There was an interesting event at the Channel4 building on Horseferry Road last night organised by Glasshouse. The title of “Making a Difference : Delivering Public Service in the Digital Age” promised much and the panel was a very good line up to match such a weighty title:
- Eric Auchard - Reuters
- Saul Klein - Index Ventures/The Accelerator Group/Seedcamp
- Zenna Atkins - Ofsted
- Tom Loosemore - 4ip
- Ryan Regan - last.fm
I’ll concentrate on just three of the panel, Saul, Zenna and Tom, as at the end of their short talks I had a sense that there could be a movement for change in the room.
Things really got interesting with Saul’s five minute talk, he spoke passionately about open technologies, citing Linux, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, the origins of the internet and CERN’s work on http. He felt that the magic combination for this was tools, policies and assets and I’m with him all the way there, in addition to his love for openness.
This really made me smile, especially as not long ago I’d felt my hackles rise at Future of Web Apps when Mark Zuckerberg suggested that even the best open standards started off closed. (I also wasn’t too keen on his slightly revisionist history of the Microsoft/IBM PC/Mac situation). I feel happy to be working with MySpace with their commitment developing on open standards, even though we’re not there yet and the social graph data isn’t fully open.
I’ve felt that some of my favourite and most successful projects have involved being open. My work on some of the very early Open Access journals which were freeing science publications from subscription models has now born financial fruit finally for that publisher with the sale of the company to Springer Science+Business Media.
Another such project was a charitable foundation enabling work by British sculptors (Cass Sculpture Foundation). Our decision in 2001 to open up every image held by the charity put them on the map with the site being used by art lovers and students on a huge scale every day. It’s also put them on the map offline too, being involved in the initial initiative putting sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, being invited to put on an exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and now in the most ambitious plan working on commissioning sculpture for the London 2012 programme.
So open is good and there clearly are monetisation opportunities around the edge of open. It’s been demonstrated of late that lack of openness can be very strange, as in the recent Met Police Crime Maps vs Ordinance Survey debacle. The debate gets very muddied though when entrepreneurial action gets involved on open data paid for by the public as wisely pointed out in a twitter message from Dominic Campbell last night:
“@jaggeree would like to agree but the return on that collective public investment to skewed to the entrepreneur. govt needs roi too.”
He’s spot on with this in my opinion, and my feeling is that if someone is making money out of public data there should be a method for redistribution of the gain. I don’t know the mechanism but I can see how you could flag it. Suggesting up front through a Creative Commons attribution to the data could be a great start: providing data on a not for commercial gain basis. I can’t personally imagine that the Met Police were going to make money on their crime maps, however I could imagine a different scenario of the data was used by estate agents in a mashup reminiscent of Stamen’s work on house prices and travel times in London for MySociety.
Zenna Atkins was superb, pointing out examples of extreme beaurocracy (not civil servants filling in forms in triplicate while skydiving) and wishing passionately for a reinvention where more of the current processes from the commercial sector were applied to public service projects. I’d love to see agile methods implemented at a governmental level personally. I hold both an Agile and a PRINCE2 certification. I can see a vast number of reasons why PRINCE2 needs to exist: where public safety is involved you need tightly controlled processes. However not all situations involve this and we all know that waterfall methods are very likely to deliver systems over budget and late. For example Martine Devos has used SCRUM effectively implementing change programs for the Belgian Government.
Tom Loosemore sagely talked about the changes going on in society, especially in the youth sector, stating that “techonology doesn’t exist for anyone under 15, it’s just normality”. I hope that 4ip can become a force for change that he suggests “turning the public sector inside out, exposing the data and services”. I hope this but I’m unsure of their mechanism at the moment. Ivan Pope and I talked at the end of the session, I’ve known Ivan for a long while and have always respected his thinking and always enjoy conversations with him which go everywhere. Neither of us is quite sure of their methods, they’re not a VC, expecting a return on investment, which means philanthropy from a public service organisatio; a mechanism that I can’t think of an example which works. The water also seems to be muddied further with partner funding from Regional Development Agencies, NESTA, The Media Trust and The Arts Council.
I’m confused, which is a shame as at one point last night I felt a revolution was about to happen and by the end of the evening I saw a complex and tangled web which as we all know is a great hiding place for complex beurocratic processes to develop. I really hope I’m wrong. If done right it will restore an edgy organisation into Channel4 which in this turbulent but exciting world, where it’s models are being picked apart by the dual forces of changes in user behaviour and financial models, is in need of change as much as newspapers and print media (as Saul sagely pointed out).
