Lockdown rules differ across the UK and are set by different, overlapping layers of government - UK, devolved, local. The result is it’s hard to understand what the current rules are for any given location. GOV.UK lists the rules for England, set by the UK government only, not those set by the devolved administrations or local authorities.
Business over a certain size have been made to write risk assessments about the measures they are taking to keep staff and the public safe. They have been asked to publish these, but it seems few have, and those that have are mostly published as PDFs. So it’s not possible to understand the measures in place at a particular venue or report back if they are being stuck to.
A range of apps and practices have sprung up to support contact tracing by recording who attends a venue. But the public has to relearn the process at each venue.
These are all problems that good design, shared standards, and digital platforms are good at solving. Well designed digital services can abstract away the complexity and organisational boundaries. They can push important information based on context using structured data. And they can crowdsource datasets where they are incomplete.
Whose job is it to do this during the pandemic? There is a clear public interest.
Since the debate about digital contact tracing started, I’ve had a picture pop into my head from the Human Geography 101 module from when I was an undergraduate. It was a set of horizontal ‘tramlines’, each one representing a person, with the x-axis representing different locations - work, home, cafe etc. I think it was representing movement around New York. The message I think we were supposed to take away was that maps and grid references are not the only way of representing human movement around a place, and besides, most of us are too predictable to require a high level of resolution.
The use of commercial platforms at the beginning of the crisis to “go where the users are” to share public health messages could have been the beginning of a new public service remit for commercial platforms. The effort seems to have faded. Given many are location-aware, that feels like a missed opportunity.
As part of the alpha.gov.uk project in 2011, we prototyped using the reach of central government’s website to surface local alerts for things like planning applications (if a user had entered their postcode for another task, and with permission). Now feels like a good time to revisit how to give local authorities the ability to push messages based on location.
Back in the late 00’s, Foursquare and Gowalla were the future of location. I wonder how the track and trace and tech debate would have played out in 2010? Probably same-but-different tech exceptionalism.
Crowdsourcing was in vogue back then too. Google Maps crowdsources still things like how busy busses are, but today it seems like there is less of it about (maybe all the commercially prized datasets have been collated). Who’s job should it be to crowdsource if supermarkets have hand sanitiser at the door or not?
Every bus stop in London has a unique number, you can text it to a short code to find out the next bus. It’s a low(er) tech fallback in the absence of an app / smartphone. Is is naive to ask what if this, but using UPRNs as the unique code, in the context of track and trace?
QR codes had been abundant and useful for some time, but there’s still a gen-x technologist snootyness about them from when they were the next big thing in digital advertising.
The state of structured data about the non-public health response to COVID 19 is woeful. At work, I’ve been working with the TUC and others to start plug some of the gaps around COVID Secure risk assessment data. It’s only part of the picture though, and without a full picture, we won’t know what interventions are being stuck to, and which ones are working.
I wonder what lessons the HSE could learn from FixMyStreet and WriteToThem?
A few years ago, I had an attempt at building a personal assistant where the rules were written in human-readable code. One of the things I experimented with was an API that answered the question “when I am inside, do X”. The inside/outside check was based on the outlines of buildings from OpenStreetMap. Not always perfect, but probably good enough for a nudge, especially when combined with other heuristics.
The various web apps that are popping to fill the gaps left by the lack of an official app are probably a data accident waiting to happen.
Even some basic, consistent, design assets and patterns for venues might help create some expectations and norms. Where’s the design manual?
I just listened to Rishi Sunak’s announcement about the first steps towards restarting the economy and getting people back to work. I can’t comment on the economics of it (beyond the size of the numbers), but I think there are a few digital policy gaps that will need filling:
- To close the policy feedback loop, the government will need much better data about what types of jobs are being created and where. It can get some of this from job adverts, but that’s not enough on its own. It also needs to look at data from RTI and Universal Credit claims, and low friction ways for companies to report new jobs directly.
- Hiring more work coaches is a good thing, but they will need better situational awareness of the local job market. This means revisiting the tools that DWP provides to work coaches so the investment becomes an increase in support rather than an increase in compliance monitoring. (Work coaches also need to be empowered to help solve problems for people beyond the organisational boundaries of DWP — anything that might help people get back to work).
- There are some big ethical questions about how the welfare system is used to encourage people back into work in the age of COVID. Getting those wrong will undermine the argument that the government is doing what is right. One way to navigate that is with better data about what DWP requires of claimants via their Universal Credit accounts, and if it actually results in better outcomes.
- Not all jobs are equally free of risk. However, because there is no standard way for employers to publish their COVID Secure risk assessments, data about how safe particular workplaces are is hard to come by. And risk assessments are not the only data gap. Encouraging people back into work will be easier if the safeguards in place are clear.
The UK government’s aim to use digital to grow the economy as we learn to live with COVID-19 is probably the right one. But will policymakers go looking in the right place for growth?
The old policy framings of regulation vs deregulation, central vs local, public vs private are increasingly invalid. A focus on ‘more digital’, or ‘more data sharing’ could mean a growth agenda fails on its own terms.
The real opportunity of digital is in the reduction in administrative burden across every part of society. The automation of the mundane everywhere. The move from transactional to real-time. And doing this in a way that maintains public trust by aligning how data and technology are used with our democratic values.
This is not a question of removing ‘red tape’ (‘red tape’ is not a problem if it is handled by machines!). And it’s not just about business. It’s about health, welfare, education too. It’s about making everything from buying a house, to applying for benefits or understanding changes to the built environment, something that ‘just happens’ while happening safely.
The elimination of administrative burden will require policymakers to think beyond tweaks to existing activities in the digital economy. They will need to focus on fixing the plumbing of the UK’s data infrastructure, public and private. It will mean breaking the silos of government so that joined-up services can be delivered in the civil servants, private companies and charities. This needs to be done in a systematic way.
The UK should aim to emerge from COVID in the years to come as a truly digital country. The route to that (and growth) is the ruthless removal of administrative burden.
With apologies to Matt Edgar for re-purposing the title of his excellent blog post Most of government is mostly service design most of the time. Discuss.. If you’ve not read it, you should.
It often seems that the design of government services comes down to three things:
Making it easier to manage, use and join datasets so that administrative burden can be reduced to as close to zero as possible for the public; services can be made more real-time; and enabling the creation of value in the form of new businesses, service offerings or insights.
Choosing to make it harder to join or use datasets, so that people’s rights are respected and there is less opportunity for misuse.
Mechanisms to correct errors, address misuse and understand how things work so that we, as a society, can hold to account people responsible for the design of a service.
In the UK today, 1 and 2 are essentially determined by the structure of government departments rather than choice. 3 is too often absent from the design of digital public services and hard to prioritise when business cases are based primarily on efficiency. A systemic understanding of all three is just generally missing.
In part, these things are the domain of database theory, and rule of law principles and digital rights. In addition to an understanding of service design, senior civil servants across government need a better understanding of the accordances of databases and the ability to prioritise the design of rights into public services.
Apple and Google have, through the design of their contact tracing APIs, removed choices from democratic governments seeking to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. If (if) a centralised model will lead to better public health outcomes (and some people are a making the case that it is) then their design choices have made this harder. As Peter Wells points out, in creating an arbitrary limit of one-app-per-country, they have also removed the ability to meet different types of need (for example, an app for NHS workers where they can use check-in type design pattern to register that they are on a non-COVID ward, or record the PPE that they are wearing).
This is policymaking by API design. It also represents a new type of technology exceptionalism: not that technology must be the answer, but that the most pressing problem to solve is one of data privacy, rather than efficacy. Efficacy gets to play in the space demarcated by the APIs.
It’s easy to see why they have taken this approach. Government’s abuse their power. iOS and Android are global platforms, and their APIs will be used in a range of political circumstances. Google and Apple are also both American companies, so if they were not, unconsciously, calibrating their response to the risks of their own country’s political and healthcare systems, I’d be surprised.
The UK has a centralised, publicly owned, democratically accountable healthcare system. There are precedents for centrally held healthcare systems, and Public Health England has shown it can be very vocal when there are attempts to use health-related data for immigration purposes. There are also technologists working in government who can help shape policy.
That’s not for a second to say there is no risk of unethical use of data the UK. There is also more that can be done to increase the transparency of the UK app in addition to the welcome open-sourcing of part of the system (something that as far as I can tell, Apple and Google have not done). But it seems like a statement of the obvious that different countries will have different risk profiles and circumstances. So why shouldn’t we, as a country, get to choose?
For the record, I’d much prefer a decentralised model if it can be shown to meet the needs of the public, both directly as users, and indirectly through public health officials. But that is not the point of this blog post.