As part of the EuroPetition project, I created for myself (and the others in the project) an idealised summary flow diagram of the process. It’s a four-stage model is used to illustrate the processes involved during the life of an individual petition , based on one I had done last year relating to the UK Parliament. Downloadable PDF available below.
Back to RIBA again this year for a rebranded Future Dem 09, in a nice retro modernist/deco environment. Someone had helpfully blanked over the power-sockets so laptop users were in a general mild state of panic about battery life, even your blogger who is a proud owner of an EEE PC 901.
The day started with a talk by Will Straw on progressive blogging. Starting with the usual overview of the USA – which he sees as being 5 years ahead of the UK – he did turn to the UK in the end. One of the main difference he sees is the effectiveness of the political newsgathering operations of the BBC, Sky and the Guardian, so bloggers can’t control the agenda. In his whole talk though, I’m not sure that he mentioned MPs once. Are they so unimportant? Another unmentioned word: Europe… ignore it as much as you want, that’s where the UK is. Surely there must be some useful experiences to get from France, Sweden, Germany or the Netherlands?
Questioners pointed out that the agenda seems to be about influencing the MSM (the direct audience is small). The lack of a business model was also a concern.
The PEP_NET session started with Chuck Hirt describing the Eastern European experience: it seems there is still (after 20 years) a legacy of dependency on government combined with a distrust of institutions that is proving fatal to engagement in politics – whether online or not. It also turns out that apart from cultural centres in Hungary, there just aren’t communal places for people to meet. Perhaps we need a Village Hall movement? Why is Hungary different?
Gugliermo Celata descibed two projects he has been involved with in Italy – OpenPolis – which has been creating a database of all 150,000 politicians in Italy (!) to track their links, activities and opinions. The other is OpenParlamento which in effect reproduces the functionality of TheyWorkForYou and the revamped UK Parliament site. He’s still looking for a business model.
Youth engagement was the next theme, with Tom Lodziak (UK Youth Parliament), Beccy Allen (HeadsUp) and two folk from Channel 4’s Battlefront talking. It’s not really my area, but it did seem to me that the there was a spectrum running from closed membership with free debate, to debates that are open to the (young) public but within a quite carefully controlled agenda. Apparently Battlefront even found it difficult to include debate on Fox Hunting… amazingly, because you’re not allowed to promote illegal things… More on thus session at Mel Poluck’s blog.
A great review of community organisations and hyperlocal news was given by Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online, then lunch!
E-Petitioning
Cllr Mary Reid started off a workstream with a review of how petition has evolved in Kingston from a purely paperpbased form to their current (could I call it third generation?) system. The three success factors she identified were:
- Processes need to be in place to handle petitions seriously
- Simplicity is essential – so no identity checking is needed, just like with paper. Councillors can make sensible judgements on whether a petition reflects a genuine issue or is generated by a vocal minority.
- Petitions bring in in peoplle who are never in the community or not where paper petitions are – so makes accessible to wider audience than paper would
Tom Steinberg spoke about Number 10’s petitioning system, and acknowledged that there have been no underlying procedural changes to reflect the needs that petitions raise (they’re basically dealt with in the same way as a letter from a concerned citizen would be). He chose to highlight the benefits that can be gained from standardising data – some good quotes over at the BBC (something from me there too!). You can read my take on the subject of data standards for petitions here.
The final speaker was David Lowe, from the European Parliament’s petitions committee (PETI). He emphasised that they see their role as supporting petitioners – trying to take an informal, supportive approach wherever possible. Many of the issues raised in petitions are more properly dealt with by national, regional and local governments: the challenge is in fact to pass petitions back down the system – which is an interesting contrast to the model EuroPetition has been working with, and something for us to think about as a project.
- Catherine Howe of Public-i has put her own presentation online together with her notes with admirable speed, saving me some effort!
- … Apologies to the people I’ve not written up detailed notes on, particularly the people in the Engaging Citizens session – Simon Burrel of Involve, Stef Gray of BIS and Eddie Gibb of Redbridge (I’d been seriously impressed by their work at last year’s event)
End of the day: Politicians’ session
How things have changed. Last year, MPs were criticised for burying their heads in the sand over blogging. This year, the chat in the panel was all about Twitter, and there was a consensus that it is risky for prospective candidates to blog[1] and even that it only makes sense for an MP to blog if they have something to say, and the ability to say something well (and probably a willingness to risk their career[2])
I am an avid reader of (and general disagreer with) Tom Harris’s blog – I am seriously impressed by his clarity of writing, never mind his expertise on Dr Who. I was not disappointed seeing him in action in the panel: Tom’s background in the media as a former local journalist showed in his thoughtful answers on the impact of the internet on local media – and the risks of dominance by the BBC, no matter how benign its agenda. During the debate, he made a passionate argument for the value of party and partisan politics – and threw in an intriguing reference to the possibility we are moving towards a post-democratic politics. I’d love to find out more about what he meant.
But, as with Malmö, the real benefit of an event like this is the chance to catch up with old contacts. So in the end I was very happy to have left home at 5.30am only to get back at 11pm. Time well spent!
- Other blogs on this topic: Noella Edelman has been very quick with a much more complete account of the day here and the Headstar site will no doubt pick up on other accounts as they’re written.
viz, [1] Iain Dale, Kezia Dugdale and [2] Tom Harris
Some thoughts from Tuesday’s EuroPetition project meeting
One of EuroPetition’s partners is the city of Malmö. Since we were due a project meeting around this time of year, we decided to organise things so that it took place just before the EU eGov pre-, un- and official conferences that have been getting everyone[*] so excited this week.
I’m sure there will be some blogs and commentary coming out of the big events, so instead of that I thought I’d write about a couple of things that came up at our meeting.
From local to European: from Spanish to Dutch, Italian, English and Swedish
The EuroPetition system is designed for a bottom up process: a petition will start locally, and then bubble up when it’s clear that there is a trans-regional or European angle. We spent some time talking about how this this linking together would work.
The starting point is this: you have to understand what you are signing – which means it has to be in your language. There are a surprising number of wrinkles to sort out in the details behind this principle. The challenge is how to share knowledge of a petition across countries without going to the expense of a certified translation of every potential euro-petition, but at the same time assuring the people creating and signing a petition that is the same as its fellow EuroPetition in the next country or region. At two extremes we have – a Google Translate of the page, possibly with a bit of tweaking to make the text intelligible; at the other, it is possible to require the same level of official certification that EU laws do, making sure that legally signficant terms are precisely and predictably translated.
In our discussion, we moved towards ensuring that wherever possible, petitioners retain ownership of the process, even when it is running across several languages. I hope it’ll be their ultimate responsibility to be happy that the translation is accurate and to be active in marketing the petition with campaigners in all the affected regions. That should at least give us a bottom-up mechanism for ensuring the petitions are accepted as being ’similar’ enough to each other by the people who matter.
I think we’re getting there – but it’s a learning process, so it may be that we try out different options in the project before committing the code to specific routes.
Validating signatures and petitions
It also became clear that we need to think more about how to validate signatures and petitions. The current project is aimed at simple petitions so verification is not an immediate issue. By simple, I mean there are no threshold numbers – this is the model used by the Scottish and European Parliaments.
But there are circumstances where you do need to have assurance on who’s signed the petitions: perhaps if there is a 5% threshold required for certain actions to take place, as is being built into the new system in England & Wales, or there may be a tight definition of ‘citizen’ or who can sign a petition based on residency or some other requirement.
We have decided that I will produce a short report outlining the issue and current practices as seen by partners. I’ll probably start on this in the new year so we have some concrete facts and proposals together by the end of the project.
…and yes we did talk about the evaluation process, which is ticking along nicely, thank you.
Overall I am really impressed by the effort the municipalities and local authorities are putting into this: right down to working with me to get a good volume of feedback on the initial questionnaire we will be running very shortly.
There’s no denying that there is a social element to European projects, and it was great to meet everyone in the project team again and see some new faces from our Italian partner and from the Swedish cluster, from Malmö, Stockholm and Gothenburg.
You’re know you’re in a good project when there’s laughter round the table even as difficult issues are being discussed. People are more productive when they’re having fun 
Finally: thank you to Grethe Lindhe and everyone at Malmö for organising things so well!
[*] If you don’t know what I’m talking about – follow the links and welcome to my world!
I wrote this sitting in a plane flying to Copenhagen, on my way to Malmo. I thought I’d get my thoughts together on why a common data standards for e-petitions is a good idea, as a kind of follow-up to my earlier post. It was either that or continue trying to read the Daily Mail.
As I see it, a common standard serves three purposes:
- First, simple support for transparency and openness
- Second, to support the transfer of data between petitioning systems, for instance prevent lock-in to a particular application. In effect, this is a structured database dump or record transfer.
- The third purpose could be to allow remote interaction with the petitioning system – to submit or sign a petition.
Even simply making data available in a standard format offers fantastic opportunities. At the micro-end, the data could feed a Facebook widget: not just to show which petition you’ve just signed, but also for instance, to find a petition on a topic of concern to you – and if it’s not available in your council, find out how the subject has been approached elsewhere. It’s easy to see how this could be extended to including selecting a target council and creating a new petition – or for combining and internationalising petitions, as EuroPetition will do.
Cross-council comparisons would also become possible at the macro-end: for instance which councils have the shortest gap between petitions being closed and resolved and/or debated by councillors. The area I am most interested in as an evaluator and someone interested in public policy monitoring.
On the other hand, as it is publicly available data, balancing privacy and openness – and data protection – becomes an issue. This might mean that there are at least two levels of data exposure needed (secure, to a known and trusted system, and general/public) with all that that implies about identity, authorisation and authentication.
The next stage is to define the exact data to capture and standards to use, starting point from a clear idea of what the data is for – who will use it, what decisions will be taken on the basis of it. The next thing would be to standardise the names and definitions to support the key dimensions to petitions which are needed to support the process, its monitoring and evaluation.
What to do
Where can we begin? Well, a good place is this: part two of the consultation being run by Future Gov on data standards for e-petitions in England & Wales is now underway. Find out more on their site - and get your comments in by the end of this month.
It is a golden opportunity in place to get the groundwork in place for standards that can be applied in England and then across Europe, as and where e-petitioning is adopted. So take it – the standard is potentially international, so your comments are valid even if like me you don’t live in England or Wales.
PS This topic is particularly timely since there is a session on e-petitions at the eGovernment pre-conference in Malmo on Wednesday. And similar issues will apply to EU Citizens Initiatives, on which the Commission has just opened up a consultation.
I’m off to Malmö – two related reasons.
First – the regular EuroPetition project meeting. I’m looking forward to how everyone is progresing in their cluster, and talking about our progress with the evaluation process. What I’ve seen so far of the applications seems really exciting!
Then, on Wednesday, there’s the preconference for the EU 5th Ministerial eGovernment Conference with the grand title of:
eGovernment Research and Innovation: Empowering Citizens through Government Services across Sectors and Borders
As well as the session on e-petitions, I’m looking forward to catching up with people from the European e-participation community. There’s the inevitable plans for Twitter chat can be followed through a dedicated Twitter console.
A
n update (now updated on 13 November).
Tim Anderson of Norfolk County Council was kind enough to contact me offline. Through him, I’ve learned that local government is also on the case in having another look at data quality.
Firstly, there are the Timely Information pilots being funded by CLG (more information at the ESD-toolkit site). The general consensus there is that there is a need data standards for public sector info to allow a degree of quality marking to be applied to mash ups. Presumably these standards will be the compatible with the ones Emma Mulqueeny spoke about?
There are some developing via a project toolkit is involved in with the Local e-Government Standards Body (an organisation I hadn’t heard of before). The LEGSB is working on the semantic web and standards for web services relating to re-use of data, service directories and links to DirectGov, NHS Choices and Business Link websites etc.
An example of the sorts of ongoing discussions on the changes that are needed to supprt mashing of data can be seen over at the esd-toolkit site: A new look at the standards underpinning business processes and managing records.
Already, local authorities in England get annual data quality auditing as part of the Audit Commission regime and random checks each year on National Indicators to make sure they comply. Which is good, but as the Audit Commission’s report points out, the focus of the quality proces is then on data required by central government – which might be different from a local activist wanting to mash it together for another purpose.
For an example of where all this is going, have a look at the Nolrfolk Community Mash-Up project which is described across at the esd-toolkit site.
But still: how many of the mashers will understand the limitations of the data? Will bad decisions be taken as a result? What happens when you mash together data of varying quality, and how can you be open about the resulting error margins? How many people understand propagation of uncertainty anyway?
It’d be interesting to do a couple of case-studies to explore this. There must be something from America by now?
Update 13 Nov: Link to Tim Anderson and Norfolk’s open data work
Opening up data seems an inherently good thing, but what about the risks you’re taking on when using the data, particularly in a context that it wasn’t collected to be used for?
As Philip Virgo pointed out last week when he was discussing an Audit Commission report on the quality of the data that is recorded by government organisations, he was taught to:
…assume random errors rates of up to 10% on original data entry unless the material was entered and checked by those with a vested interest in its accuracy and with the knowledge and authority to ensure that errors were identified and corrected. We were also told to assume that it would subsequently degrade at about 10% per annum unless actively used and updated by those with the knowledge and ability to update the files.
(This would of course apply to a lot of corporate collected data too)
Or, in the words of the Audit Commission:
The priority for local public bodies has often been to ensure the quality of the data needed for top-down performance management. Unwittingly, the requirements of submitting data nationally have sometimes eclipsed the requirements of frontline service delivery and public need. (para 20 of the report)
That implies that some fields (the ones central government are interested in) will be more accurate and consistently recorded than others (everything else). The solution is in the same paragraph:
… Data generation should be a by-product of normal business, not an end in itself. The starting point should be ‘what data does the frontline need to deliver its business well, and for us to know that is happening?
That’s the way to ensure any errors get fixed immediately.
Maybe the open-data movement needs to start thinking about a to be a way of marking the relative dodginess of a source of data: so that for instance if you know 10% of records may be wrong in one dataset and 5% in another, you can judge what margin to add in when making decisions based on an analysis of the data.
Is there some sort of implicit assumption that opening up the data will force a general clean-up and improvement in quality? Even so, we should never be assuming the data is perfect.
Just wondering…
Update (later on 9 Nov): Coincidently, Ton Zijlstra has posted a great “Open Gov Data Poster Flow Chart” he developed with James Burke over at his blog. It’s designed to help civil servants “decide if and how it is ok to open up data sets they have available” …the current version doesn’t include an explicit step for thinking about whether the data quality would support (safe) export, but maybe that will change in future.
PS This was triggered by a posting in Emma Mulqueeny’s blog – which I’ve just come across – it seems a great place for tracking what’s happening with open data in the UK government. Something to add to the list.
Overview of the subject – with links and accompanying presentation. All good stuff
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Presentation at the Amsterdam Social Strategy Talk, talking about the issue of public participation and open data in relation to government innovation.There were plenty of smart people there, including practitioners from the government of the Netherlands and key players behind the Dutch Digital Pioneers initiative that funds social innovation.A very simple introduction to why this topic matters, plus a consideration of some recent critiques of transparency initiatives, decorated by a lovely data visualisation of world population growth from the G-Econ project.
The subject is certainly in the air!
The International Teledemocracy Centre celebrated it’s 10th Birthday last week. More at our website.
Just think how much this field has changed in the last decade – I’m proud to be part of team that has been around to describe, evaluate and help create working e-participation and online engagement systems.
I wonder where we’ll be in 2019?
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The e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) mandates the adoption of XML and the development of XML schemas as the cornerstone of the government interoperability and integration strategy.
The Government Data Standards Catalogue sets out the Government Data Standards (GDS) to be used in the schemas and other interchange processes. It also contains the standards agreed to date. These standards are also recommended for data storage at the business level. The Catalogue comprises 2 volumes:
Volume 1 – sets out the rationale, approach and rules for setting and agreeing the set of Government Data Standards (GDS) to be used in the schemas and other interchange processes. Volume 1 sets out the general principles, i.e. the rationale, approach and rules for setting standards.
Volume 2 – sets out the Data Types and Data Items standards. The source for this is an XML document which is published as HTML files or as a PDF file on the Govtalk website.
