We want the front page of our website to demonstrate our current work more effectively and to make it easier for you to find things of interest to you.

Our front page is important as it’s the first point of entry for most visitors to the Citizenship Foundation. Is unlikely we will be able to do substantial work to the rest of the website any time soon, but we are working hard to build strong links across the site and to write more engaging content.

Do tell us what you think. Your feedback is important as it will help us develop a front page that is right for our visitors.

They cover blogging and social media, law and writing and editing content.

They are not policies as such; and please bear in mind they were written for a specific internal audience. But if they could be of use to you do feel free to adapt them (they’re licenced under Creative Commons BY-SA).

I would also be very interested to hear your feedback on them.

“The Big Society is what happens whenever people work together for the common good. It is about achieving our collective goals in ways that are more diverse, more local and more personal.

“The best contribution that central government can make is to devolve power, money and knowledge to those best placed to find the best solutions to local needs: elected local representatives, frontline public service professionals, social enterprises, charities, co-ops, community groups, neighbourhoods and individuals.”

Central to this is a continued commitment to releasing public data for the public to use:

“Public access to public data provides the evidence base for public pressure and action, both on the part of those proposing new ways to deliver services and on the part of service users thus enabled to make an informed choice. This is what we mean by ‘transparency’: the ability to see how government actually works - or doesn’t work.

“…there can be no local innovation without local control of resources. Nor can local decision- making succeed without access to the government data on which informed judgement depends”.

The approach is to “focus on outcome, not process, and to release such knowledge into the public domain as raw data - so that anyone can analyse and visualise the information, spot trends and make connections that would otherwise go unseen”.

I haven’t yet seen anything that puts an expectation on the voluntary sector to release data, and to do so in an open format, but if they are to deliver services that the public are expected to scrutinise then inevitably it will need to happen. And it will, rightly, need to happen across the board - regardless of whether an organisation is delivering a public service or not.

The question then is what data should be released, and how? NCVO is already encouraging charities to release data and Open Charities has opened up the charity register; the Charity Commission itself, however, seems to be lagging behind at the moment.

I expect it won’t be allowed to lag for long though. The voluntary sector may well be about to find itself under a lot more scrutiny, not just from government and funders but the general public too.

There is more discussion around open local data on the Open Local Data Blog.

The strapline on the Beyond 2010 conference programme was ‘More for less’, which was challenged by one or two of the speakers. In the words of Robert Hardy, of Robert Hardy Consulting: ”It’s not more for less, and it’s not less for less: it’s different for less”. In other words, we shouldn’t delude ourselves that technology will somehow allow us miraculously to squeeze more out of existing models with less expenditure: a radical change of culture is required.

That was refreshing, but on the whole it felt that radical change was being expected to come from the adoption of technology rather than being the driving force for it.

There was a lot of talk (particularly in light of the recent Comprehensive Spending Review) of opportunities to bring about these radical changes and efficiencies to public service delivery through the adoption of digital technologies.

Unfortunately I didn’t hear much, over the course of two days, that hasn’t been said pretty continuously for at least the past decade. Back in the late 1990s I was sat in meetings organised by government departments, discussing how technology was going to solve the issues of voter turnout and simultaneously bring down administration costs; little has changed. While the conference speakers seemed oblivious to this, they did seem to believe what they were saying; unfortunately my experience doesn’t tell me that miraculous savings are made by relying on technology, and it certainly doesn’t fill me with confidence that any of them have even half-grasped the challenges they face in transforming service delivery through technology.

Inefficiency is a human trait (or ‘failing’, if you really must): organisations and systems are only as efficient as the human beings running them. And no matter how organised someone is, none of us is a robot: we all make errors of judgment and we all have some days that are better than others. So the inefficiencies of people create complex systems, which in turn exacerbate the problem; if a person is inefficient I expect it’s generally because something about the system allows or encourages them to be. My limited experience suggests that all systems are inefficient but that larger ones are less able to be flexible and responsive. (An example of that might be where an organisation grows because it needs extra capacity to respond to its audience effectively, but at the same time loses valuable internal networks as it becomes less informal.)

And what is meant by ‘efficiency’ anyway, and who decides that? For it to mean anything at all requires everyone in the organisation to be working within the same parameters, which to be set will have to be determined somehow (probably by targets and measurements). And those parameters are themselves the product of the very same inefficient system that they are trying to address.

So how do you safeguard against that? I think skills are the key: if an organisation or system contains the appropriate skills, then human behaviour can be managed and capitalised on effectively. It would seem to me that skills are of fundamental importance if we hope to see such major changes to public service delivery as are being called for. And not just those skills required for using the new tools at our disposal, but skills for every aspect of public life. If we want radical change in the provision of public services, someone in any given organisation needs to champion that and enable it to happen. That in itself requires skills: skills for understanding the nature of the task, for managing people, for identifying issues and solutions, etc; skills even for identifying necessary skills in the first place (a tricky one when you’re at the top of the pyramid). No matter how flat an organisation, there will always be people where the buck stops; if these individuals don’t have the skills to manage the change that people are calling for then it doesn’t matter if everyone else is skilled up to the eyeballs, the exercise will be doomed to fail.

Yet skills were hardly mentioned during this conference.

There was also a noticeable lack of attention paid to other areas of policy, with little acknowledgement that these massive challenges to public services are not confined to their own protective bubble. Formal education, for example, wasn’t discussed as a key component of IT skills development, and yet uncertainty currently surrounds the nature of ICT in the National Curriculum; interrogating and understanding the implications - both apparent and hidden - of all the public data we’re being offered requires skills that currently are tied to the citizenship curriculum, yet there are fears for the future of citizenship too.

Digital innovation in the public realm requires all sorts of other skills, and links across lots of policy areas. In order to for the impending upheaval of public service delivery to have any positive impact, in my opinion, the decision-makers in that process need to be careful not to become blinded by the promises of well-meaning but often excitable digital enthusiasts.

Many thanks to Paul Clarke for his support in writing this.

NCVO, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, has put its ‘toe in the water’ by publishing some of its data to the new datastore in a bid to encourage others to do the same.

‘Essentially, we’d like to see the sector match government in opening up what we’ve got so that society as a whole can realise the benefits of sharing and mashing data together and then visualising it. This space is our toe in the water to start pulling that together.’

However, a number of comments were interesting and enlightening, and will prove invaluable feedback; and, happily, the majority of respondents were satisfied with their experience.

Many thanks to all who gave relevant feedback. We shall continue to work at making ourselves as available and approachable as we can.

We believe this is just due to a couple of css-related issues we overlooked yesterday, and hope to have it fixed within the hour.

Update

This is now fixed.

Most are stylesheet changes, tackling consistency of layout and readability of text. It’s been a lot of work that most people probably won’t notice, and there are still bits to iron out, but it is a lot tidier now.

I have also tightened up some of the content, in particular the information about our work and what we mean by ‘citizenship‘.

We’re conducting a short survey into how accessible we are as an organisation: can you find contact details easily, do we respond in a reasonable time, is our response adequate, et cetera.

We should be very grateful if you would take a few minutes to tell us what you think. The survey will be up for four weeks and then we’ll review it and let you know what our next move is, so keep your eyes peeled on this blog.

In one part of our survey, school students in the 11-19 age range were asked which topics they thought they should be taught more of. I took the data I wanted to visualise and created a new table with it. Then, with the help of tutorials from flowingdata.com, I used the statistical computing framework R to turn the numbers into both a heat map and a set of Chernoff faces. I then used a vector drawing package (Inkscape, to be precise) to tidy up and tailor the images.

Heat map

In the heat map image below, the ‘hotter’ the topic the more important the students thought it was.

Chernoff faces

The bigger, happier and more elaborate the face (in the image below), the more important its associated topic was felt to be. The characteristics of the faces are determined by the data for each age group.

All of that was derived from a csv file of a simple table of data: