos published on the MerrionStreet flickr account use a Copyright All Rights Reserved license. This indicates ‘that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works; that is, they have not waived any such right’.

For each photo there is a “Request to license MerrionStreet.ie’s photos via Getty Images” link, which forwards users to a Getty Images site to purchase the photos. Strangely even photos of Government buildings are licensed in this way.

Number10.gov flickr:

Publishes photos using the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license. This means that others are free to copy, distribute and display the photos on their sites, provided they give original credit to Number10.gov, do not use the photos for commercial purposes and do not alter or build upon the original works.

Whitehouse.gov flickr:

Publishes photos as United States Government Work. This means they are “not subject to copyright in the United States and there are no copyright restrictions on reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, or display of the work.”

The impact of setting such a restrictive license policy on Irish Government photos, is that any blogger or media outlet will need to either purchase the photos from Getty for use on their sites, or contact MerrionStreet directly. There appears to be a contradiction here as the site says: “We have video, audio, photographs, text, links to other websites and much useful data which people can share”. Unfortunately, this sharing does not extend to their photos.

Both the Whitehouse and Number 10 websites have their own video players through which they often broadcast live video, and which others can embedded on their sites. They also upload these videos to their respective YouTube channels, but YouTube does not represent the exclusive distribution mechanism for this media. Unfortunately, this is not the case with MerrionStreet.

MerrionStreet Video:

The site includes video footage of Ministerial speeches, Government announcements and a feature called “doorsteps” – where the Taoiseach or Minister answers a range of questions asked by a number of journalists. These videos are, however, all exclusively presented through YouTube. As such, the Irish Government appears to be explicitly endorsing this platform over and above the plethora of other video sharing platforms available.

The Irish government should avoid publicly endorsing one product or service over its competitors. Instead, it should ensure videos are available in different formats (e.g. .mp4) and on more than one video sharing platform. Also, they should ensure that when YouTube videos are embedded on MerrionStreet.ie they do not include the YouTube logo. This should apply to other areas of Government that create video content e.g. the House of the Oireachtas short films.

The MerrionStreet team could create its own branded, neutral video player that would allow anyone to embed the content. That would  be a more equitable way for the Government to spread its message, while still retaining a YouTube channel.

Number 10 Video:

Number 10 has its own platform neutral video player available called Number 10 TV. Videos on this player can be freely embedded in other websites and blogs. It also maintains a YouTube channel, however, it does not exclusively present its videos through this platform.

Whitehouse Video:

The Whitehouse has hundreds of videos available on its website, YouTube and Vimeo channels. It has been careful not to endorse any Video platform exclusively, and was required to create its own video player with captioning for Section 508 compliance.

The Whitehouse has also used YouTube.com to allow the public to pose questions to the President on a wide range of issues, and has recently been used by Press Secretary Gibbs to respond to questions regarding the recent oil spill.

There are longstanding policies against using advertising on federal websites or having sites endorse specific software or products. General Services Administration (GSA) guidelines prohibit .gov websites from commercially endorsing any product, commodity, or service.

GSA finalised an agreement with YouTube in February last year to resolve the legal concerns such as liability, endorsements, advertising, freedom of information and governing law. This allows for other government agencies to use YouTube without conducting their own formal assessment of its suitability and adherence to government laws.

MerrionStreet Facebook:

The MerrionStreet Facebook page has already garnered over 250 fans, but has seen very little by way of interaction or dialogue with these users. The current page appears to be merely an outlet on which news stories are posted, rather than a genuine attempt to start a conversation around particular news stories.

Number 10 Facebook:

The Number 10 website has developed a Facebook application in order to disseminate news and other information throughout the site. They’ve also recently announced a partnership with the Social networking site to support the Treasury’s Spending Challenge. The Democracy UK page will be used to stimulate debate regarding ideas proposed to cut public spending.

Whitehouse Facebook:

The Whitehouse has an extensive Facebook presence with more than 600,000 fans and thousands of ‘Likes’ and comments on news articles and videos. This provides a platform upon which the Whitehouse can share information including photos and videos, announce official government events and observances and gather feedback from constituents. This page enables users to publish their comments on Whitehouse news, something which is not possible on Whitehouse.gov.

Earlier this year, GSA signed a terms-of-service agreement with Facebook to make it:

easier for government agencies to create Facebook pages and use them to dramatically increase access to information, offer education on government services, and further empower citizens to interact with government.

This new agreement with Facebook resolves the legal concerns found in many standard terms and conditions that pose problems for federal agencies, such as liability, endorsements, advertising, freedom of information, and governing law. As part of this there is no advertising on the Whitehouse Facebook page, in contrast to the usual advertising that is included in the sidebar and header of users’ profiles and which appears on the MerrionStreet page.

Reaction

Reaction to the new site has been mixed. Many have commented on the cost involved in the creation of the website, when it uses freely available software. Some twitter reactions to the site include:

@gavinsblog: So Merrionstreet.ie is exactly what I expected – crap

@paulmwatson: When they said @merrionstreet.ie was inspired by number10.gov.uk they weren’t kidding. Expensive WordPress blog.

@ronnymitchel: In all fairness to @merrionstreet, although they paid waaaaay too much for the site, it does look nice for just @wordpress.

@micflan: 40k obviously doesn’t buy you a favicon, custom 404 pages or decent URL’s (index.php in every one). http://www.merrionstreet.ie/

This, however, misses the point and we should consider what the Government originally tendered for. The original RFP sought services including:

• Design of the website and associated accessible HTML templates
• Building the website according to the agreed design specifications
• Installation and commissioning of solution
• Provision of software maintenance and solution support including the associated templates,
• Provision of solution documentation
• Provision of solution training and handover to Department personnel

The RFP made no specific requirement for citizen engagement or dialogue through Twitter or Facebook. The only mention of social media in the RFP was:

The design must integrate seamlessly with various social networking sites ((e.g. YouTube, Facebook etc.) while maintaining a consistent look and feel wherever technically possible

Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that these elements remain relatively static.

Improvements

This is not to say that these elements shouldn’t be improved upon. The Government could attempt to create much more entertaining and informative YouTube videos – by taking inspiration from Whitehouse.gov’s West Wing Week and the Inside the White House series. MerrionStreet should be more aggressive and original in its efforts to communicate the Government’s message, over and above the creation of glossed up press releases.

As of now, their Facebook/Twitter pages merely republishes information posted on MerrionStreet. The team behind the site should consider posting more content that is original to Twitter/Facebook, giving users added incentive to visit these pages.

Finally, the Taoiseach’s office should try to expand MerrionStreet into a more sophisticated online operation that seeks to engage with citizens, rather than merely push information to them. Unfortunately, the initial scope of MerrionStreet was far too narrow. Its objective was simply to ‘Deliver a cohesive and whole of Government approach to the dissemination of Government information in a wide variety of formats’.

Improving the site to become a two-way medium with comments and citizen engagement is when it’ll really become interesting. At the moment, the site isn’t up to the standards of Whitehouse.gov or Number10.gov.uk. Getting to this point will require a change in focus from the ‘dissemination of information’, to – as Australia announced yesterday – a more:

open government based on a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government held information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology.

Hopefully, this will come with the next release.

Further reading:

• Irish Government’s MerrionStreet.ie goes live
• Ireland’s Government reveals its social media strategy
• Broke State shells out €40,000 on ‘spin’ website
• RPF for Provision for and Support of a Government News Website
• GovFresh Free Gov 2.0 theme
• Australia Gov 2.0 Taskforce report
• April 2010 – OMB Social Media Guidance
• June 2010 – OMB Guidance for Agency use of Third-Party Websites and Applications
• Six New Media Challenges – Legal and Policy Considerations for Federal Use of Web 2.0 Technology
• PBS special segment on the White House new media team

In David Cameron’s first podcast as British Prime Minister he outlined plans to make Government more transparent and allow people to hold ministers and public services to account.

One of the central themes of the podcast was that his government would be one that “gives power away to people instead it taking it from them.” He explained how a big part of this was providing the public with more information about government and especially how and where it spends its money (1:50 – 2:16):

It’s your money, your government, you should know what’s going on.

So we’re going to rip off that cloak of secrecy and extend transparency as far and as wide as possible. By bringing information out into the open, you’ll be able to hold government and public services to account. You’ll be able to see how your taxes are being spent. Judge standards in your local schools and hospitals. Find out just how effective the police are at fighting crime in your community.

Public Spending information

Cameron went on to explain how transparency could help “re-build trust in our politics”, through making politicians more accountable for their spending decisions. Analogous to this he previewed the release of details of “public spending over the past 12 months, information about hospital infections, and some of the salaries of senior officials in government.”

He warned, however, that the information would not be perfect, not always in the most convenient format or free from mistakes. Nevertheless, his view was:

I don’t want to hang around making sure everything is perfect – I want to get on with it, to make a start on this transparency revolution that we’re planning.

In time, I want our government to be one of the most open and transparent in the world.

Following on from the podcast, the Prime Minister sent a stark letter to all British government departments. It began with a stated commitment to hold public bodies to account, and ensure value for money in public spending:

Greater transparency across Government is at the heart of our shared commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account; to reduce the deficit and deliver better value for money in public spending; and to realise significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data.

The Government must set new standards for transparency, and our Coalition Programme for Government sets out a number of specific commitments. The Government’s initial transparency commitments are set out below, alongside deadlines for publication. Limited exemptions on national security and personal privacy grounds will be permitted.

The commitments include:

• Historic Combined Online Information System (COINS) spending data to be published online in June 2010. – (Released on 4th June)
• All new central government ICT contracts to be published online from July 2010.
• All new central government lender documents for contracts over £10,000 to be published on a single website from September 2010, with this information to be made available to the public free of charge.
• New items of central government spending over £25,000 to be published online from November 2010.
• All new central government contracts to be published in full from January 2011.
• Full information on all DFID international development projects over £500 to be published online from January 2011, including financial information and project documentation.

Along with this he announced how this spending transparency would relate to local government:

• New items of local government spending over £500 to be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011 – (however, not forced by law).
• New local government contracts and tender documents for expenditure over £500 to be published in full from January 2011.

The priority attached to this was highlighted with the request to all departments to take “immediate action to meet this deadline for data transparency”:

Given the importance of this agenda, the Deputy Prime Minister and I would be grateful if departments would take immediate action to meet this timetable for data transparency, and to ensure that any data published is made available in an open format so that it can be re-used by third parties. From July 2010, government departments and agencies should ensure that any information published includes the underlying data in an open standardised format.

Of course, the release of the datasets specified in the Coalition Programme is just the beginning of the transparency process. In advance of introducing any necessary legislation to effect our Right to Data proposals, public requests to departments for the release of government datasets should be handled in line with the principles underpinning those proposals: a presumption in favour of transparency, with all published data licensed for free reuse.

Some journalists have likened this spirit of online transparency and the “Right to Data proposals” for government-held datasets, as akin to the US Public Online Information Act (POIA) where “public means online” is set as an operating principle for government.

Lifting the Government Spending “Cloak of secrecy”

Late last week, the government enacted Cameron’s pledge to release COINS spending data, and published the entire contents of the Treasury spending database. This documented where public money comes from, what it is spent on for every financial year from 2005/06 to 2009/10.

It’s a complicated set of data which the government has admitted needs ‘some degree of technical competence’ to make use of. In this vein they’ve asked the Open Knowledge Foundation to help make it ‘more accessible,’ and have also promised ‘more accessible formats’ and user-friendly subsets by August.

The datasets can be downloaded from data.gov.uk, or analysed through the Guardian’s data-explorer.

Making sense of the data

Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor explained how we now need people to make sense of this data and to explore its trends and intricacies:

Now what is needed is people who can make it make sense for the rest of us; we have the transparency but need lenses to bring out the detail.

It’s crucial for citizens to find ways to examine and interpret the data; otherwise it may as well be  – as David Cameron says – “locked away in a vault marked sort of private for the eyes of ministers and officials only”.

We need data.gov.uk/dataset/coins to pass the ‘Mumsy’ test, so citizens can do their own investigations on subjects such as general government spending on consultants, or specified towards a particular agency.

Open data activist David Eaves sums up the challenge going forward:

We need a data-literate citizenry, not just a small elite of hackers and policy wonks. And the best way to cultivate that broad-based literacy is not to release in small or measured quantities, but to flood us with data. To provide thousands of niches that will interest people in learning, playing and working with open data. But more than this we also need to think about cultivating communities where citizens can exchange ideas as well as involve educators to help provide support and increase people’s ability to move up the learning curve.

His call for a data-literate citizenry is one of the reasons we need a massive release of open data, and also an encouragement and incentives for coders to share ideas and skills on how to use and engage with government data (my emphasis):

It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.

[...] But smart governments should not only rely on small groups of developers to make use of open data. Forward-looking governments – those that want an engaged citizenry, a 21st-century workforce and a creative, knowledge-based economy in their jurisdiction – will reach out to universities, colleges and schools and encourage them to get their students using, visualizing, writing about and generally engaging with open data. Not only to help others understand its significance, but to foster a sense of empowerment and sense of opportunity among a generation that could create the public policy hacks that will save lives, make public resources more efficient and effective and make communities more livable and fun.

When we think of libraries, we often just think of a building with books.  But 19th century mattered not only because they had books, but because they offered literacy programs, books clubs, and other resources to help citizens become literate and thus, more engaged and productive. Open data catalogs need to learn the same lesson. While they won’t require the same centralized and costly approach as the 19th century, governments that help foster communities around open data, that encourage their school system to use it as a basis for teaching, and then support their citizens\’ efforts to write and suggest their own public policy ideas will, I suspect, benefit from happier and more engaged citizens, along with better services and stronger economies.

The release of such large amounts of government data represents the beginning of the journey, not the end. The presumption of openness in relation to spending data, represents a sea change in the government’s relationship with the public, and how it wants to structure the debate on government expenditure.

These are small steps, but they’ll only make a big difference if the government utilities these resources as a catalyst towards ensuring citizens can become literate in data, visualization and coding. Ensuring the data is released in open standardised formats (as COINs data has been), allows newspapers and other organisations to create user friendly interfaces to interrogate the data, and will allow for the creation of new apps (check Alpine Interactive’s great visualisation app, and Dharmafly’s Gov expenditure app) and a more data-literate citizenry to emerge.

David Cameron noted how “People will be the masters. Politicians the servants. And that’s the way it should be”. I for one agree, and the release of such data enforces this mantra.

For more check:

• Guardian live-blog on the release of COINs data
• Guardian COINS data-explorer
• Charles Arthur on making sense of COINs data
• COINS data release: The 10 things we found out
• Tech Weekly Podcast with comment from Tom Watson MP on the release of COINs data (25:29 – 34:34)
  
• Francis Maude – Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General – on Opening up government to scrutiny
• COINs analysis appplication (rosslynanalytics)
• COINs on data.gov.uk
• Programme for Goverment (Transparency)

Earlier today, David Cameron outlined new Conservative plans “for real change in politics”. In a speech entitled “Big ideas to give Britain Real Change”, he described 9 ideas for real change in Politics. Ideas include:

1. No more unelected Prime Ministers
2. Opening up democracy: More postal primaries
3. Expanding the Freedom of Information Act
4. Neighbourhood budgets: giving neighbourhoods direct funding
5. Public drafting: “Crowdsourcing” the drafting of government legislation
6. Opening up parliament: a Public Reading Day
7. Protecting whistleblowers: Strengthening protection on government waste and misuses of public money
8. A new right to data: Right to Data Act
9. Strengthening Select Committees

Of particular interest to those in favour of a more Open Government are the plans for:

Expanding the Freedom of Information Act

The Conservatives plan to expand the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to include taxpayer-funded bodies such as Northern Rock and Network Rail, along with bodies such as the Local Government Association. The idea is to provide the public with access to a wide range of government information previously not freely available.

Public drafting: “Crowdsourcing” the drafting of government legislation

Late last year, the Conservatives announced a competition to create an online platform to through which citizens can post ideas in relation to government policy. The intention was to create a platform through which ‘the collective wisdom of the British people’ could be harnessed to improve draft legislation.

The Conservatives claim “Government legislation is often hastily drafted, leading to unintended consequences in the law.” As such, they plan to

pilot a new ‘crowd-sourcing’ approach to drafting legislation, enabling expert members of the public to play a role. This will help produce better Bills.

This new system of ‘Public Drafting’, will allow members of the public the opportunity to engage with and improve the drafting of legislation. It will have four stages:

• The Department sponsoring the legislation will publish detailed instructions on the policy intentions of the legislation online, as well an explanation of the constraints within which all clauses will have to be drafted.

• People will register for an online forum that allows them to submit draft clauses they believe will achieve the specified policy aims. We expect this to include lawyers, academics and other experts. If needed, contributors will also be able to ask the sponsoring Department questions to clarify the drafting instructions, and these questions and answers will be posted online.

• All public contributions will be open to review, comment and amendment from other registered participants, and participants will be encouraged to rate all submissions.

• At the end of the process, the highest rated drafts will go forward to be considered by the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel, the official government drafters of all legislation. The decision on whether to accept, in whole or in part, any of the top rated drafting suggestions will rest entirely with the Parliamentary Counsel.

They reference Beth Noveck’s book on Wiki Government and the Peer to Patent pilot project as a model on which ‘Public Drafting’ would be based.

Opening up parliament: a Public Reading Day

As part of their aim to “throw open the doors of Parliament” the Conservatives have announced a “Public Reading Stage for legislation” which would take place before a bill goes to Committee stage for deliberation. The idea is to give the public a chance to feed in their comments on proposed legislation which would then be considered by elected officials:

The Public Bill Committee process will include a formal Public Reading Day, when MPs and Lords formally consider and discuss the points submitted by the public. This process will help open up the legislative process and improve the scrutiny of proposed legislation, while still retaining the fundamental character of our representative democracy.

A new right to data: Right to Data Act

The Conservatives propose a “Right to Data Act”  to give members of the public a legally enforceable ‘Right to Data’. This will allow for members to the public to appeal if public bodies refuse requests for data collected by government. They claim this:

radical policy will help transform the culture of the public sector from one that presumes secrecy to one that presumes datasets should be open and shared with the public on an ongoing basis.

The Conservatives look set to expand the reach of data.gov.uk through making more datasets available particularly in relation to government spending. As part of this, they reference the President Obama and how he has promoted transparency in government spending through the establishment of Recovery.gov and the bill enacting USAspending.gov.

People power through electoral reform

Overall it looks like an interesting set of ideas that expand on David Cameron’s ideas on People Power and the Conservative manifesto’s ‘Invitation to join the government’. However, while this agenda establishes a progressive stance towards open government, it does not mention topics such as electoral reform which would enshrine a more fundamental change into British politics. It’s not to say the Conservatives don’t have ideas on this – their manifesto contains pledges on petitions to secure debates in Parliament and reform of the House of Lords – it’s just that fundamental people power i.e. through the power of the vote, is not adequately addressed.

According to yesterday’s BBC poll of polls: Liberal Democrats with 30% of the vote will get 102 seats, Conservatives with 33% get 258 seats, while Labour coming in third with 27% will emerge as the victor with 261 seats. Will Hutton, of the Work Foundation, summed up the situation:

We want our votes and opinions to count. Yet the majority of us vote in constituencies which are essentially rotten boroughs that will return the same party come what may. Your choice, if not from a winning party, is not to vote or vote tactically. Only in the 100 or so marginals, where Lord Ashcroft has directed his millions, is there a genuine political contest. It is the fast road to voter disengagement.

Analogous to this Polly Toynbee of the Guardian explained ‘we need to change the system to make every single vote count’.

The Liberal Democrats support a change to the voting system through the introduction of proportional representation. They believe this is a much fairer and more equitable system. This is supported by advocacy groups such as Vote for a Change. However, as it’s unlikely the Liberal Democrats will be the largest party at the next election, they are calling for a Hung Parliament as a means of achieving this electoral reform.

The new economics foundation’s Vote Power Index, demonstrates the unequal distribution of electoral power under the current UK voting system. The index calculates the value of a vote in a constituency based on the number of votes and the chances of the seat changing hands.

Stephen Whitehead explained the two startling findings of the index:

Firstly, it shows the staggering inefficiency of our system in translating votes into outcomes. Thanks to the vast number of votes that are effectively wasted, almost three quarters of voting power is squandered.

Secondly, and perhaps more fundamentally, the index highlights the chronic injustice of our system. In the UK the luckiest fifth of voters have more than 33 times more power than the unluckiest fifth. This is a far more uneven distribution than household income in the UK.

This index highlights the need to change Britain’s electoral system to establish a voting regime that recognises the importance and significant of each vote, and ensures the majority opinion of people throughout the country is reflected in the Houses of Parliament.

Now that really would be a big idea.

Further reading

• Vote for a Change
• Electoral Reform Society
• Electoral dysfunction: Why democracy is always unfair