Club Troppo

We are all in Tom Watson’s debt for pursuing the corruption of the Murdoch press as vigorously as he has – and continues to. I have had some dealings with Tom arising from my involvement in the Government 2.0 Taskforce. In any event, in addition to continuing his pursuit of the Murdoch press he has just been caught up in a strange set of events. His intern, it seems took to his Twitter account when he was in a meeting and tweeted something which mentioned rape. If you mention rape this stirs up trouble.  And what the hell was she doing on his Twitter account? Who knows, but it was a very stupid thing to do, which she very quickly admitted on Twitter.

This caused the predictable avalanche of nonsense in the media. Tom acted pretty kindly, didn’t sack the silly idiot who had tweeted on his account, and then published this account. It ends in these propositions.

8. The intern has not been sacked nor was she ever going to be. She’s young. We all make mistakes.
9. I know her well enough to know she’ll never do this sort of thing again.
10. And yes, I know I should have logged out. I really do. Thank you to the people who pointed that out.
11. For those that have asked – all my tweets, other than the two this morning, are my own.
12. Though my account wasn’t technically ‘hacked’, yes, I do understand the irony of what happened.
13. Once again, I am sorry.

Now the British are different to us.  They’re more sticklers for form. So if Tom wants to apologise, then technically yes, the buck stops with him. He runs the office and ‘takes responsibility’ for what happens.

But beyond that?  He’s in his own office and I don’t agree that he ‘really should’ have assumed that one of his staff would hijack his online ID, even for a joke, just as he shouldn’t assume that she would forge his signature, or (for that matter) video a visiting guest on the dunny. As for ‘irony’ – Tom’s role as a minister in the Blair Government was to promote these online tools and train others in them. Well OK, admit the irony, but strictly speaking there’s not much irony. Someone stuffed up.

I can’t help thinking that a right leaning politician wouldn’t be bowing and scraping. Enough of the apologies Tom. Leave them to Rupert Murdoch – even if he doesn’t mean them.

One thing I think about whenever I sit in a tram waiting for cars that shouldn’t be holding up the tram to stop holding up the tram is that trams should have a video cam on them and drivers could have a button that either activates the cam or marks the spot at which it is running and if the car was breaking the road rules it gets a ticket. Improves efficiency and brings in a bit of revenue. What’s there not to like. Anyway, the same idea has been proposed various times in the past but has never managed to be implemented. I don’t know why. But as is so often the case, technology’s capacity to decentralise these decisions is leading the way – with bicycle cams as illustrated above. Handy in court cases.

I’ve been counting those I know who are highly energetic, positive people and who are naturally excited by the possibilities of the web, who have been leaving government employ.  I can think of Darren Whitelaw in Victoria, Mia Garlick in the Commonwealth service (though based in Sydney) and Craig Thomler (Cth, Canberra) who have all pulled or are pulling the plug on Government.

But it’s not all one way. There’s at least one person who’s heading into the bureaucracy – the great Pia Waugh who has been the great Kate Lundy’s staffer for three years.

A bundle of optimism, positivity, equanimity, creativity and capability.

So public sector, I hope you know how lucky you are.

Tim O’Reilly proposed the slogan “Government as a platform” for his Government 2.0 activities which he’s heavily scaled back in favour of more lucrative opportunities. But there was always a problem. That problem was that it wasn’t so much that no-one had ever had the idea that government might be an enabling resource – a platform in the lingo of Web 2.0. The real problem is that government has no culture of this. Departments are proprietorial and secretive and that’s a tenacious culture which is prevented from evaporating by lots of expectations and structures.

But there is one part of government that has cultivated the culture of ‘Government as a platform’ since its inception around a century and a half or so ago:  The GLAM sector – that’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums. I couldn’t help noticing when doing the Government 2.0 Taskforce that the GLAM sector were up and at it long before anyone else. The National Library had its newspaper digitisation program and Seb Chan from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum was on our Taskforce and instrumental in getting us to run a mashup competition – and likely instrumental in getting the Powerhouse to become the first museum anywhere in the world to post its historic photos on Flikr and licence them Creative Commons. Seb’s unit built the mashup of baby names in NSW which is fascinating to play with.

I also learned about all the problems the national and state libraries were having getting rights to archive web content that were analogous to their rights as libraries of record to receive a copy of all publications in their jurisdiction from publishers. If they had such rights all they would need would be a robot to go and collect the material and Bob’s your uncle. In fact without this, much of their efforts involve sending people letters to ask their permission to archive their sites. I discussed with various people in libraries of record having such rights which certainly made sense to me.

Anyway, they still don’t have such rights.

Meanwhile . . . they are certainly keen on their rights to printed material as you will observe from this letter I received from the Victorian State Library this week (I might add that The Victorian State Library is a terrific organisation, which I am very fond of, but even terrific organisations do really silly things):

The State Library of Victoria tries to collect a copy of all books, videos, CD’s, CD-ROMs, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers and any other items published in Victoria for permanent preservation in the Library.

To help us in this endeavour, legislation was passed in 1869 requiring publishers to deposit free of charge with the library a copy of every item published in Victoria. Current legislation is contained in section 49 of the Libraries Act 1988 (see enclosed leaflet).

Recently the following publication came to our notice.

The economic value of Australia’s investment in health and medical research: reinforcing the evidence for exceptional returns. 

We look forward to receiving a copy of this publications (sic), as well as any other publications you might not have previously sent us for legal deposit. Please follow the enclosed legal deposit instructions when forwarding publications. (Continued)

I’ve always thought that institutions that are set up at arms length from government to offer independent advice to governments would be an excellent venue for online discussions to start taking place. An easy opportunity, pretty comprehensively passed up was the Public Service Commissions’s various deliberations on what the codes of public service conduct should be. I would have thought it would have been an ideal matter on with those in the APS might have discussed the issues openly on a blog.  After all it’s APS’ professional business, not ostensibly political or policy business.

Some time ago the PC tried a bit of online engagement, but it had all the usual ‘run by the IT department’ problems and didn’t go anywhere. I discovered with some excitement the unit in the Victorian Bureaucracy which was built in the mould of the PC and which I think is doing a pretty good job was getting into the same game.

Alas VCEConnect is the usual disaster.

VCEC’s original discussion starter on state reform – consists of a single unsigned question asking whether people agree on the three priorities in the draft report.  There’s one comment.

Then there’s a thread on another inquiry into education reform. It asks “In your view, what are the key areas the Victorian Government should focus on? And, more specifically, what actions should the Government take in these areas?” There are two comments.

That’s it. Both posts were put up in November.

If I were asked what I think of VCEConnect I would borrow from Mahatma Ghandi when he was asked what he thought of Western civilisation.

I think it would be a good idea.

When I did the Government 2.0 Taskforce, one of the subjects that was earnestly discussed was archiving of government sites.  It’s a big problem in government. I could never see why it should be a big problem. After all you can look at anything written on ClubTroppo since it started.  We haven’t spent any huge amount of money to deliver that kind of functionality, haven’t burned any midnight oil. But IT people in government told that it’s very expensive to keep web pages live. I have no idea why but they swore black and blue that it was.

Anyway I recently sought to track down the results of Obama’s less than spectacularly successful community brainstorming on open government when he came into office. (The top two suggestions for promoting open government were legalising marijuana. The other big thing was releasing Obama’s birth certificate.) Anyway I emailed an American friend who’d been in the White House at the relevant time – now back in academia – asking for any write up of the program and she told me there was one in a 2009 annual review of operations.  But it’s gone from the website and no-one has been able to find it in a couple of weeks. This is 2009!

For another project I was also looking up the old Power of Information Taskforce in the UK.  Here’s Tom Steinberg’s blog entry announcing its release.

I’m delighted to announce that the review I’ve been working on with Ed Mayo and the Cabinet Office has launched today. You can get the official PDF version here or my friend Sam Smith’s annotatable version that he just threw together.

I clicked on the first link and it went through to here.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/publications/reports/power_information/power_information.pdf

Which was promising. It said this.

Object moved to here.

Alas, it wasn’t there either and I was diverted to a Cabinet Office Page Not found signal – as you can see for yourself if you want to click on the link.

Meanwhile one of the things that the Power of Information Taskforce and Review did was to publish using commercial blogging platforms. And everything using that remains safe and sound. “Sam Smith’s annotatable version” that Steinberg says Sam “threw together” refers to on his blog is still there, safe and sound. Likewise the Government 2.0 Taskforce published to its own url using Wordpress software, and it’s still there too, it’s cost to government would be the same as the cost of Troppo to those of us who run it – the cost of the domain name registration, which is about $30 a year or something, though the cost to government of maintaining the UK’s Power of Information review, which is a sub-domain of wordpress.com is exactly zero.

So it still eludes me why, with all the resources to hand, governments make it quite so difficult for themselves.

Ross Gittins asked me if I’d fill in for him during his summer break, which gives me a chance to get a few things off my chest. So here’s the first of four weekly columns.

In 2009, I chaired the federal government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce. We sketched out how government might be transformed by the open zeitgeist and tools of Web 2.0 – like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Web 2.0 massively scales up our capacity to communicate – with possibilities both trivial and earth-shaking. And it scales up simple improvisation. Whether you’re organising a party or a working bee, just hop on to Facebook or Twitter and Bob’s your uncle.

Two hours after the Christchurch earthquake, work commenced on a map on the net on which could be plotted emerging developments on the ground. The information, such as the address of pharmacies that still had insulin, was parsed from 300,000 tweets bearing hashtags like #eqnz.

If you think this was a job for official emergency services on the ground, think again. Tim McNamara wasn’t with the government, but spearheaded the initiative from the North Island capital Wellington. The people who parsed the tweets were further away still, a band of humanitarian ”Crisis Commons” volunteers spanning every continent. (Continued)

Herewith an paper about my encounter with design, on taking up the Chairmanship of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and encountering the Family by Family program.  The site where it’s been published doesn’t have any comments facility, so I’m opening up discussion here should anyone wish.

And I read today a quote that might have been a good complement to the quote appearing at the head of the article – immediately below.

Not only was he [Edward Land - inventor of 'instant cameras' and founder of Polaroid] one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.

Designing better lives: An economist’s appreciation of design

Design is often described as making things not only useable but useful and desirable/delightful. We’d agree this is important – but what is even more fundamental (and rare) is making things that prompt change. – Sarah Schulman and Chris Vanstone [2]

       I.

Design is on the march. Apple teeters on being the most highly valued company in the world – its core competitive strength lying in design and systems integration, not technology. ‘Design thinking’ is becoming increasingly prominent not only in the development of products and processes, but also in the delivery of services. So much so that Deloitte has recently begun investing heavily in its own ability to provide its clients with design knowhow as a crucial engine of its innovation and competitiveness. As I write this, a prominent article on Australia’s Deloitte Online’s homepage [3] is titled “Design thinking demystified”. So what is the core contribution of design and what is behind its rise?

Adam Smith’s invocation of the benefits of self-interest – or as he called it self-love – is famously encapsulated in this aphorism:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Smith’s point is not that self-interest is good in itself, but that the self-interest of one person in a market brings them into relation with others’ self-interest. Note that Smith’s injunction (implicitly to both parties) is for each to seek their own interest by addressing themselves to the other’sinterest. Since Smith founded it, the discipline of economics has focused on the incentives facing each of the parties to a bargain and on their relative bargaining strength.

But there are more things in heaven and earth. For the butchers, bakers and brewers of Smith’s time there was no great mystery as to what constituted the customer’s wants or needs. Today’s world is much more complex. If you’re making computers or even cars, customers have specific wants that are not so easily divined by producers. Thus, part of Japan’s auto-producers’ recipe for competitive success was meticulous attention to consumer needs.[4]

This process has now gone much further. A great transformation occurred at the outset of the personal computer era when the Apple Macintosh showed that consumers didn’t just want more technical capability from their software and hardware – something that could be captured well enough in standard disclosures of those technical capabilities. They wanted user-friendliness – a very different thing and something inherently difficult to ‘disclose’ in specifications.

It turns out you can’t really make a car or a computer useable without a lot of work, almost invariably involving the users themselves. And indeed there is a discipline that has grown up under our noses which has been all but ignored by economists and policy makers but which nevertheless addresses itself to this issue. That discipline is design. (Continued)

Here are two talks I’ve given in the last year. One was a couple of weeks ago at a Melbourne Conversation on Big Data. I talk about the serendipity of big data and the relevance for privacy regulation.  And tell a story about Kaggle. I recommend the talk before mine by David McCloskey of Deloitte. He’s a very thoughtful guy.

The other is a talk on Education 2.0 given to QUT senior staff. It’s only up for another week or so and it’s one gigabyte to download – which is ridiculous, but apparently reduced from four gigs.  It’s a zipped file.