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:
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.
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.There is going to be so much detail in the Great Repeal Bill - so many tiny decisions with potentially big impact - that it’s going to be hard to know what we are losing and what we are gaining. One thing we could lose is open data about dangerous products.
For reasons I’ve never fully understood, the body seemingly responsible for publishing recalls of dangerous products in the UK is a private organisation: The Chartered Trading Standards Institute.
They publish UK product recalls on their website, the terms and conditions of which forbid the reuse of the data online:
“You are welcome to print off pages from this website, link to them, or reproduce them, other than on another website, as long as you do not do so for financial gain or distort the information they contain.”
When I worked for Consumer Focus, we wanted to build a simple tool that sent email alerts about dangerous products. The long-term vision was to build a service that automatically issued recalls based on your purchase history (something I still hope a retailer like Amazon or John Lewis manages to get around to one day).
The Chartered Trading Standards Institute actively protect their copyright on the data (the Terms and Conditions forbid reuse of the data online), so we could not use that.
Luckily, EU law requires that national product recall lists are also published on the EU’s website under the Rapid Alert System (RAPEX), and RAPEX has a much more permissive approach to reuse:
“may be reused for commercial and non-commercial purposes, free of charge and on a non-exclusive basis, in paper form or in any electronic format, throughout the world”
The UK will presumably no longer be covered by the RAPEX system if we leave the single market.
We could loose access to open data about dangerous products, unless parliament includes in the Great Repeal Bill a requirement to publish product recall notices on GOV.UK under the Open Government Licence.
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
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.
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
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.
## Change the law
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 it desirable
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
## Intervene in the market
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.
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
- 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).