Visual aids in Parliament?

Visual aids in .au parliament
I wrote last year about the insanity of the annual Budget speech(es), in which the Chancellor stands up and reads off a list of numbers. In business, you’d never contemplate doing that without some kind of visual aid. But come on, visual aids in Parliament?
Let me take you to Canberra, where there’s been an outbreak of visual aiding on the floor of the House of Representatives. In recent days, the ABC reports, Kevin Rudd and his government have been ‘taunting the Opposition by waving photos of projects funded with stimulus money’. The opposition have responded by wielding ‘a mock credit card to make its point about debt and a hard hat to mock Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s appearances at infrastructure sites’.
But by common consent, things went a bit far on Thursday when, with the assistance of his front bench colleagues, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey unfolded a three metre-long chart, over six panels, illustrating the growth in government debt. The speaker ruled this was too much; Hockey responded by producing a pair of scissors, and cutting the chart into its constituent panels for individual presentation.
‘Pity they couldn’t have cut through the noise and silliness of a question time that added nothing to the sum of human knowledge,’ says Sky News Australia’s commentary on the ‘farce’.

Cameron's online promises

cameron-speech-20090526
The explicit references to the internet in David Cameron’s big speech on ‘fixing broken politics’ this morning don’t come until the end. All MPs’ expenses to be published online; the same will go for ‘all other public servants earning over £150,000’. An Obama-esque pledge to put all national spending over £25,000 online. A commitment to ‘publish all Parliamentary information online in an open-source format’ (whatever that means). An end to the ‘ridiculous ban on parliamentary proceedings being uploaded to YouTube’. All good, on the face of it.
But the underlying message throughout the speech, empowerment of the individual, is really only a reflection of the changes being brought about by the internet revolution. We expect to be able to do things now, in our daily lives, which seemed like science-fiction only a few years ago. It’s really not that long ago that ’28 days for delivery’ was a standard; now we get fidgety if our delivery isn’t here within 2 or 3 days. Your mobile phone has instant access to every fact in the world, within seconds.
So Cameron’s talk of ‘giving people the power to work collectively with their peers to solve common problems’ isn’t really the articulation of a great vision: it’s a reflection of a reality that’s already with (many of) us. Likewise, transparency isn’t really something within his gift. ‘At the length, truth will out,’ Shakespeare wrote as far back as 1600; it’s just that these days, it gets out a heck of a lot quicker.
Having said all that, there are some parts of the speech which make me feel a little uncomfortable. I find it difficult to hear an Old Etonian and Oxbridge-graduate speaking up for ordinary people feeling ‘deprived of opportunities to shape the world around them, and at the mercy of powerful elites that preside over them’. And similarly, when he says ‘we rage at our political system because we feel it is self-serving’, I find my eyebrows raising at the use of the word ‘we’. (A bit like when Five Live presenters talk about ‘the media’ in the third person.)
But the reality is, this is the man who currently seems most likely to be running the country in a year’s time. The power will be in his hands. And whether he’s doing it by choice, or just recognising the way the wind is blowing, he’s talking about diluting that power, boosting transparency, and embracing the web. We like.

Watson to quit at reshuffle?

A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line from the Sunday Times at the weekend: ‘Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister wrongly accused of involvement in the Damian McBride smear e-mails, will return to the back benches. He has told friends he is exhausted by government and wants to see more of his two children.’ I’ve got no inside track on that story (not for lack of trying, btw); but when you look at recent blog entries and tweets, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising. Even though he got his apology, it’s clear the experience of this Easter wasn’t pleasant. (Plus, being realistic, the Party may prefer him to be spending his time planning for the forthcoming general election.)
Around Easter, I had several conversations with people, all of us concerned at the possible loss of Tom as Minister for e-government / Digital Engagement. It’s been such a wonderful period, having someone in that position who deeply, personally understands it – particularly after two anonymous predecessors, Pat McFadden and Gillian Merron. (Yeah, exactly.)
If true, and I stress if, it would seem to put a slightly different light on the appointment of Andrew Stott as Director of Digital Engagement. With a new Minister arriving at the Cabinet Office front door, with (in all likelihood) little background knowledge, it’ll be up to his/her right hand man to drive the Power Of Information agenda forward. The reshuffle is expected shortly after the European elections on 4 June; Stott starts his new job (formally) on 2 June. Two fresh faces in the same fortnight would not be ideal.
PS: Is that really Tom’s middle name? (not safe for work)

New LabourHome, flashy Libertas

A couple of interesting developments in online political campaigning in the last few days.
LabourHome has finally had its long-needed rebuild and refresh – moving, hurrah!, to WordPress. But by the look of it, and I could be wrong on this, it’s running on normal WordPress, rather than MU (multi user). You’d have thought it would be an ideal candidate for MU, giving each user their own proper, customisable blog (plus the option to extend to a full-on social network via BuddyPress). Instead, it’s a single group blog, with a particularly large group of authors. It’ll be interesting to see how far it scales.
Visually it’s satisfactory, if a little modest in its ambitions, with familiar/predictable fonts and screen furniture. Functionally though, it seems like a dramatic improvement on what went before, with a much greater sense of order to it all. (Particular credit due for importing so much backdated content, including comments even.) It seems to be a much better site for the move already; and as Alex Hilton seems to be hinting, it gives them a platform that’ll be much easier to extend.
libertasadI’m also intrigued by something Libertas have put together: a ‘make your own ad‘ function. They’ve got a handful of templates, with space for you to put a personalised message, or upload a picture; the resulting advert is generated in Flash, for inclusion in their (highly visible, although not yet obviously effective) online push:

Libertas is a new political party that seeks to put the people of Europe back in charge of the EU. In that spirit, we’re asking you to help spread the word by creating your very own ad for Libertas. We’ll then run it across the internet, along with thousands of others. It’s dead easy. And it’s a first.

It’s not without its issues and limitations: there must be a risk of abuse of the service, and I wonder what the implications are as regards election legislation. Plus, frankly, the templates are a bit rubbish. But it’s a very interesting concept nonetheless; a logical ‘next step’ from the many unofficial Obama-inspired websites like obamicon. One for the bigger parties to consider?

Douglas Carswell's open politics

Conservative MP Douglas Carswell has been a key player in the historic Parliamentary events of the last few days, but his view of its implications goes far beyond the Speaker’s handling of expenses claims. I wrote before about his challenging views at a recent Hansard Society event; he talks, very convincingly, about the need – or perhaps more accurately, the inevitability – of more open politics. Tellingly, in interviews yesterday following his Big Moment, he talked about ‘the era of YouTube’ (although that’s another story altogether).
He points us to an article in today’s Times by Danny Finkelstein, which articulates the Carswell thesis particularly well:

For what we are about to discover is whether, after this turbulent fortnight, MPs really get it. Or whether they simply don’t have a clue what has been going on… Mr Martin’s departure should be seen as the pivot between two very different ways of conducting politics. It should be seen as the final moment in the long, slow death of closed politics and as ushering in a new age, one that will grow slowly and from small beginnings. The era of open politics. The cause of this new era, and the need for it, is the information revolution… Large centralised political parties were created because of the existence of the mass media… But whether this system has advantages or not is irrelevant – because the information revolution makes its continuation impossible. The replacement of the monolithic mass media with a much messier, much freer market in information changes everything. The media is fragmenting and taking Parliament with it.

Of course, both Carswell and Finkelstein are long-standing bloggers: Carswell in particular did some interesting experiments (now abandoned) with ClactonTV.com (archived) and a TalkClacton.com discussion forum as far back as 2006. But it’s been fascinating to see online now being proposed instinctively as a solution to the current crisis. (And full credit, by the way to the Conservatives for their rapid creation of a Google spreadsheet, presumably with a nice and easy input form, for the publication of Shadow Cabinet expensesnot the first to adopt it as a publishing platform of course.)
We’re some way away from Carswell’s vision, as described in his book The Plan (co-written with YouTube star Daniel Hannan). But you’d have to say, the wind is blowing in his direction.

Lords committee on online engagement

Did you know the House of Lords is currently inviting opinions on how it, and Parliament generally, can relate better to the public? No? Neither did I, which kind of proves something in itself.
It’s the Lords’ Information Committee, it’s called People And Parliament… and it closes in two days. The deadline for full written submissions passed on 5 May. Having bumped into details about it earlier today, I’ve been looking at the transcripts of an April session featuring such luminaries as Ben Hammersley and Tom Loosemore. It was a feisty session at times – listen to it here. I was particularly taken by one contribution by Tom, which I will probably find myself quoting in business meetings to come.

I used to run the BBC’s message boards and forums and it is a thankless task because you end up spending millions of pounds censoring people, and I fear you will do the same, if you are successful. I do not think you will be successful as being the home for those national debates, a genuinely democratic cross-section of the country coming along and discussing issues in a constructive way. I do not think Parliament’s website itself will ever be the home for that debate.
Having said that, what I think the Web does do is open up all sorts of possibilities for you, as representatives in this place, to go out and consult. So if you want to go and find out what people think about immigration, there are many, many places on the Web where there are constructive conversations about immigration and you can go and join in and listen there. You do not have to insist that everybody comes here. That is how the place has always worked. It does not always rely on five people sat in front of a table talking to you.
So I would encourage you as Members and as Lords of this place to go out and use the Web to engage with the different issues and avoid like the plague hosting conversations on your own website. When I left the BBC I left them with a document which said, ‘Do not host conversations on the BBC’s website, link to them instead.’

There’s not a little irony, then, in looking at the forum set up by Parliament to discuss the subject: only to find a handful of responses, whose quality is, to be frank, mixed. Not for the first time then, Tom Loosemore shows he knows what he’s talking about. He also made some fine points about making Parliament’s data easily reusable as a first step towards wider engagement, and handled questions about sustainability with great tact. I heard his name mentioned as a possible Director of Digital Engagement; for the record, I think he’d have been fantastic.
There are two more meetings scheduled: one happens to be tomorrow, and features none other than Tom Watson. It’ll be streamed live online, and archived for later viewing: you’ll find it here.

'Safe hands' Stott fails to inspire – so far

Stott announcement
Well, we didn’t see that one coming, did we? The Cabinet Office ultimately plumped for an internal candidate in its search for a Director of Digital Engagement; Andrew Stott has worked there since September 2004. The new role was ‘created to take forward the Power of Information agenda’, the press release helpfully notes; but in his existing (former?) role, Stott already has/had ‘director-level oversight within the Cabinet Office for the Power of Information work from its inception and was a member of the Minister for Digital Engagement’s Power of Information Taskforce.’ So very much the ‘continuity candidate’, you might say.
The job description for the role (which I’ve reproduced here) called for ‘someone who would be acknowledged by their peer group to be a leader in this field. The successful candidate,’ it said, ‘will have a CV that creates instant credibility and confidence with Ministers, senior officials and digital communicators in Whitehall.’
Sadly, ‘instant credibility’ isn’t the reaction I’ve heard from most of my own contacts. One, on promise of anonymity, called it a ‘spectacular own goal’. Others have been more measured in their language; others much, much less. Several of the responses frankly aren’t printable.
There’s no question general (but for the record, not universal) consensus that Stott will be a ‘safe pair of hands‘. Of course he meets the criteria of having ‘the authority to be credible with Ministers and senior officials’ and ‘experience of the workings of Government’. But there’s little evidence – and I stress, evidence – of his fit with some of the other supposedly essential criteria. If he has ‘run a public facing web site of significant size’, or ‘innovated in web, beyond web publishing’, the web itself doesn’t have much information about it.
I’ve been pointed towards the ‘Information Matters’ strategy published last year by the Knowledge Council, chaired by Stott. Not a document I’ve yet read myself; but Public Sector Forums did, and weren’t impressed – ‘consisting largely as it does of top-down dictums, much reinventing of wheels and what Basil Fawlty would aptly call the bleedin’ obvious.’ (Link for PSF members only)
However, COI’s Andrew Lewin offers grounds for optimism. ‘A new face from the private sector to make a bold splash and shake everything up… wasn’t a very appealing prospect,’ he writes. ‘[Stott is] certainly very familiar with the government scene in the online engagement areas and will be hitting the ground running. This appointment means we should be able to get on with things, but with a high profile person at the head of things to drive it forward still faster.’
And Will Perrin, who knows him from the Power Of Information taskforce, says he is ‘exactly what [the role] needs: responsible, reliable, non political, strong on delivery great with the tech’.
Stott is a brave man, not just because the Daily Mail is against him from day one. If he is to meet the sky-high demands of the role, he needs the active support of the many web-literate civil servants, and the wider ‘gov 2.0’ community. His is not the appointment to win that support instantly, by default. If he is to lead a process of national digital engagement, he first needs to engage with the guys who will actually make it happen.
Oh… and a quick PS: No, I didn’t apply for it. It struck me – rightly, I’d now suggest – as a talking role, rather than a doing role. I’m enjoying the freelance lifestyle too much. I don’t miss the bureaucracy, not in the slightest. I don’t want to be full-time in central London just now. And frankly, there’s too big a political risk attached to the position.

Andrew Stott named as Director of Digital Engagement

Andrew Stott Facebook picJust announced by the Cabinet Office: Cabinet Office man Andrew Stott, Deputy Government CIO and chair of the CTO Council has been announced as the new £120k/yr Director of Digital Engagement. An appointment from the government IT angle, rather than the social media angle. Hmm.
The Cabinet Office press release plays up his Whitehall seniority and experience, but rather neglects the more ‘social web’ aspects of the appointment. So for reference, here are the key elements of the Job Description, sent out in February. I expect there will be plenty of discussion to come on this.

ROLE PROFILE
Background
The Government recognises the widespread use of the internet and in particular a huge increase in the use of digital communities and social media. It also recognises that despite significant advances in Government web, there is now an opportunity to significantly increase the degree to which Government engages with citizens through the web. In recognition of this, the Prime Minister has appointed a Minister for Digital Engagement at the Cabinet Office and we now seek to appoint a highly credible digital communicator to be Director of Digital Engagement.
Job Purpose
The Director of Digital Engagement will be based in Government Communications at the Cabinet Office and will work across Government departments to encourage, support and challenge them in moving from communicating to citizens on the web to conversing and collaborating with them through digital technology.
Job Description
The successful applicant will:

  • Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government
  • Work with communication, policy and delivery officials in Government departments to embed digital engagement in the day to day working of Government
  • Work with Directors of Communication to ensure that digital media are included in the reporting of reaction to Government policy and initiatives
  • Work closely with web teams to ensure that digital communications are making the most effective and efficient use of hardware and software
  • Act as head of profession for civil servants working on digital engagement
  • Ensure that digital engagement is always a leading part of Government consultation
  • Introduce new techniques and software for digital engagement, such as ‘jams’ into Government
  • Convene an expert advisory group made up of the leading experts on digital engagement to provide advice to Ministers and act as a sounding-board for the Government’s digital engagement strategy
  • Work closely with the Ministerial Group on Digital Engagement, delivering the work agreed at Cabinet on digital engagement

You will manage a small team, directly, but will have to manage relationships with a wide group of senior officials across Government. This will require developing working arrangements in which departmental officials feel they are accountable to the Director of Digital Engagement without the benefit of a formal line management arrangement. These relationships will be at Director and Director General level and may well involve five or six departments at any one time. The relationships will be across professions, involving policy and delivery officials as well as communications and IT. Since this is a new role charged with getting Government to work differently, you will have to develop these relationships from scratch in a pressured environment in which Ministerial expectations of delivery are high.
You will have a small budget, but two key purposes of the job are to assist Government in making effective use of current digital spend, which runs into many millions, and to enable departments to save significant sums on their engagement activities through switching from expensive face to face and postal methods to cheaper digital techniques. You will be accountable for leading Government’s new focus on digital engagement, which is central to Government priorities and with significant risk of reputational damage if this does not happen or Government gets it wrong.
You will be accountable to the Permanent Secretary – Government Communications and to the Minister for the Cabinet Office.
Judgement will be crucial in this role. It leads on the future of Government engagement with citizens through digital means. This means that the post will be breaking new ground on a daily basis, across Government. The agenda is politically very high profile and full of complex issues between and within departments that you will have to exercise very sensitive judgement on how to manage and resolve. You will have a level of professional expertise that is likely to mean that you will be unique in your ability to exercise judgement and provide advice to Ministers and Permanent Secretaries/ senior officials on matters within your remit.
Influence is a key aspect of this role. You will be required to exercise influence across departments with Ministers and senior officials to drive forward the future of digital engagement. This will require Government and individual departments to change the way they do business – from consulting citizens to collaborating with them on the development of policy and how public services are delivered to them. It will involve supporting Ministers and senior officials in entering conversations in which Government does not control the message or the dialogue. Giving Ministers and senior officials the confidence to do this will require influencing skills of the highest order. This role has few direct reports and little direct resource at its command. The ability to make change and delivery of challenging objectives happen by negotiation, persuasion and influence will be critical.
This is not a role for a generalist. The professional skills required are formidable. Engagement in the digital space is a young ‘profession’ and the job requires someone who would be acknowledged by their peer group to be a leader in this field. The successful candidate will have a CV that creates instant credibility and confidence with Ministers, senior officials and digital communicators in Whitehall.
Within six months the Director of Digital Engagement will have developed a strategy and implementation plan and be able to show concrete signs of momentum in executing the plan.
Within a year the Director of Digital engagement should be able to point to two departments whose use of digital engagement are recognised in the digital community as being world class
Within two years the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government
In addition [to all the usual senior civil service stuff], there are a number of additional attributes for the role:
Essential

  • Is a highly credible individual in digital communications
  • Has run a public facing web site of significant size, for example for a broadscaster or newspaper; or has been a leading figure in getting a large organisation to engage through digital channels.
  • Has innovated in web, beyond ‘web publishing’ and can demonstrate concrete personal examples of changing how organisations carry out their core functions using digital channels
  • Understands the technology and software that enable excellent web development, and has experience of advising on its procurement and deployment
  • Has experience of achieving change through influence, especially with policy and delivery officials
  • Has the authority to be credible with Ministers and senior officials

Desirable

  • Has experience of the workings of Government

ONS drops jobs data early

I’ve actually got a lot of sympathy for the team at the Office for National Statistics today. This morning should have seen the release of the monthly unemployment numbers; but due (apparently) to ‘a computer error on automated systems’, they leaked out yesterday – and ONS took the decision to bring forward the official publication. Bearing in mind the market sensitivity of the data, I can imagine the scenes.
As I’ve mentioned before, I was in charge of the web team(s) at ONS for a couple of years, from 2002. It was one of the most frustrating periods of my career: for all my best efforts, my vision of web-friendly database publication went unrealised. Instead, the current National Statistics website is still fundamentally the same 6-month stop-gap site I pushed through in 2002. I don’t know about the underlying data-crunching systems, but I see no evidence of there having been any improvement since I left. They were inadequate then, and they look even more inadequate this morning.
Instead, improvements to government statistics online now seem to be centred on something called the Publication Hub. In effect, it’s a big catalogue of government statistical releases – most of which are still located on the originating department’s website, and are still being delivered as PDF or Excel files. User-friendly it ain’t, placing the priority on ‘metadata’ (which, in statistical terms, means lengthy written explanations of methodology) rather than the actual data. Most people will struggle to find any numbers whatsoever.
There are some appalling quirks: for example, if you press the button to see the homepage button for the ‘next 30 days’ of scheduled statistical releases, you see day 30 first, and have to click two or three times to get to day 1 (ie tomorrow). And whilst it’s good to see RSS has been taken into account, it’s impossible to work out what’s meant to be included in the feed each time you see the orange icon.
I left ONS five years ago because I didn’t believe senior management recognised that the world had changed. In my letter of resignation, I suggested the Office was ‘five years behind the times’. Another five years on, if this Publication Hub is the answer, they still haven’t understood the question… and we’ll have to rely on third parties.