Want a Smart City? Take the people out!

Recent news: An international technology company plans to develop and operate a massive technology testing and evaluation centre in New Mexico.

The state Economic Development Department announced Tuesday that Pegasus Global Holdings is conducting a study on the best New Mexico location for its facility, to be called The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation. It will require as much as 20 square miles of open, unimproved land and will resemble a mid-sized American city, including urban canyons, suburban neighbourhoods, rural communities and distant localities [...] The projected opening date is 2014.

The centre will be designed to represent a mix of old and new infrastructure found in most modern U.S. cities, according to a news release, and will replicate the challenges of upgrading existing infrastructure to that of the 21st-century “smart city,” operating within a green economy.

The project will derive its revenue from access charges, user fees and the sale of excess utility output, such as power generation, water treatment and wireless infrastructure, according to the company’s website. No permanent population will reside within the center’s boundaries, according to company officials.

A story on this subject can be found at Information Age and even the Telegraph has got on board (entertaining readers’ comments as ever)

I guess this sort of experiment is important in finding the technology that has potential.

From my point of view though, this approach removes exactly what is interesting: people, society and organisations. Wouldn’t you think this approach would make it too easy to generate utopian solutions which will only get messed up by real people and real behaviours?

This article reminded me of this mock town[*] (or something similar to it) built by the Israeli army which the USA military used before the Iraq invasion… They learned all the wrong lessons about how to do military occupation. To put it mildly.

[*] Here’s the same thing treated as an art object.

Open data and personal data systems in the UK and England (+ Scotland and Wales and NI?)

A couple of months ago, Mydex (via William Heath) published a brief UK list of government initiatives on the Ideal Government site, looking at applications of personal data systems (PDS). The motivation is the belief that:

Only the addition of an individual-centric model to the existing organisation-centric model can deliver speed, convenience, privacy personalisation and choice to the individual, and cost savings and efficiency for the organisation based on better online authentication, cleaner data and feeds of personal circumstances and preferences

The past groups services under three headings:

• Systems where a PDS is a prerequisite
• Policies that share the PDS philosophy
• Generic innovation activity where PDS could have a major impact

I put some notes together which I thought might be useful to come back to….

The first thing that strikes me is that it needs to talk more about the challenges raised by devolved/ federated government structures which may have different priorities and approaches to putting in MyData-like systems.

All the items under heading 2 (and many under heading 1) relate to English institutions. What is the situation in NI and Wales? How could the ‘One Scotland/National Entitlement Card‘ scheme fit in here, without being subsumed into a UK-wide structure? (Which wouldn’t be popular with the Scottish government). What about EU-level services? Eg the checking the E111, or the sorts of cross-border validation services that STORK is meant to provide? (It often puzzles me how insular the UK/English debate can be).

Back to more local issues, management (or at least awareness) of police and social work/care records are another obvious area for extension. This is potentially important since these agencies try to work together with health and education professionals when dealing with challenging people and families. Some of my colleagues have been working on systems that allow professionals in these sectors to share (appropriate, controlled and audited) details on individual cases and it would seem logical/fair that the service-user should also have a role, and some ownership over the data held on them.

This raises two further questions:

• The role of NGOs and advocates: to what extent can they act on individuals’ behalf? Not everyone is data-literate and self-efficacious enough to use the data. We could end up enhancing the power & autonomy of those who already have it, and putting another barrier in the way of people who are not sure how the systems work.
• At what point does ‘My Data’ merge into agency data (eg details of ongoing investigations, comments from professionals). Seems to me that identity is shared between the individual and society… and that I need to revert to some books on philosophy!

  More practically, I think the solution is likely to need controlling access and accuracy of data held on systems owned and operated by external business or organisations. The PDS could be a repository for the keys that prove the you have the correct rights. This would truly be empowering people to control or understand the data held on them.

All this assumes that agreed standards are in place with an accompanying support/development process, definitions and codes of practice to ensure consistency in use and application, and an understanding and management of the risks involved. Use of open data implies there also need to be clear rules about copyright, database rights etc.

Final thought: MyDex’s approach is that they will be a repository for securely storing personal data. They are not the first or only company to spot this opportunity in the market – see for instance Abine.com or OwnYourInfo. But I wonder if this is a place where the right part of the public sector could have a positive role – for instance perhaps as an extension of library cards?

Local government and social networking

Dan Slee has just posted a great summary with tons of example of the opportunities that intelligent use of Facebook can open up for local government.

I’ve had a couple of thoughts in response (a bit much for a comment, hence this post). There’s potential for a real tension between having a coherent image, and the needs for individual units to get their approach across. Also, there must be a few people who are uncomfortable with “like”-ing their local authority… a great way of ensuring only positive feedback I guess! Or a reason to brand by location like Coventry has done, assuming no-one else has got there first.

Interesting to compare it with what I came across a couple of years ago on the subject – amazing how little the principles have changed, but how much better they are being applied.

I wonder how long Facebook’s dominance will continue: How should the approach change when there are more than one potential social networking site to use? (Maybe not Google+, but the next thing…?)

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You know what, now that the summer holidays are coming to an end, I may revive this blog.

Meantime, if you are a blogger yourself, you could do worse than complete Catherine Howe’s “Bloggers, Place and Identity” survey…

Peter

Next challenge for petitioning software: the ECI

It is times like this that it is frustrating to live in a city that’s (let’s face it) at the periphery of the EU, and to be working in times of budgetary constraint. There are a lot of exciting developments happening as the European Citizens Initiative starts coming into reality… for instance, the Summit that run in Austria this weekend.

Well, since I can’t be there, and I’ve had the chance to think a little about EuroPetition (see the evaluation presentation at the end of this post) and how it can integrate into new developments like STORK, I thought I’d share some ideas. I’d love it if there was a way of taking them forward… italics in the rest of the text refer to jargon used in the Regulation.

Europe as a modern Tower of Babel…

First, the great thing about the EuroPetition service is that it provides a mechanism for a multilingual ECI campaigning and signature collection process – this is exactly what the ECI needs.

But, we the need to distinguish deliberation by the multinational citizens committee of the wording of the ECI, from providing the infrastructure for collection of ‘statements of support’ (signatures) for the ECI. Does the ECI system need to do both? Would the system support ECI campaigners who speak different languages be sure they are campaigning for exactly the same thing?

Signing the ECI (‘statements of support’)

It is important to keep the signature collection as uncomplicated as possible to make it easy for ordinary people to use (ie only enough validation to prove that a person not a spambot has signed the ECI). There should be a separate verification step to check that the national signature thresholds have been met – this could take a statistical approach.

It might be easy to attempt the advanced e-signature collection process referred to by the Regulation. It seems that these won’t need the secondary verification step that will be needed for statements of support, electronic or paper, but the question is which if any government would actually be able to deal with them. I think that all e-signatures will initially be treated as statements of support.

Security: confidentiality, but also integrity

The ECI application should provide a mechanism to prevent tampering with stored signatures, even if the database is hacked (eg using encryption/digital signatures/certificates)

But… how will it really work?

The real challenges are around how the ECI will be managed by the Commission and the Member States… I’m sure this will have come up at the ECI Summit…

• Creating an ECI service that is certified and accepted by the Commission in time for the April 2012 deadline – this gives us a rough deadline for completion.
• The approach Member States will take to signature verification – will they provide an electronic infrastructure we can check against, or will the ECI service be required to send data to the MSs for verification?

Finally, anyone developing an e-ECI system has the challenge of getting at least one trans-EU ECI campaign on board, to have a decent chance of meeting the 1m signature collection target – and supporting & informing the EU citizens who have chosen to take part.

EuroPetition and the ECI

Oh yes, the EuroPetition project itself had a successful review, back in March. My part of the presentation is below, but first, a presentation from the PEP-NET summit last year that explorded some of these details:

The last few slides of the evaluation presentation below contain an updated overview of the challenges the ECI has set itself (as well as showing where we had got with our thinking):

Enjoy.