Articles
- I’m reading between the lines here, but it fits with how Google has approached other sectors, like events ** aggregate, not individual
- Generating ideas and prototypes early on is OK, so long as the ideas are loosely held. Projects can fail through a lack of good ideas, just as much as they can by a lack of top-cover.
- That moving fast is a strategic tool, with a different set of outcomes.
- Designers should design in a way that embraces high-level concepts but allows for details to be filled in later (more on this coming in a future blog post).
- An acceptance that, sometimes, we are not starting from scratch and the only thing to do is get something done. (By the time Alphagov started, the flaws and opportunities of Directgov had been debated and prototyped again and again at Govcamp, at RewiredState hack days and in the community around mySociety.)
-
Generating ideas and prototypes early on is OK, so long as the ideas are loosely held. (Projects can fail through a lack of good ideas and speed, just as much as they can by a lack of top-cover.)
-
That moving fast is a strategic tool, with a different set of outcomes.
-
Designers should design in a way that embraces high-level concepts but allows for details to be filled in later (more on this coming in a future blog post).
-
An acceptance that, sometimes, we are not starting from scratch and the only thing to do is get something done. (By the time Alphagov started, the flaws and opportunities of Directgov had been debated and prototyped again and again at GovCamp, at RewiredState hack days and in the community surrounding mySociety.) As the development cycle gets even shorter (see Google App Maker and the as a hint of what the future might bring), knowing when to run is only going to get more pressing.
-
The initial work on the Service Manual was in part about removing a general sense of unease about duplication, and about what technical best-practice should look like, as the GDS got bigger. There had been a few sporadic blog-posts, but the process of writing the manual distilled lots of things for the first time.
- Beckton Gasworks in East London was the site of an early trade union victory in the form of the eight-hour day.
-
Facebook and Twitter should repurpose their advert platforms to also share civic information: things like what is happening in the local area - planning applications, blood donations, items needed by food banks, community meetings. They could start to put the altruistic right next to the selfish 2.
-
The approach that Google News has taken for marking news articles as fact-checked should become a global standard, should be embedded in the UI of services and as recognisable as the CE product safety marking.
-
Write and opensource low-level libraries that make it easy to manipulate / generate jobPosting data structures.
-
Fork or contribute to opensource software for publishing jobs, such as Simple Job Board for Wordpress, so that it meets the jobPosting standard.
-
Lobby the providers of back office HR systems to adopt the standard.
-
Lobby the big job boards to adopt the standard.
-
Government mandate that all job adverts published online conform with jobPosting, probably with exceptions for small companies.
-
Government mandates that all jobs resulting from a government contract over a certain amount are advertised on websites that use jobPosting (think Crossrail), probably with an exception for contracts under a certain size. Local authorities could adopt this unilaterally.
-
Government creates an API end-point that conforms with jobPosting and mandates that, regardless of where else companies advertise jobs, they must also post data to that end-point so that the data can be used as part of the Universal Credit service. The API could also be run voluntarily under the ‘make it easier’ approach.
-
Make the publishing of quality job adverts an issue of corporate social responsibility. Encourage big employers like Tesco, who publish their own jobs, to adopt the standard for the wider economic health of the country.
-
Create a ‘better jobs kite-mark’ that publishers who adopt the standard can use.
-
Create a website that celebrates publishers who use the standard and invites people to ask others publically to adopt it, much as Two Factor Auth List does for 2fa.
-
Create a validator that gives job adverts a rating for jobPosting and possibly other useful checks like the use of potentially discriminatory language. Francis Irving built a version of this at a recent Cabinet Office hackday
-
Government adopts jobPosting as the standard to exchange information about apprenticeship vacancies.
-
Government creates an incentive for publishers to use the standard by disproportionately recommending jobs that meet the standard to jobseekers.
-
Government publishes NHS and Civil Service jobs using the jobPosting standard, entrenching the standard in the market.
-
Educate jobseekers to favour websites that clearly publish wages, locations etc.
- It’s happening at 51.5007, -0.1246
- It’s happening at 2016-04-28
- It was a thing of type X
- Here’s a link to more information about the thing: http://example.org Someone should build something that handles this use-case and encourage others to use it. There would be immediate value without getting bogged down in modelling every possible type of planning application and process (that should come later).
Google Jobs will break 90 years of welfare policy — here’s what the policy response should be
Google Jobs will break 90 years of welfare policy — here’s what the policy response should be
In 2013, Ian Duncan-Smith said “looking for work should be a full-time job”. This was to be policed through the ‘claimant commitment’ a document that details, among other things, the number and type of jobs that someone is expected to apply for. People would then present evidence that they were spending up to 35 hours a week trying to meet those targets when they signed-on.
Proving you are spending time looking for work has been a component of the British welfare system for a long time. Before the Claimant Commitment, people had to fill out a paper form detailing the jobs they have applied for, and you can go right back to 1921 and the introduction of the “seeking work” test.
Also in 2013, an anonymous group of benefits campaigners released an app called Universal Automation. Universal Automation automatically submitted random job applications on behalf of users of the government’s Universal Jobmatch website — a service that benefit claimants are told to use to look for jobs (and which allows Jobcentre staff to see what jobs they are applying for).
Universal Automation was an exercise in digital disobedience rather than a useful service, but it was an interesting weak signal too. It asked the question: what if finding jobs became something that took seconds rather than a day?
Last week, Google announced ‘Google for Jobs’ which promises to use AI to determine which jobs people should apply for. This is possible, in part, because of the slow but steady adoption by job boards of a standard for publishing structured data about job vacancies* — the schema.org jobPosting.
Traditionally, job search services have used free text search plus a basic understanding of location to help people find jobs. With jobPosting, in addition to the textual description of a job, structured machine-readable data about things like location, job category, skills, hours and benefits can be included.
Better data, in combination with increasingly ubiquitous AI, mean it’s possible to do smarter things — like recommend jobs that fit both your skills and when you need to pick the kids up from school, or tell you which jobs you could apply for if you developed a particular skill.
Google for Jobs currently looks quite basic, but it (or something like it) will soon start to make looking for work into a ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’ activity, and release an enormous amount of wasted human potential in the process.
So what should happen to welfare policy when digital assistants replace the job of looking for a job?
One response could be to carry on regardless — forcing benefit claimants to continue to present evidence of time spent. But if digital assistants get good enough, then this will become tantamount to getting people to dig holes and fill them in again.
A more mature response would see changes both to what is expected from benefit claimants and to the data infrastructure that government provides to support job seeking.
Benefit claimants should be freed up to spend more time on learning and other activities. They should be able to submit digital proofs that apps were looking for jobs on their behalf or that they completed a course online.
The government should support services like Google for Jobs by investing in data infrastructure that increases the quality and quantity of open data about the labour market and skills.
It should prioritise creating open, real-time datasets about career progression, job titles, available skills and demand from people’s interactions with job centres and HMRC **.
Data about child care availability and training courses should be made available, and research into what skills are needed for particular jobs needs to be invested in.
Finally, government needs to create a regulatory framework for services like Google for Jobs to ensure that they support people from all backgrounds and that any potential for bias baked into the service can be spotted early and addressed.
As good design and AI start to become a feature of the working-age welfare state, one of the most effective interventions government can make will be to improve the quality of data those systems use. The days of having to prove “actively seeking work” are nearly over.
* I’m reading between the lines here, but it fits with how Google has approached other sectors like events
** aggregate, not individual
Originally published on blog.memespring.co.uk
Google Jobs will break 90 years of welfare policy - here's what the policy response should be
In 2013, Ian Duncan-Smith said “looking for work should be a full-time job”. This was to be policed through the ‘claimant commitment’ a document that would detail, among other things, the number and type of jobs that someone would be expected to apply for. People would then present evidence that they were spending up to 35 hours a week trying to meet those targets when they signed-on.
Proving you are spending time looking for work has been a component of the British welfare system for a long time. Before the Claimant Commitment, people had to fill out a paper form detailing the jobs they have applied for, and you can go right back to 1921 and the introduction of the “seeking work” test.
Also in 2013, an anonymous group of benefits campaigners released an app called Universal Automation. Universal Automation automatically submitted random job applications on behalf of users of the government’s Universal Jobmatch website - a service that benefit claimants are told to use to look for jobs (and which allows Jobcentre staff to see what jobs they are applying for).
Universal Automation was an exercise in digital disobedience rather than a useful service, but it was an interesting weak signal too. It asked the question: what if finding jobs became something that took seconds rather than a day?
Last week, Google announced ‘Google for Jobs’ which promises to use AI to determine which jobs people should apply for. This is possible, in part, because of the slow but steady adoption by job boards of a standard for publishing structured data about job vacancies* - the schema.org jobPosting.
Traditionally, job search services have used free text search plus a basic understanding of location to help people find jobs. With jobPosting, in addition to the textual description of a job, structured machine-readable data about things like location, job category, skills, hours and benefits can be included.
Better data, in combination with increasingly ubiquitous AI, mean it’s possible to do smarter things - like recommend jobs that fit both your skills and when you need to pick the kids up from school, or tell you which jobs you could apply for if you developed a particular skill.
Google for Jobs currently looks quite basic, but it (or something like it) will soon start to make looking for work into a ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’ activity, and release an enormous amount of wasted human potential in the process.
So what should happen to welfare policy when digital assistants replace the job of looking for a job?
One response could be to carry on regardless - forcing benefit claimants to continue to present evidence of time spent. But if digital assistants get good enough, then this will become tantamount to getting people to dig holes and fill them in again.
A more mature response would see changes both to what is expected from benefit claimants and to the data infrastructure that government provides to support job seeking.
Benefit claimants should be freed up to spend more time on learning and other activities. They should be able to submit digital proofs that apps were looking for jobs on their behalf or that they completed a course online.
The government should support services like Google for Jobs by investing in data infrastructure that increases the quality and quantity of open data about the labour market and skills.
It should prioritise creating open, real-time datasets about career progression, job titles, available skills and demand from people’s interactions with job centres and HMRC **.
Data about child care availability and training courses should be made available, and research into what skills are needed for particular jobs needs to be invested in.
Finally, government needs to create a regulatory framework for services like Google for Jobs to ensure that they support people from all backgrounds and that any potential for bias baked into the service can be spotted early and addressed.
As good design and AI start to become a feature of the working-age welfare state, one of the most effective interventions government can make will be to improve the quality of data those systems use. The days of having to prove “actively seeking work” are nearly over.
GDS Retrospective #2: tools for making & communities
GDS Retrospective #2: tools for making & communities
Tools that help teams make things faster and tools help teams talk to each other better are very powerful leavers when it comes to digital transformation.
That networks eventually emerged across government in the form of Slack channels is great, and I am genuinly excited every-time I see an update to the GOV.UK prototyping tools and design patterns that edge it towards becoming a solid, generic set of tools.
But, collectivly, we did not realise that this stuff was important early enough at GDS.
The Government Service Manual project could have gone in that direction — a place to share and view progress of projects across government.
And it nearly did (I think the prototype is still on Github somewhere). It could have become a place to link to source code on github, to list team members and resources of a project, and to share progress against the Digital by Default Service Standard throughout a project. A bit like Launchpad does for various FOSS projects. In doing so, it could have set the expectation that projects should be open and that they should share their work, as well as set the expectation of the sort of infrastructure that needed to exist to support teams like email groups, git repositories, blogs, IRC (this was preslack IIRC).
That project was probably never the right place to do that work, but we should have done it in some form, somewhere. We could have provided more tools for communities across government earlier, and we could have built more tools to make it easier to make things.
It’s hard to say why it didn’t happen. Partly we just didn’t collectivly realise it was a priotity. Partly these things are quite boring, quite geeky and hard to explain to people who’ve not had to rely on such tools. Partly they cross diciplins/professions which makes the ownership problem harder and the oppertunity harder to see. Partly there was just lots going on!
Anyway, my main relfection on thisis: sort your tooling early.
Originally published on blog.memespring.co.uk
A GDS Retrospective #1: knowing when to run
A pretty solid approach to building digital services and to digital transformation emerged out of the work of GDS and others across government.
It is a synthesis of established processes of user-centered design, civil service processes and the collective wisdom (and biases) of lots of people. It’s broadly set out in the Government Service Design Manual and can be characterised as setup a multi-disciplinary team of 5–15 people, then do one or more of: Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live.
This is a good thing.
Government now has an approach to building digital stuff that is better suited to a world of the shortened development cycles that the maturity of open-source software, commoditised services and integration testing have gifted us.
Reflecting on my time at GDS, I think there is something missing. Not everything that followed the process succeeded, and not everything that succeeded followed the process.
From the original alphagov project the reset of the Universal Credit project, there are examples of where just making something at speed worked as a strategy to give space and poermission to do more work, and to change the way people view a problem.
When it comes to digital transformation, we are missing a mature approach to knowing when to run and when to follow a more structured process. We don’t have the words.
I don’t know exactly what form that narrative should take, but I think it could include some of the following:
As the development cycle gets even shorter (see Google App Maker and the as a hint of what the future might bring). Knowing when to run is only going to get more pressing.
Originally published on blog.memespring.co.uk
GDS Retrospective #1: knowing when to run
This is part of a series of blog posts about reflections on my time at GDS. See background and caveats.
A solid approach to building digital services and to digital transformation emerged from the work of GDS - a synthesis of established processes of user-centered design, civil service processes and the collective wisdom (and, inevitably, biases) of lots of people*. It is broadly set out in the Government Service Design Manual and can be characterised as 1) assume you know nothing 2) setup a multi-disciplinary team of 5 - 15 people 3) then do some combination of Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Live over a period of 4 - 12 months.
This is a good thing.
The UK government now has an approach to building digital services that is better suited to the world of shortened development cycles that a combination of open-source, commoditised platforms and integration testing have brought us.
Reflecting on my time at GDS, I think there is something missing from that approach, as it is understood.
Not everything that followed that process succeeded, and not everything that succeeded followed that process.
From the original alphagov project to the reset of the Universal Credit project, there are examples of where just making something at speed and setting as much direction as possible worked as a strategy to create the space and permission to do more work, and to change the way people view a problem.
When it comes to digital transformation, I think we are missing a mature approach to knowing when to run fast and when to follow a more structured process.
We don’t have the words** and as a result, it gets used haphazardly as an approach and a risk of accusations of cutting corners
I don’t know exactly what form that narrative should take, but I think it could include some of the following:
Beckton - a tool to build groups of paying members
img {max-width:300px; border:solid 1px #ccc; margin-bottom:5px;} Is it possible to build a general purpose tool for creating a paying membership organisation?
Last spring, I was introduced to Roger Hallam, a researcher at Kings who had been investigating the use of what he terms ‘conditional commitments’ - the “I’ll do X if n other people will do too” design pattern pioneered by mySociety’s PledgeBank service, and later used by KickStarter.
10 years on from PledgeBank, it should be many times easier to build a focused conditional commitment service, because today, we have services like GoCardless and Stripe, as well as things like Twillio and MailGun for messaging.
I started working on something, but never quite finished it. Then just before Christmas, I did some work for Sam Jeffers and the TUC and the idea came up again. Then, after James Darling published his membership related prototype the other day, I thought maybe I should tidy-up the thing I had been working on and do the same.
So, this is Beckton*. It uses GoCardless to create Direct Debits that are only invoked if the target is met. Hopefully it’s pretty self explanatory:
The code and instructions to get it running are avaliable on GitHub.
I have a hunch that there are 4 or 5 missing tools like this, and something like James' membership prototype that are going to be foundational if we are going to get some of the new types of membership organisation that lots of people are talking about at the moment.
It’s hard to know who is going to build them or pay for them though, and I’m not sure it’s something you can easily user-research your way too either.
Activity based permissions
Activity based permissions
I got a CleanSpace Tag pollution monitor via a promotion with the London Cycling Campaign.
Putting aside the fact that users don’t retain rights to the data they generate, it’s a rather excellent idea: build a real-time crowd-source map of pollution by getting cyclists to mount cheap devices on their bikes.
The problem is that it requires an app to constantly track your location, even when the app is not running. This means 1) my location is being stored somewhere, even when I’m not using the device 2) it runs down my phone battery like crazy.
What I would like is to be able to allow an app access to my location only while I am cycling.
Android has a ‘DetectedActivity’ class, which is the closest thing I can find. Although ideally, it would be an OS level preference.
I can’t find any papers on the general concept of activity based permissions or authentication, though.
Originally published on blog.memespring.co.uk
Retrospective
Retrospective
I often wonder how different things might have been if I had not gone on holiday after the beta of GOV.UK launched. Growing organisations have points in time when the future gets fixed, and that was one of them.
While I’m proud of a bunch of the work I did in subsequent 4 years, I never really ever got to set the creative direction at GDS directly again and I never got to blog.
Along with many others, I also mostly worked on things that we didn’t write about at the time. Not because they were secret in any way, just because, for one reason or another, it wasn’t practical or efficacious to do so.
It’s easy to forget that right up until GOV.UK went live, even that project was pretty contentious. We were unable to explain a lot of the design decisions we made. The same goes for most of the transformation projects GDS helped departments with.
As Russell says, history gets written by the bloggers. But there’s lots of good work that didn’t get blogged.
The positive side of this is that I, and many others, got to see a lot of different bits of the puzzle of government, and now is probably a good time to write down thoughts, missed opportunities and new possibilities for another generation.
So, with the ‘Retrospective Prime Directive’ and the civil service code firmly in mind, I’m going to have a go at recording some ideas that never quite made it, but are probably buried away somewhere in the GDS GitHub attic, and some thoughts on what the digital future of some of the government services I worked on could be.
Could be one blog post, could be a dozen.
I hope others do the same (Sarah already has), collectively we probably have some useful insight into how good government could be.
Originally published on blog.memespring.co.uk
Is the internet the problem?
As ever, Julian is both almost certainly right about this and has the clarity of thought to state it properly (and as ever buried in a post mostly about other things):
I have the view that the “Internet” part of the “Internet of Things” is the problem, with all these servers, gateways, analytics, and remote controls from anywhere in the world. None of it does anything useful, because the value of data and control of a thing is inversely proportional to your remoteness from it in time and space.
The answer is therefore going to be nearby. It’s not ever going to be found from pushing it out to some faraway server in China.
What we really want are “Things with Internet Technology”. That is stuff with Wifi, Webpages and Wisdom. No nonsense, fun, and easily reprogrammable on an escalator of betterness to a high plane than the bare ground we start with.
Designing digital services that are accountable, understood, and trusted (OSCON 2016 talk)These are…
Originally published at blog.memespring.co.uk on November 23, 2016.
Designing digital services that are accountable, understood, and trusted (OSCON 2016 talk)
These are the speaker notes and slides from my talk at OSCON 2016 last month.
Hello.
Welcome to this session about power and importance of designing digital services that are understandable, accountable and trusted.
I’m hoping to convince you that designing digital services that are understandable, accountable and trusted is now a commercial as well as a moral imperative, and that building an open society in the digital age is about more than open code.
And that, whether you like it or not, if you work in software or design in 2016 you also work in politics.
My name is Richard Pope. Quick bit about me.
I worked for the Government Digital Service for 5 years, part of the team that delivered GOV.UK. I then went on to work with teams across different government departments and policy areas.
Before that, I setup the labs team at Consumer Focus, the UK’s statutory consumer rights organisation, building tools to empower consumers. I’ve worked at various commercial startups including moo.com and ScraperWiki.
I co-founded the Rewired State series of hackdays back in 2007 that aimed to get developers and designers interested in making government better.
The last piece of work I did in government was on a conceptual framework for the idea of Government as a Platform. Government as a Platform is the idea of treating government like a software stack to make it possible to build well-designed services for people.
The work involved sketching some ideas out in code, not to try and solve them upfront, but to try and identify where some of the the hard design problems were going to be.
Things like: what might be required to enable an end-to-end commercial service for buying a house?
Or what would it take for local authorities to be able to quickly spin-up a new service for providing parking permits?
With this kind of thinking, you rapidly get into questions of power.
What should the structure of government be?
Should there be a minister responsible for online payment? Secretary of State for open standards?
What does it do to people’s understanding of their government?
How and where should you build in opportunities for recourse for when things go wrong (which does happen from time-to-time).
This is the Arthur Dent problem. In Hichhickers guide to the When he has just worked up to the surprise that the council are going to bulldoze his house:
And that, at the heart of it, is the subject of this talk.
How do we build stuff that people can understand and trust, and is accountable when things go wrong?
How do we design for recourse?
I’m hoping to convince you that, whether you like it or not, you also work in politics. That software is politics.
This image is from a book called ‘The New Anatomy of Britain’ the journalist Anthony Sampson.
He published a book approximately every 10 years from the 60’s on the subject of power in the UK. Each book included a diagram - this is the one from 1962.
The size of the bubble denotes how much power he thought that group had. In this one, the Aristocracy' is still significant enough for a mention.
This is the one from the early 80’s. The Civil Service looms large (This was the age of ‘Yes Minister’. Trade Unions and nationalised industries also feature.
In 2004 the centre of government, in the form of the prime minister is shown as a lot more powerful. As is what we’d now call ‘traditional media’ (Fleet Street / TV). Despite being the age of ‘Web 2.0’, digital doesn’t get a singled out.
I think these diagrams are useful because I think they demonstrate a couple of things really clearly.
Firstly, they reduce things down to an abstract landscape of power. There is only power - be it commercial or political, accountable or unaccountable.
Secondly, they show that power is mutable: it changes over time, and it can be change, and that can happen quite rapidly too (as the changing power of unions illustrates).
But, fundamentally, they show this: that politics is about the distribution of power in society.
In the second decade of the 21st century, digital services - code and design - are changing how power is distributed.
To illustrate how, I’m to going to give a couple of quick examples, from different sectors:
Society’s ability to regulate industries effectively is limited by its ability to access and understand code, as we saw with the VW emissions scandal.
Research from Carnegie Mellon University found that men were far more likely to see Google adverts for high paying executive positions than women.
The decisions developers make about how they model adverts on job publishing platforms have an effect on people’s ability to find work.
Debates about workers rights are increasingly debates about code. The employee tracking and conditions that are coded into the platforms of Deliveroo and Uber are changing what it means to be employed.
The other day, there was the suggestion that the slump in the pound was the result of algorithms feeding on news stories from social media. (Possibly some of these could have been generated by bots. It’s bots all the way down!)
Facebook’s dilemmas around news algorithms are pretty well documented. The decisions they are faced with about censorship and quasi-regulation are the things that, historically, only nation states have had to deal with (but ofcourse Facebook lacks the opportunities for recourse that nation states have in place - at least in the western tradition).
Connected devices are redefining what privacy - a fundamental human right - means. And we are, in turn, being asked to trust opaque machine learning systems with that data. This is a screen-grab of Google Now requesting access to a Nest thermostat.
Uber is winning the battle for the future of public transport through a combination of legal brute force and amazing service design.
But, long-term, could we see them replacing democratically accountable civic transport networks?
And that is not the only area the ability of our elected officials to make transport policy is being impaired.
Back in May, there was an election in London for a new Mayor.
One of the flagship policies of the Labour candidate was a ‘hopper ticket’ - bus users would be able to change busses as many times as they liekd with an hour.
This is a big deal for people on low incomes on the outskirts of London. Clear policy to try and address that.
The policy actually launched a couple of weeks ago, but in a slightly in the different form.
Just after the election, Transport for London released a statement saying that, in the short-term, they could only implement the policy for up to two bus rides.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like TfL couldn’t fully deliver on an electoral promise because they couldn’t change the code, and the candidate and the press couldn’t know this during the election.
I imagine that was an interesting first meeting.
Government policy is increasingly expressed in code like this.
So, if politics is about this distribution of power in society, software is now politics.
The decisions of designers and developers are a political force of their own. So this is what I mean when I say I think you work in politics.
And we are asking users to trust us with more data, to allow code to make more decisions for them all the time.
You are in this bubble!
Now, it’s possible to see all this in a negative light. Run for the hills and disconnect! Reality or nothing! But I think we have reached a really interesting point from a design point of view.
And it’s this:
If you want your users to trust you with more data, and make more decisions on their behalf.
If you want users to start trusting their data in your machine learning system.
Or if you want users to trust your device in their house.
This is the fundamental design decision facing people building digital services right now.
It’s time to stop designing digital services to be easy to use and to start designing them to be understandable, accountable and trusted and easy to use.
Or to put it another way: ‘It just works’ is not good enough anymore.
So, we need to figure out how to wire these attributes - understandable, accountable, trusted, into the services and institutions of the digital age.
It’s time for some new design patterns.
Incidentally, we’ve been here before: the manufacturing and industrial revolutions led to new institutions and practices that took the work of entrepreneurs and put it to work for society.
There are four areas I think deserve our attention:
Can we make accountability and transparency part of the design of services?
This is a hypothetical service for starting and managing a company. Now, obviously the service should be designed around user needs, and users should not have to understand the structure of government to use it.
But that is not the same as obfuscating how government works.
So, what if you could understand why that service is the way it is directly from the service? For example which government ministers are responsible for its safe running?
How the service is performing?
What is the underlying legislation for the service? Why does it exist and how can it be changed?
What definitive data sources does it use?
This is a government example, but what would a commercial equivalent be?
Maybe making it clear exactly how much was paid to an uber driver and if it meets living wage levels, directly on the email receipt?
Or making it possible to understand supply chains and environmental impact when buying a product from Amazon?
Or display government food safety inspection data next to a delivery order from Deliveroo?
Could they do all this in the app, at the point of use?
In fact, Google has started showing some work in this direction with Google News explicitly marking fact-checked articles.
This is only going to get more important as superficially good design abstracts how things actually work further away from the user.
So maybe you should be able to ask Alexa “did the people who assembled you have the right to paid parental leave?”
As we saw with the bus-fare example earlier, more government and non-government services are expressed in code. The code is the definitive article and wanting to change policy requires an understanding of how the code works.
So, what mechanisms do we have to understand how the code works?
One way is to obviously examine the source code directly.
Luckily the UK government increasingly does open its code.
I was part of the team that drafted this a few years ago - it’s the Digital By Default Service Standard, and it includes a requirement to open up the source code of new projects.
Other governments have since made similar commitments.
Now, obviously not everyone can read code - although journalists and consumer rights organisations probably do need to get better at it - and there are many circumstances where organisations will not want to release their source code.
Maybe we can look at other tools of the software development tool-chain to help expose the rules.
If services published their tests, would it help people understand how they work? After all, Gherkin syntax is designed to be understandable by non-coders.
Here are a couple of examples that explain the rules about free prescriptions in the UK:
Could the publishing of software tests help politicians make better promises?
As software agents of one sort or another (bots, digital assistants, news feed algorithms) start to make more and more decisions for us could publishing of software tests be useful for making bots more transparent?
You can’t ‘view source’ on Siri or Google Now.
So, might you get things like this.
A couple of years ago, I built a proof of concept bot called Habitat to test this idea — it used Gherkin tests as the user interface.
It worked surprisingly well, at least for exposing simple, deterministic decisions.
But tests are only one way of exposing how code works. We could also see the emergence of software deposits organisations for holding private code and that consumer rights organisations or government inspectorates have the right to audit. Some of this already happens in the gambling industry.
For bots using machine learning, the public publishing of training sets will probably also become important.
The next area is ‘permissions’.
Take a minute to think about permissions. You might think that this is already solved,
Probably the most important research question in digital product design today.
We are now pretty used to apps asking for permission to use our cameras or access our location. But we are not yet used to the idea of different services exchanging data about us, beyond maybe email address.
I’d like to show you an example of how that could work in a government context.
That is not how government works at the moment. And that is only a prototype.
But we are going to have to figure out design patterns for exchanging new types of data in a way people understand.
The other reason this is a hard problem: it is also a moving target because of more data and more devices. We are struggling today with a few devices and data points.
I think this quote from Charlie Stross sums up the problem we face.
And I think there is a parallel here to how the tools we needed to organise the web had to change over time. Back in the late 90’s, a hierarchical list of categories was a perfectly acceptable way to organise the web for people, but as it got bigger we needed better and better search; personalised search; machine learning assisted search.
When it comes to permission systems, we are currently the equivalent of the Yahoo homepage.
The argument here is not just transparency.
Services providing an access history to users, should become an accepted standard because putting users in control of their data is the best protection organisations have against fraud and that users have against misuse.
This is a mockup of a government transparency log, but something like it could equally apply to a commercial service.
Again, I’m not sure we have a clue what design patterns will work here - especially as the amount of data expands.
There is no single answer and this subject needs serious investment by governments and tech sector.
I think Facebook have gone on record to say they want data sharing to become more of a design problem and less of a policy problem, which is encouraging.
Finally, for users to really trust stuff in the digital world, we need trusted 3rd parties to do some of the hard work for them.
And this means giving some elbow room to some new digital watchdogs.
We are all familiar with the idea that new technology resulting in regulatory institutions.
It took this book in the US to change the law around car safety.
In the UK, The Consumers Association was set up to test the products of the manufacturing revolution.
What will the watchdogs of the digital age look like?
Can the tools that we use to develop software become the tools of consumer watchdogs?
Environmental campaign groups might start automatically checking open government data for breaches of regulations.
We could see third parties actively verifying datasets and checking facts.
The approach the GDS is taking to open registers is intended to enable this - they using signed Merkle tree’s so others can verify the integrity of a government register.
So a legal watchdog could independently and automatically verify the integrity of the Land Registry.
Or an app on your phone might verify the food safety rating of the takeaway you just walked in to.
Data validators become advocacy tools when they are checking for compliance with data standards that have an effect on equality in society.
This is a validator for the jobs advert standard that the government has adopted. Try it out on your company.
Single purpose monitoring services like twofactorauth.org and OpenDiversityData seems to be another emerging pattern.
The work going on around software supply chains is also really interesting.
The effort towards reproducible builds of Debian for example - being able to say exactly what set of code is running on a device.
Could using the code scanning tools currently used by companies to identify open source licence restrictions in their codebase could be repurposed to identify if vulnerabilities?
This is going to be increasingly important in safety critical systems - you want to know if the system operating the breaks on your car is the one it is supposed to be. There is an excellent talk from Fosdem on Safety Critical FOSS - Jeremiah Foster, I recommend looking it up.
We need to ask ourselves this question. In a world of Amazon, Facebook and Uber - do we need a global consumer rights org? Who is going to explain all this to users?
So, these are some important areas we need some new design patterns for.
And if you work in the digital industry, you are in this bubble.
Like it or not, you work in politics.
I could go on about ultimate power corrupting and all that. And the moral angle is very important.
But questions of accountability, understanding and trust are only going to become louder.
These issues are only going to get harder to solve as we ask users for more data and to trust code to make decisions for them.
The organisations that understand this and start thinking about how to make services that are accountable, understandable and trusted will have the advantage.
Facebook and Twitter as public service networks (it’s not just about the algorithm)
1) It doesn’t have to be operated by a government, it could be a new institution setup by the industry, but government seems most likely.
2) I had an unsuccessful attempt at this with [Streetwire]([web.archive.org/web/20081...](http://web.archive.org/web/20081219040000/http://www.streetwire.org/)
) back in 2009 (but then it didn’t have a global audience of billions!). I am currently working on a platform to try and at least collect information like this in a structured way so that other services could use it.
Originally published on blog.memespring.co.uk
Facebook and Twitter as public service networks (it's not just about the algorithm)
It’s pretty clear that the code that chooses what we see on social media needs to be more transparent.
Hopefully, we will start to see governments1 move to some form of regulation model where code can be inspected and held accountable (the UK and US governments are already doing this for the software in gambling machines).
Surely there will also be progress towards explaining how code works, even if the code itself cannot be revealed.
But I worry, that because ‘The Algorithm’ is seen as the problem, that is the only place we look for solutions. I wonder if the question should instead be: “what would a general public service requirement look like for Facebook and Twitter?”
2 thoughts for starters:
1) It doesn't have to be operated by a government, it could be a new institution setup by the industry, but government seems most likely. 2. I had an unsuccessful attempt at this with [Streetwire](http://web.archive.org/web/20081219040000/http://www.streetwire.org/) back in 2009 (but then it didn't have a global audience of billions!). I am currently working on a platform to try and at least collect information like this in a structured way so that other services could use it.
Brexit, open data and dangerous products
Originally published at blog.memespring.co.uk on October 24, 2016.
Dear England
Dear England,
You have another decision to make. A decision about the sort of country you want to be now the referendum has been decided:
You can ask your politicians to keep on administering the country much as they always have, while working to find an institutional home for the various things currently done by the EU. That is quite a task. More than enough to keep parliament busy (especially while also trying to deal with whatever fallout the referendum has on borders, the economy, society and a divided country).
But will it be enough? Enough to make England the sort of place you want it to be? Enough to heal a divided, and in places, angry country? Enough to fix the mistrust in politics? Enough to keep up with an exponentially changing world where the digitisation of everything is creating huge questions about the future of every aspect of society?
The fact is that many of our laws look out of date, and many of our institutions do not look fit for purpose - and judging by the referendum campaign - are not trusted, are not understood, are not effective and feel remote.
We could all find ourselves back here in 5 or 10 years without any of these things sorted out, anger focused not on the EU but some other target.
There is an alternative though.
We could try and find find something to unite around: a shared patriotic, progressive mission building something new, to redesign how we run our democracy for the 21st century.
Finding a shared mission might be the only thing that can unite the country, and I’m convinced it is the only thing that can address the issues that immigration is a proxy for (ever more hard-line policies on immigration will only embolden those who call for the hardest of lines).
For this to work, every institution would need to pledge to renew itself, every sector of society examined. Below are a few examples of the questions you could be asking, if only you choose to.
Political Parties
People increasingly display multiple and often vague political allegiances. At the same time, people have the most spare time in human history, and technology has given us the ability to organise large numbers of people, and to communicate with them, at near zero cost.
But political parties are still operating a ‘Get Out The Vote’ strategy. Get the message right (truth optional), knock on the right doors and that’s it.
That parties see ‘A Vote’ as a thing to be ‘Got Out’ is symptomatic.
Every political party, but especially the Labour party, need to articulate what it means to be a political party in the digital age. Not in terms of short-term political victory, not in terms of left-vs-right, but in terms of national interest : how should politics be operated in the UK?
Media
Media organisations (both new and old) are optimising for people to reinforce their beliefs in social media bubbles. Politicians are following suit. In places, this made the referendum debate look indistinguishable from that of conspiracy theorists.
By any measure, the media failed you during the referendum debate. But how do you want the media to operate? What regulatory and ethical framework do you want for the media in the age of Facebook?
Income and welfare
The welfare narrative of the last parliament stigmatised many and framed the debate about welfare and tax in terms of ‘strivers and skivers’. Hopefully, the post-referendum voting analysis means income inequality as an issue can no longer be ignored.
But you, England, need to decide what shape you want the tax/welfare graph to be. Everything from guaranteed incomes to flat-taxes to new tax bands could be up for grabs, but only if the way we have the conversation is renewed, in terms of the shape of that graph.
As a country, we are in a good place to be able to do this - the UK has a real-time tax reporting system and a highly flexible (in legislative terms) welfare framework.
Government accountability
The EU, in the context of the referendum, may come to be seen as a warning about what happens when a government institution is not understood by people (either because it is too complex, feels too remote, or it is obfuscated deliberately for short-term political reasons).
For people to trust government, it is not enough that it provides a good service, it needs to be understandable and accessible for people to feel that they have any agency (especially when things go wrong).
You have an opportunity to demand a new contract between those elected to administer services and those that use them. For example: as more services are delivered digitally, it is possible to put information about what elected officials and what organisations are accountable for a service, at the point of use.
You also have an opportunity to look at every sector - train companies and academies for example - and ask “is this accountable enough”?
Digital national infrastructure
That non-profit organisations like Democracy Club are having to build and operate the infrastructure needed for a democracy in the digital age (basic things: like lists of who is standing for election!) is symptomatic.
Despite lots of good work in recent years, many of the systems we use to operate the country are just not fit for purpose and are rarely designed to empower people.
You could wait for things to get incrementally better, or you could demand that the government treats building ‘Government as a Platform’ as a national priority akin to HS2, and with a focus on designing for empowering individuals as much as ease of use, so people start to feel more agency and ownership.
Devolution and reform
Whatever you think of the EU, it has provided a counterbalance to the power of the government. At the other end of the scale, in local government, many of the recent reforms that have been billed as ‘localism’ were actually about letting local government find where to make cuts, or about centralising power in Whitehall.
Outside the EU, we will be left with power concentrated in the House of Commons (soon to be smaller), and real electoral power concentrated in a few constituencies.
Do you really want so much power concentrated in one place? Will it really be good enough if, at the end of the whole process of leaving the EU, you haven’t also decided what to do about the House of Lords, about hyper-local-devolution, or about voting reform?
It used to be easy to point at things that looked like progress. That seemed to stop sometime around 2008. Equal marriage and the Olympics now feel like the last gasp of a period that was more optimistic. Regardless of how you voted in the referendum, it is hard to disagree that there is a lot more uncertainty about today and a bit less optimism.
The only faint hope seems to rest in creating something positive: a rolling, democratic, progressive, English revolution. Something that everyone can feel part of. Something that everyone can unite around and might just restore some trust (so hopefully, we never again find ourselves in this situation again).
This was written as a contribution to the #DearestEngland project
EU
Thought for the Day is an anachronism, but there is one (only one) that has ever stuck in my head. It was broadcast in 2012 by Lionel Blue and it was about Europe, particularly about Europe immediately after the war. This is the transcript from the BBC website:
While spring cleaning, I found a packet of postcards I’d sent to my parents from Holland just after the second world war. To my surprise I’d forgotten how grey wartime food was. At the end even potatoes and bread were rationed. We dined on snoek. But in Holland, I wrote frenziedly, real cream oozed out of cakes, and sandwiches overflowed with meat. And with an exchange rate of ten guilders to the pound, living was cheap. 8 bob a day covered my youth hostel, cigarettes and chips. I couldn’t afford dances or cinemas and I wasn’t allowed in sex shop being too young. So I mooched around looking for freebies which is how I fell from heaven into hell.
Along a well built street I noticed a ruined facade. A faded notice said Hollandsche Schouwburg - Dutch Theatre- but there were no programmes. I tried a door, it opened and in the gaunt roofless theatre, an English notice among bunches of sodden flowers said this was the collecting place of men women and children awaiting deportation to the death camps. Their sufferings it said were indescribable. I sat down and wept.
Back at the youth hostel the students comforted me.
There was light ahead, they said. Schuman. Monnet and Adenauer were starting an iron and steel community, to make future Franco-German wars impossible. It was indeed the first step towards the present European Union.But now I’m frightened. I see the same signs that accompanied the end of the Weimar republic and the rise of the dictators. Currencies in trouble. Swastikas at football matches. Massacre at Srebrenica. The search for scapegoats, the rise of media demagoguery. Loving ourselves but not our neighbours as ourselves. The endemic problems of European tribalism, economic and spiritual. Heaven and hell are very close, and the devil is in the detail. To finish on a foody spiritual note - here’s a saying from Lao Tse a Chinese prime minister of long ago who became a contemplative hermit in his old age, unintentionally founding a new religion.
‘Govern a state as you would make an omelette’ he said-‘with care.’ I’ve never personally succeeded with omelettes so I can’t help there. Mine broke up into scrambled egg which with a dollop of Jam is truly gorgeous. Sometimes if you’re lucky or if you pray hard enough, failure can turn into success. May it be so with Europe!
Whatever the failings of post-war Europe and the EU (and there are quite a few), I want Britain, and England, to remain part of an organisation that exists, at its foundation, to favour cooperation and agreement over war and animosity. Everything else is frankly just noise.
Policy options for getting wider adoption of the jobPosting standard
The UK government has adopted the schema.org jobPosting standard as the format that it will use to publish job vacancies on the web.
Better job adverts are important for a lot of reasons, as pointed out by Citizens Advice. In response to a tweet from Phil Rumens, below is a list of possible ways to get wider use of the standard beyond government.
Make it easier
Change the law
Make it desirable
Intervene in the market
2 local government platforms someone should just build
1) Where things are (as a platform)
Reuse the datastore and editing tools behind open streetmap and use it to start managing geographical data (parks, opening times, protected views, lamposts) for a single council. Then give a login to people from other councils and get them to do the same. Use the tagging system to drive out what is common between councils and what differs
2) Things that are happening at a location (as a platform)
Lots of local notices (planning applications, parking suspensions, licencing applications) can be boiled down to:
A thing is going to happen
Here’s a description of that thing happening
Gherkin - a universal language for accountable bots?
You can’t view source in Google Now.
Software agents of one sort or another (bots, digital assistants, news feed algorithms) seem set to make more and more decisions for us.
How will we know how they are reaching their decisions? How will we know when a decision based on a something that aligns with our best interests vs the company who provide the software?
Will some critical bots need to become subject to auditing and regulation? (OFBOT anyone?). If the public sector starts building digital assistants into its services, how would a parliamentary committee ever understand what it does?
I watched the live feed of Bot Summit 2016 the other day - Martin O’Leary talked about various ways to make bots more understandable to users: expose the artifice; be explicit, not implicit. He pointed at the blogpost that goes alongside the Sorting Hat bot that explains in plain English how it works as an example of exposing the artifice of the bot.
Having a human readable explanation alongside a bit of software, in an agreed format, could help users understand the software they use and help regulators audit.
I’ve written before about the possibility of regulatory bodies doing something similar when they publish their data using the Gherkin language (aka Cucumber). I’ve also built a proof of concept building a digital assistant that runs on gherkin syntax input but a user.
What if all the makers of digital assistants and bots - regardless of how they are written, or if they are open or closed source - started publishing a description of how the software works in Gherkin?
GIVEN a user has an account WHEN a story is liked by 5 or more of their friends THEN it is recommended to them or
WHEN a user is outside AND more than 1 km from home THEN display nearby bus stops or
WHEN a user asks “what should I have for dinner” THEN reply with a random recipe
It’s not about the technology! (Apart from when it is).
“Digital/transformation/business is not about technology it’s about design / strategy / culture” is a recurring meme. It can be a comforting thing to cling on to, and it’s probably true a lot of the time, but is also not true in some important respects.
Technology does matter. Good digital / design / business / transformation / culture / strategy requires an understanding of the materials.
Open Streetmap came into existence 10 years ago in part because of affordable consumer GPS units and open-source GIS software; bespoke on-demand printing services like moo.com because of high-quality digital printers; many of the ‘web 2.0’ services became possible because of Ajax.
Who knows what Web RTC and other decentralised technologies are about to do to how we use the web and the sorts of things that could be designed to meet user needs? Or the quiet revolution in the capabilities of mobile web browsers? Or Yubikey and other new password technologies?
If you don’t understand the materials you are working with, you can’t build the right thing, even if you go about it in the right way. You can’t build what you can’t think of in the first place.
Sometimes the right question to ask is ‘could we meet our user needs better using this new technology?’.
The same thing applies to system level design.
Novel uses of human readable software tests, ‘reproducible builds’ and audited software supply chains could fundamentally change how regulatory bodies operate.
SOCITIM trying to improve and standardise the design of local authority websites and services without solving the underlying problem of how code and data get shared between hundreds of organisations (and an understanding of the technology available to do that). Users of local authority digital services are stuck with bad services, in part, because that underlying problem has not been solved. Design standards without an understanding of the current state of technology are less potent than they could be.
So what’s the solution?
For one, digital leaders need to spend more time understanding the current state of technology, and make sure they have technologists and developers in their organisations making decisions, not just building things. (How many of the people at board or senior management level in your organisation would count themselves as technologists?)
The move from wireframing and mockups to ‘designing in-browser’ has changed the way things get designed for the web, but I think it is time to go further. The dominance of mobiles and tablets mean teams should be designing and developing directly, with multiple devices on their desks and in their demos. Commoditised services like Heroku, Gocardless and Twilio, and mature web frameworks mean it is possible to get real products, or multiple variations of a service, into the hands of real users in the time it used to take to build a prototype or mockup.
Finally, design should be a genuinely multidisciplinary task, something that anyone can do, not something that is ever more specialised. I’d go further and say that dedicated design teams (and probably dev teams in many circumstances) should not exist. But that is probably a future blog post.