Revisiting the Local Government Platform

Lately there has been a batch of talk about “(local) Government as a Platform” including blogs from Dave Briggs, Gavin Beckett, Mark Thompson, and others, with video clips from John Jackson and a slide deck from Methods Digital. This all links to recent blogging about single platforms for local government websites and digital in local government generally.

All of this made me reflect on two things – my original blog posts on the topic in 2012 (and whether what I’ve done since is consistent with that vision), and whether this is all really doing what it needs to in 2015, is it solving the problem that we need to solve today.

And, to be quite blunt, I think the answer to these questions are “meh” and “no”, respectively.

From 2012:

“Local Government (in this model) is a hub. It’s purpose is to connect people (and places) with needs to people with funding to people who can provide services to help under the governance and ownership of people with the political mandate to do just that – with the aim of improving the lot of the people and places under its jurisdiction.”

I would just like it to be noted that I was, and am still, being descriptive of the purpose of local government. That is, I was thinking local government IS a platform, not local government AS a platform. I was using this as a lens to try and make sense of the industry I work in, not as an explicit design of a possible future state, although it does imply some changes to the way we do things*.

Obviously things change and move on and I am not an exception to that, so I’m here and now asking myself how the above description stacks up with my current understanding and thinking it’s ok, if a bit granular. Clearly government of all kinds has the aim of connecting people and improving stuff (although those things aren’t usually so causally linked), that’s kind of obvious but it doesn’t quite get the point. What is the unique thing that government does that no other kind of business can do?

The short answer to this might be “user research”. Every council employs – by statute – at least a dozen people that do user research, they get performance managed every four years and regularly get fired if they are a bit crap. Our councillors don’t always use the same methods as professional user research teams but they are seriously committed and highly visible and work to the same ends.

Of course, plenty of commercial operations do user research as well, but the difference is that when councils (or indeed governments generally) do it then it is a public conversation. People canvas the views of local people about what their priorities should be, then formulate these views into policy documents (“manifestos”) and everyone gets to vote on which person and policy document is the best: the winner then gets to try and make these priorities a reality, with the conversations around this being made public immediately, and their policy work is scrutinised and held up to public account. If people don’t like the results then 4 years later they’ll be fired and another mixture of policy priorities will be voted in.

The GDS mantra since day one: “What is the user need?” – I would say that government exists to uncover and highlight the (sometimes rapidly) changing needs of its citizens and the places they live in via an ongoing public conversation. Local Government is a platform when – and only when – it enables those conversations and allows a variety of organisations to design services to satisfy those needs, but the choice and delivery of those services – including design decisions around digital services – is a tactical one. It’s the conversation that uncovers the needs that is core to Government, not the services.

So perhaps we don’t need to spend lots of money on new technology, we just need to listen to what people are already telling us and find better ways of reflecting it. Better conversations lead to better targeting of services (not just ours either) and, ultimately, better results.

For these reasons I think that the conversation about “local government as a platform” shouldn’t be a conversation about technology or even about business models, when it should be about democracy and finding ways to support the work of active citizens – our councillors, voluntary sector organisations, businesses, families and agencies – specifically linking them to data insights, and giving them direct control over more levers of power to make them more relevant and give them more power to uncover user needs.

In the process we need to become more platform-like – but by changing our working practices and culture, not just by installing software. We in local government need to be the platform, not just build it.

I want to blog a bit more about this in the coming weeks, but obviously would welcome the chance to broaden this conversation out. I’m an IT bod, not a political theorist.

 

* Specifically, articulating this description led me to do a number of things:

• look at the use of data and intelligence in this context, specifically to support councillors (with Lucy Knight, who is taking this forward)
• establish a local ODI Node to help the whole community benefit from public data resources
• look at prototyping different public business models
• support the implementation of integration technologies to help knit web services together
• specify open data and APIs in standard procurement specifications
• get involved in a small way in a number of specific procurements with the aim of improving the openness of the chosen solutions.

#ukgc11: What do we need from a location-based architecture?

Following on from my overview of the UK Govcamp unconference I want to put some markers down for the thing that excited me the most: the potential of location-based services to deliver on the localism agenda and some ideas on how that might work.

I’ve got quite a low tolerance for reading HM Government documents so the fact that the Government published a plain English guide to the localism bill (see http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/localgovernment/localismplainenglishguide) was music to my ears.  There seem to be a few salient points which act as a background for this discussion:

• The new general power of competence will give councils more freedom to work with others in new ways to drive down costs. This might, for example, give us the freedom to utlilise an existing location-based service to experiment with their APIs and/or pilot some services.
• the Community right to bid to run local services effectively means that some of the facilities currently provided by the local council may move out to community groups. Doing this while maintaining the benefits of joined-up information mean that a solution architecture needs to be in place that provides an interface (in its broadest meaning) to allow a 2-way information flow between the public asset and the local authority and other local public services.
• there are some reforms to the planning system included. Although not directly relevant to this solution architecture, the planning system is often hampered by lack of access to information. You might see a yellow planning application notice nailed to a tree somewhere but it’s not always easy and quick to see what is being planned. A location service might help with this.

I like to think about scenarios to help get some requirements teased out, and these ought to be based on services that we actually deliver. There seem to be categories of scenario based around

• internal council workflow (eg Highway maintenance)
• citizen interaction with the council (eg library services)
• community group operations when delivering a service (eg Park services)
• civic social interaction around a location (eg reporting a crime/graffiti)
• general social interaction at a location

this last scenario is already well covered by location-based services such as FourSquare or Gowalla. Nothing to add there. However, the other four scenarios require that, on check-in, information is pushed and that information is a real-time aggregate of a number of other data sources, some of which might be under local authority control (Highways, libraries), some of which are provided by 3rd parties (community-provided Park services), and some of which are transactional forms to enable the person checking in to provide feedback and information (all of the above).

Currently the commercial services in this space provide the ability to send “tips” and special offers to people checking in, but these are relatively static. Perhaps some kind of frigging with the APIs could allow tips to be generated dynamically from an XML file? Then we could create the XML file in real time from whatever data sources we have and deliver that whenever someone checks in?

We also need a security model to ensure that a council highways officer gets a different view of the “tips” file (sorry, I really must think of a better name) to a citizen or community group representative.

Some of this stuff overlaps with my recent post about a solution architecture for highways, but I wasn’t location-enabled when I wrote that. Expect more detail to be added to this once I’ve met with colleagues later this week.