Business - Written by Anthony D. Williams on Thursday, February 5, 2009 15:39 - 1 Comment
Power of Information Task Force releases its report (in beta)
The Power of Information Taskforce, which was established to advise the UK government on how to take advantage of new developments in digital media, released it’s report to the Cabinet Office earlier this week in beta. There are 25 recommendations in all. Many themes in the report resonate strongly with the issues I have been discussing on wikinomics.com. I’ve paraphrased what I think are some of the more important recommendations and added my own commentary below:
- Follow the crowd. Many government have wondered what role they should play in providing support to citizens seeking information and advice online about issues that fall under the domain of the public service (education, health care, etc.). Should governments create their own forums that they monitor and control or should they participate in mutual support communities that already exist such as NetMums and The Student Room. The Task Force correctly observes that in most cases it makes more sense for public servants to become active in pre-existing online peer support communities that already have critical mass than it does to create their own. The task force also recommends that in some cases governments should encourage and assist the development of mutual support communities outside government to enhance public service outcomes. I personally like the idea of a publicly-funded venture fund for non-profit social ventures that can demonstrably improve service outcomes for citizens.
- Create platforms for innovation. As discussed many times on this site (see here, here, here, and here for example), the Task Force recommends that all public agencies in the UK create online innovation spaces where the general public and staff can co-create information-based public services. They suggest following the BBC’s ‘backstage model‘ model (referring to the fact that BBC backstage users can build non-commercial services using a vast array of BBC content feeds), starting with a live backstage for the UK’s DirectGov site by June this year. A key ingredient of the “bakcstage” service is accessible public data, unrestrictive licensing regimes, and open APIs (which they discuss in recommendation 10-15). I’ll be watching this one closely.
- Rethinking public consultations. Many citizens rightly perceive citizen consultations as just broadcast politics as usual–a mere veneer of participation and outreach on a fundamentally broken system. The Task Force suggests that public agencies break out of the traditional “many-to-one” consultation mold by using collaboration tools that enable true “many-to-many” collaboration.
- Create a public services R&D function. Innovation is notoriously difficult in the public administration, due in large part to cultural inertia, complex legacies, and political wrangling. Many efforts to move government services online amount to little more than paving the cow paths–-the same old inefficient government structures and institutions have remained intact when a much more radical rethinking and restructuring is in order. The TaskForce’s suggestion to create a “modest fund for leading-edge R&D to continue to test ideas and incubate new capabilities” is a good one, but it will be interesting to see how they insolate the R&D function from politically-motivated tinkering.
The full report is worth reading if these issues interest you at all. It’s in beta stage for the next 10 days, so your comments could help shape the future of digital governance in the UK.
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[...] Also of interest, Anthony Williams remarks on the report in his Wikinomics blog. [...]