Simon Whitehouse has already written about the fuller discussion. Here I focus on building the relationship between developers and the council.

This is theoretical stuff, written from the point of view that you won’t get anywhere if you don’t treat people appropriately. The practical and political hurdles are many, and being from outside the sector I’m not qualified to comment on those; but needless to say they need overcoming before this model will work.

There have been a few schemes where developers have been rewarded with lunch or drinks for thrashing ideas around, but this is hardly sustainable. What happens to those ideas? How do you ensure your friendly developers don’t get disheartened or disillusioned?

In my opinion, there needs to be a genuine partnership between the developers and the council. This must be encouraged and managed by the council and must start the moment someone shows any interest.

The journey might look something like this:

[If it's worth it, I might turn this into a flowchart]

1. A developer visits the council’s open data platform, where they can search the ideas that are ‘Completed’ or ‘Under development’;
• OR they can offer an idea. If it matches existing keywords the developer is presented with possible duplicate ideas;
2. If there is no match the developer may submit an idea;
3. At this point the relationship begins. The developer’s idea is logged as ‘Potential’ and the two parties enter an agreement;
4. They must agree parameters for the development (these could be pre-determined requirements from the council, including deadlines and milestones);
5. Agreement of those parameters constitutes a pre-procurement agreement; in addition:
1. The council agrees to support the development until completion or until the agreement is terminated (see 5.4);
2. The council agrees not to use the developer’s idea independently;
3. The council agrees that the developer is not bound to develop anything at all;
4. The developer agrees that the council can terminate the agreement at any point if the basic parameters are not met;
6. EITHER: The council may offer an endorsement but no financial support
1. If the developer agrees then the product must not change without approval from the council;
2. The idea is now ‘Under development’;
3. If the product does change, or the council disapproves of any changes, the council may withdraw its endorsement;
7. OR: The council may now offer the developer a procurement agreement
1. If agreed, both parties are bound by it;
2. The developer’s idea now becomes ‘Under development’;
8. Only when the product is launched does it become ‘Completed’.

The point is that the relationship between council and citizen needs to change if anything meaningful is to come of sharing information.

Of course the council needs to retain some control over its own products, but it also needs to enter a proper, mutual arrangement with the developer if it is to keep their trust. A process such as the one outlined above should assist in that.

Such a process also ensures that the council only puts its name to products that meet its own standards. While a council can’t control how people use its open data it can control what it endorses.

If adhered to, this should help build confidence between the local authority and the development community. It should also enable a whole swathe of improvements to services, which otherwise the council would not think of or be able to develop.

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With user testing it’s easy: the client pays a company an extortionate amount of money to test their product; or, if it’s being done on the cheap, buys lunch for a few folk and tests the product on them instead. People might even do the testing as a favour, but that requires them to have some level of emotional attachment to whoever’s doing the asking.

With public consultation the reward is harder to quantify, but it still needs to be there.

On Tuesday evening I was involved in giving some feedback on a local council web initiative. I wasn’t paid or fed, and I had no emotional attachment to the consultant (the council). I do, however, have an emotional attachment to the group that was being consulted and so I am quite happy to have taken part. But had I been consulted directly I would not have been happy at being told that my suggestions would be ‘added to the log’ and ‘may or may not be used’. In fact I would have been angry: they’d taken up my evening and wouldn’t even be bothered to let me know if and how they used my suggestions. (And no, I see no reward in simply helping the council as I have little faith in its ability to do things well.)

Many public consultations seem to treat their participants as free user testers, which seems something of a paradox. Some reward (which could be simply the satisfaction of doing someone a favour) is important. If there’s no payback – fee, lunch, feedback, satisfaction, etc – then the participant will probably feel used and alienated.

The same goes for ‘digital engagement’ initiatives; which tend, in essence, to be attempts at consultation.

Last night I went to a panel discussion on ‘Connecting with constituents: MPs and Digital Engagement’, chaired by Andy Williamson of the Hansard Society. On the panel were Jon Kingsbury of Nesta who talked about the new MyMP iPhone app (funded partly by Nesta and partly by Public Zone), Tim Hood of Yoosk and Paul Hodgkin of Patient Opinion.

All three initiatives aim to listen to people and feed their input effectively into the public processes, while also making them a valued and engaged part of those processes. There are in fact lots of online initiatives trying to do this, but I’m not sure many of them have really grasped the importance of payback. MyMP doesn’t seem to have considered it (I may be wrong of course). When I posed the question to the panel last night, Yoosk appeared to put faith in the conversation developing to the point where the participants felt bonded enough in some way (as part of a network perhaps) for payback to occur naturally. Maybe that will happen, but it seems a bit of a gamble.

Patient Opinion was apparently the only of the three initiatives to have understood the importance of payback (feedback, in this case: they gather stories from people and are starting to post outcomes of those stories). It seems telling that Patient Opinion was set up by a doctor – not a politician, charity or think tank – and was the only initiative last night that didn’t claim to connect citizens directly with elected representatives or public figures.

The problem seems to be that perennial one of the Web: lots of people have great ideas for layering technology on top of society, and rush to deliver them. What doesn’t seem to happen is a questioning of the underlying processes; it’s all very well encouraging conversation, but what do you do with it?

Someone asked why on earth there were all these different tools available when there should simply be one in the obvious place: Parliament’s own website. One reply was that if people don’t trust a site or organisation (or they don’t have a connection with it) they won’t use its tools, and so these third-party tools are crucial to engagement. While I agree with that I also agree with an assertion made by Andy Williamson: people already have social tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc) that they use to talk about general stuff of interest to them, and when those conversations wander into politics it is in those spaces that they’re conducted; in general people won’t seek out a dedicated site or application for holding those conversations.

Last night the old adage seemed to ring truer than ever: meet people where they are. And having a voice is great up to a point, but feedback – or reward – is critical in the end.

Note: in this post I use the definition of ‘consultant’ as that of someone who asks questions, not someone who gives professional advice.

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Dan Slee (Walsall Council) and Stuart Harrison (Lichfield District Council) and myself have compiled some arguments for open local data for people to use when faced with making the case for it.

We’ve also put together the Local Data wiki, so that this work can be continued collaboratively.

Visit Arguments for open local data

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Socitm is the membership association for ICT professionals in Local Authorities and the public and third sectors. Their Better Connected report, now in its twelfth year, compares local authority websites against a set of criteria designed to:

“…provide an informed view of the quality of the experience that members of the public are likely to have when engaging with local government through a website. We do this by examining how well each site deals with common queries and situations.”

Considering that claim, it seems a shame that in order to acquire a legitimate copy of the report itself you must pay £400 to subscribe to Socitm Insight. (You can, however, download a free spreadsheet showing how each council was ranked.)

So Stuart has kindly agreed to share his thoughts on the report with anyone who’s interested.

The discussion is being held in Moseley Exchange at 6.30pm on Monday (26 April).

If you intend to join us please take a moment to register on our Eventbrite page just turn up.

Update:

I’m going to try live-streaming the audio on Bambuser, and if I can find time I hope to release the audio mapped to any slides that Stuart might use. I might also get round to live blogging it here.

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Martha Lane Fox:

“… Government is going to move most of its services onto the web … so that it can start talking to people in a more interactive way, I guess…”

BBC Breakfast presenter (Bill Turnbull?):

“… What does that mean?”

Martha Lane Fox:

“I’m not a politician, I’m only independent champion, and I’ve raised this challenge to get the ten million people who’ve never used the internet online by the Olympics…”

The rest of the interview is about how she needs to encourage people online for economic reasons, but it didn’t give me the impression that she’s thought very hard about the social and civic implications of being online.

I’m sure she’s doing a great job, but it feels a bit like the blind leading the blind. In my view the person who’s championing digital civic engagement really should be more critically aware of the arguments around it.

Martha Lane Fox on BBC Breakfast, 29 March 2010

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Visit OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles

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