All posts in the topic Tom Steinberg's grauniad chat (Short link)

Oct 27 19:58 UTC

You guys aren't reading the Grauniad?!?

My clip?
"Downing Street's e-petitions site– though little noticeable impact on
government policy"

When you've just dodged a potentially lethal pothole on your bike, you want to
report it there and then. Soon you'll be able to do just that. The developers
of fixmystreet.com revealed last week that an iPhone interface is in the works.

Fixmystreet already enables anyone with a browser to report potholes,
fly-tipping and other nuisances without needing to know which public authority
is responsible for them. All you have to do is click on a map and enter the
nature of the nuisance, along with a photograph if you like.

Although Fixmystreet was originally funded by the government, it is very much
not a government web project. It is one foray in a guerrilla campaign of
helpful but often disconcerting websites to emerge from the charity MySociety,
which celebrated its fifth birthday last week. And there is a promise of more
to come – so long as it finds a way out of what its director, Tom Steinberg,
calls "deep financial insecurity".

If you've been on the web to probe democracy or public administration, you've
probably been to a MySociety site. The charity's best known product is probably
TheyWorkForYou, which lays bare elected representatives' personal productivity
(to the alarm of some). MySociety also built Downing Street's e-petitions site,
which boasts 8.9m electronic signatures – though little noticeable impact on
government policy – as well as the PledgeBank good causes site and
Whatdotheyknow, a web clearing house for Freedom Of Information requests.

The common theme is cheap and cheerful open web technology tipping the
relationship between people and government, in favour of the people. Steinberg
last week called on ministers to spend more of the £13bn annual IT budget on
more projects such as these, and less on giant databases. The future, he said,
must lie with "technologies that empower and uplift, not depersonalise and
degrade" – an implicit challenge to schemes such as the national ID register.

Outsourcing 'cult'

He also laid in to the "cult" of outsourcing IT work. "Government in the UK
once led the world in its own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting
an empire's worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those
things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time
to start bringing them back into the corridors of power."

Unlike many web activists, Steinberg has the ability to be taken seriously. As
co-author of last year's Power of Information review, he has the web 2.0
philosophy ringing through Whitehall – not least in the cause of free
government data.

Steinberg didn't come up with the idea of MySociety – he credits that to a
fellow policy wonk, James Crabtree – much less create its websites, which are
mainly the work of volunteers. However, the 31-year-old former Downing Street
insider's sharp political antennae and humour have been crucial in keeping
doors open to the very organisations that MySociety's websites apparently
threaten to subvert.

Looking back over five years, Steinberg admits that he has shifted the culture
of government "less than we might have hoped". On the other hand, he's
pleasantly surprised by the survival rate of MySociety sites. "We were thinking
in dotcom boom terms, that we'd have a 70% failure rate. In fact we haven't
shut down anything at all." Another shock was the body that turned out to be
most resistant to MySociety ideas. "I didn't think we'd see parliament being so
crushingly slow."

The new FixMyStreet site is likely to tread on more official corns. Unlike most
MySociety efforts, it operates in direct competition to a central government
service, the Connect to your Council function on the Directgov website. (In a
perfect example of unjoined-up e-government, FixMyStreet was originally funded
by the old Department for Constitutional Affairs, while Connect to your Council
was run by the former Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.) It has also
infuriated some local authorities by sidestepping their own electronic
problem-report forms with emails that are more awkward and expensive to handle.
At a recent conference on web 2.0 organised by the government IT managers
association Socitm, Steinberg came under fire for increasing the number of
avoidable messages flowing between citizens and councils at a time when the
government's policy is to slash these by half.

Some participants demanded that MySociety create dedicated links with councils'
customer relationship management systems. Steinberg countered that not only
would this be impractical – several hundred interfaces would have to be written
– but that it misses the point of what is wrong with current e-government
systems. "We want councils to understand that what they're building now is not
good enough for the 21st century. This is an opportunity to recognise that they
need to make their systems parts of the internet rather than little fiefdoms."

Birthday warning

At last week's birthday party, Steinberg tempered his celebratory mood with two
notes of warning. One was on MySociety's own sustainability – to transform
political systems, it has to play a long game. "MySociety needs to work out how
to be here not just in six months, but in 20 years. To do this, it needs to
secure funding."

The second was to the government, represented by Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office
minister whose endorsement of the Power of Information programme has placed
MySociety thinking at the heart of government policy. For all such good
intentions, the government's recent record of IT innovation has been "a tragic
farce", Steinberg said. "I hope we don't have to wait until a new government
comes in to have a decent shot at slaying some of the shibboleths that stand in
the way of decent reform."

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