There are three interesting posts this week from various sources around Social Media. First one really underlines why it cannot be ignored. After reading the post ‘Social media now more popular than personal email – Neilsen’ and looking at the statistics of internet usage I have to admit this is the way that I communicate to a number of my friends. Whereas a year or two ago I would email friends, now I often just send messages on Facebook.
There are a number of examples of government organisations who have used Facebook effectively and those that have not managed so well. Checking back on Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) who back in January I pointed out had not posted any updates to his Facebook group for a month now looks like he is (or someone is) doing it on a daily basis.
It is a way of people keeping up-to-date with what he is doing and what he is thinking. Most of his posts seem to get a fair amount of comments – these range from thoughtful insights to ‘Boris for King’ and ‘we have named our dog Boris after you”….
Leading on from that is a post from Andrea DiMaio who was talking to a government client about their web presence and Facebook presence when it was pointed out that they did not believe that they had any presence on Facebook. Someone it appears had set up a group and was happily answering questions, all looked official except no-one knew who the creator of the group was…
It is important that even if you are not engaging over Facebook or Twitter, you need to ensure that someone else it not doing it on your behalf.
Finally, it is important not to forget that there is more than just facebook and twitter out there. As pointed to in the excellent whitepaper on Obama’s use of Social Media ‘Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit’, the Obama campaign maintained profiles across 15 different social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, AsianAve.com, MiGente.com, BlackPlanet.com and others. There is more that just Facebook out there and you need to understand what local and community driven social networking sites are out there.
As pointed out by the third post ‘2009 Facebook demographics and statistics report’ there has been a staggering increase of 513% of people over 55 joining Facebook, while college and high school users has dropped by 20%. Facebook was not the first social network out there, and it will not stay at the top forever. You need to understand who are the people you want to communicate with, then you needs to understand where they are – don't assume it is Facebook, it may be somewhere else.
The BBC website has an article ‘Twitter to give bushfire alerts’ where it explains that after this years tragic bushfires in Victoria, the State will use Twitter in future to keep people up to date.
I think that Twitter can be a huge help in these situations. The technical issue you have in situations like the Victoria bushfires is one of scale. As hundreds of thousands of people hit your website from around the world, the ability to scale out the hardware to cope with the load is just not possible. A site that is probably running on a couple of servers will soon become swamped in that situation. Sites like Twitter or Facebook however run at such a huge capacity already, that the increase of that size can be coped with, and they have the dynamic infrastructure to add servers rapidly if needed.
The other issues is the scalability of gathering and pushing out of data. If you rely on ‘official’ sources (ie Fire, Police etc) then you will never get the full picture. If citizens can report fires, whoever is receiving those calls and emails will soon become overloaded. In a fast moving emergency situation you will never be able to keep up with demand.
So this is where Twitter and social computing comes in. The are designed to allow community participation, they can scale massively and also they can often receive data from many different sources – ie SMS, Mobile Phones, PC’s.
The other advantage is that if people enter in the data in a structured format, you can start to mine that data. Last winter there was significant snowfall across the UK, and being the UK that means that the country grinds to a halt. Using twitter, and a defined format of the hashtag #uksnow then the first part of the postcode and x/10 to rate how bad the snow was. So for example mine would have been
#uksnow OX4 7/10
Now we have data coming in, in a format that we can mine you can do something about it. There were a number of sites at the time that gave mashups of the data, so you could see how badly places were hit. After the event, someone also created a time-lapse video to show how the snow spread across the country.
As reported on localgov.co.uk, Croydon council has had to suspend its use of Twitter after a member of the council staff used the account to criticise a reporter. I find the statement they released slightly bizarre:
A spokesman said: 'We need someone to find out how Twitter works, review its potential and then enlighten others as to how best it may be used for legitimate, professional purposes.
'As yet there are no rules about using this kind of channel.
'As with email and the internet a few years back, guidelines will be developed if the media enters common usage.
So if you do not know how it works or what you are going to use it for; you created the account it because….?
Any Government organisation has to be aware that any form of communication will come under scrutiny from the press, citizens and other organisations. No new channel of communication should be opened without at least some basic guidelines – and the classic is don't put anything in print (paper or internet) that would cause you problems if it was on the front page of a national newspaper.
I would be interesting to see if there are any basic generic guidelines for both Twitter and Blogging. One of the best I have seen in this area is from the US Air Force on how to deal with comments on your blog. It is clear and simple - just what you need.
Like all things there are good and bad examples of Gov 2.0. One of the main drivers for Gov 2.0 should be a reduction in cost of communication with citizens and I came across two separate examples with different outcomes.
Spenta, a Spanish partner who specialises in SharePoint, CRM and .net development and do most of the work on the CSP Demo image and CodePlex for CSP, pointed me at this article about the Barcelona Mayors’ Blog, and the cost of it which is being called into question.
The complaint is that he has spent €315,000 annually on his blog which has 23,000 readers a month, and even after this expense he is not answering the questions being posted by these citizens. The main cost seems to have arisen from the cost of 6 people used to write the blog for him, which seems a little over the top…
On a more positive note I was looking at the Neighbourhood America website (they are global, despite the name) who provide SaaS Gov2.0 solutions. In one of their case studies they worked with the United States Health Care Working Group and the team responsible for reaching out to citizens. This team have to find out what health care coverage and services they want, and how they are willing to pay for it.
Using social software they managed to reduce the cost per participant from $250 to $7.50 and quadruple the number or participants. A far better set of figures than they managed to get in Barcelona.
It does not matter how good your tools are, you need to put them to effective use to get good results.
I know when someone first started to describe to me the concept that the government should not hold data about me, but rather I should hold it instead – it took me a little while to understand why this was a good thing.
A paper has been released by the Centre for Policy Studies (an independent right wing think tank) entitled “Its ours – Why we, not government, must own our data” by Liam Maxwell that takes you through some of the arguments in this area.
In its summary it points out:
In 2009/10, the UK Government will spend about £16.5 billion on IT, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP. However, much IT spending is currently wasted. Only 30% of projects succeed.
A clear choice is emerging for the future of government IT:
− Either to continue with the Transformational Government agenda. This relies on the State holding, in the words of the Treasury’s adviser, a “deep truth about the citizen, based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs and rights”, with huge centralised databases directing public services to the point of need (as judged by the State).
− Or to abandon expensive and failing centralised IT projects and yield control of personal information to individual citizens. This is the approach that has been increasingly effective in the private sector.
Having worked in this sector for a while now, both in the UK and worldwide it is terrifying to see the money that is thrown a huge doomed IT projects. As you go into the report there are some other staggering statistics.
when the DWP analysed its communications with customers, it found that the take-up was tiny. More than half of the “customer base” (51%) were able to access services online by mid 2008. But out of the 142 million contacts with the public, only 340,000 (about 0.25%) used the online services.
and also
The high cost of government IT provision – £16.5 billion this year, and growing – is equivalent to £700 for every household in the country, or almost £300 for every man, woman and child. To put this in perspective, the State spends approximately 60% more every year on administrative IT than it does on drugs for the National Health Service.
No other organisation spends anywhere as much on IT, even though they process similar amounts of data on each individual. For while central government spends £300 per person per year, Google, MSN and online banks spend between £10 and £60 per person per year.
The quotes like this keep on rolling out for the first 21 pages, before it starts to look that the alternative. The paper is quote good, however I would prefer something with less of a party political bias. One other area they do not touch on, and I think is one of the most interesting is around cost. How does the private sector make money on holding your data – is it through advertising or even selling data to third parties?
I am rather enjoying Andrea DiMaio’s latest post – It is time to explore the dark side of Government 2.0. As I have noted a few times here, here and here not everything is always rosy in the Gov 2.0 garden. One of the issues that I see is the speed at which governments are feeling that they need to adopt Gov 2.0, and they are not going into it with their eyes open.
One of my current concerns is the weight being given by governments to online polls and the influence that social media seems to have on them. The first and foremost concern is around the digital divide; there is a significant percentage of the population without internet access – but even then there is a significant percentage that are unlikely to engage with the government online. My mother and father have a PC and (finally after a lot of nagging) have broadband; however they will not be going near Facebook, Twitter or any other Social Media and nor are they likely to engage in any online petitions. Is their voice less valid?
What I fear is that we move into a world where whoever shouts loudest online can influence the direction of government. Petitions whether online or offline are not a replacement for democracy they just indicate what one group of people think about a subject. As I commented in this post, just because 2 million people clicked a link saying that they did not want road tolls – there was no debate, no understanding of the pro’s and con’s and no-one asked the other 50 odd million people in this country what they felt.
What is great about online engagement is that it lowers the barrier of entry to engagement. As a citizen, I do not have to attend town hall meetings if the information and engagement is also done online. However because the barrier to entry is lower, it is also more susceptible to spamming (for want of another word). For example, my brother sent me a link to a poll on the 10 Downing Street web site. Did I agree with its sentiments – kind of. Did I click the link – of course, my brother asked me to.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe that online engagement is important, and will become ever more important – but it should not be given more weight than it deserves, especially given its limitations in representing a cross section of the population and also the ease with which media and pressure groups can gain online support.
Gov 2.0 can and will effect all levels of governments and associated agencies. Over on the Headstar e-government blog there is a case study of Web 2.0 in Local Government which sparked my interest for two reasons.
Firstly and totally unrelated to the subject in hand is that it is about Brighton and Hove City Council which is where I went to school and strangely enough I was there on Wednesday with my Father and Brother watching Sussex take on the might of the Australian cricket team. A glorious day was had by all and the Sussex team played fantastically well. (To my Australian readers that is a photo of Philip Hughes being comprehensively bowled out for 15 runs while being bathed in bright English sunlight. Yes, both events can happen in England, it is just that neither of them happen enough for our liking)
The second point in the post was about their use of Yammer which in many ways is similar to Twitter, but with one important difference. Whereas Twitter is open to anyone, Yammer restricts you to communicating within your own organisation (restricted by email domain eg @microsoft.com). Instead of answering the question ‘what are you doing?’, instead you answer the question ‘What are you working on?’.
I have tried Twitter, but if I am honest its noise to relevant data ratio is just too high. Like most people over the course of a day I am monitoring multiple inputs. Phone, SMS and Instant Messaging are pretty well 100% relevant – there is a 1:1 connection between you and the person connecting with you.
Email is next down on the list. Microsoft does email like no other company I know with many people having 100+ mails a day to deal with. I would like to say that the noise to relevant data ratio is better than it is, but I do sometimes spend too much time wading through emails.
Below that are Blogs. I subscribe to nearly 90 blogs and a fair amount of that is noise, but I also get a enough relevant data out of it to be a worthwhile investment.
Bottom of the list is Twitter. I subscribed to it not for social reasons, nor to keep up on day to day events, but to get information relevant for my job. I am sorry, but the noise to relevant data ratio was just to low – it was not worth my investment. It took up too much time and gave me too little in return.
I think over time Twitter is going to settle down as more of a social service – keeping up with friends, current affairs etc. But where people are trying to use it as part of their daily job to help team collaboration and information sharing, I don't think it works.
That is where I think Yammer or another similar service will fill that gap. No offence, but I don't care what you are doing – I however am interested in what you are working on, what you have read that is relevant to your role, information that I can use in my daily work.
Companies and organisations will inevitably move to use social computing as part of their day to day activities, but the usage is sometimes subtly different to the use of non-commercial services and I think the assumption that tools such as Twitter and FaceBook can be used successfully in a corporate/public sector environment is wrong.
Tim Berners-Lee has published a set of notes that he has written after talks with various people in the UK and US governments. They are pretty rough and high level, but interesting to see the direction he is taking after his appointment.
It is good to see a health dose of realism already coming through, I hope it continues:
There are two philosophies to putting data on the web. The top-down one is to make a corporate or national plan, by getting committees together of all the interested parties, and make a consistent set of terms (ontology) into which everything fits. This in fact takes so long it is often never finished, and anyway does not in fact get corporate or national consensus in the end. The other method experience recommends is to do it bottom up. A top-level mandate is extremely valuable, but grass-roots action is essential. Put the data up where it is: join it together later.
A wise and cautious step is to make a thorough inventory of all the data you have, and figure out which dataset is going to be most cost-effective to put up as linked data. However, the survey may take longer than just doing it.
For any government agencies out there looking to put data online, you should take a serious read of these notes as they have some good solid advice.
There is so much being written about Gov 2.0, about what it means to different people - however we have no ‘formal definition’. Personally I am one of those people who does not really care if we cannot all agree on a definition – Gov 2.0 will continue to change, lets not tie it down.
I rather liked the one a colleague of mine, Bill Gaylor (Public Sector Architect at Microsoft) spotted on GovLoop – Next Generation Government: Mobile, Measurable, Malleable
- Mobile: the idea that work is no longer a place, but a set of tasks that can be performed anywhere – whether that’s in a government-owned building in a major metropolitan center or a privately-owned family farm in the middle of Minnesota. In the private sector, this type of flexible work environment is already commonplace
- Measurable: But now you wonder: How will we know if anyone is really getting any work done in this brave, new, mobile environment? Well, I have a ready answer for you! We make sure that every aspect of our work is measurable. What better builds trust between manager and employee than a clear set of tasks with target dates and appropriate metrics? If I know what needs to get done and by when, why does the how and where matter?
- Malleable: Finally, when I heard words like inclusive, responsive, open, efficient, transparent, and innovative, I needed another “m” word…and malleable came to mind. Dictionary.com tells us this word means “capable of being shaped or formed; able to adjust to changing circumstances; adaptable.” As collaborative technologies make our democracy even more participatory, enabling citizens to become more actively engaged in decision-making processes through projects like the Open Government Initiative or the Recovery Dialogue on IT Solutions
Now you may agree or disagree, but different people want different things from Gov 2.0 and we should not constrain ourselves with a strict definition. Take for example the entry on Wikipedia for Government 2.0, I have to admit I think it misses the point a bit:
Government 2.0 is neologism for attempts to apply the social networking and integration advantages of Web 2.0 to the practice of government. Government 2.0 is an attempt to provide more effective processes for government service delivery to individuals and businesses. Integration of tools such as wikis, development of government-specific social networking sites and the use of blogs, RSS feeds and Google Maps are all helping governments provide information to people in a manner that is more immediately useful to the people concerned.
I think it is far more that just applying Web 2.0 to Government. As a technologist is frustrates me that people think they can install Gov 2.0; that by having a Twitter feed they have ticked the Gov 2.0 box.
So, I don't think we need a strict definition of Gov 2.0; I just think that some definitions are better that others.
(note to self, don't start writing a series of posts unless you have them all ready to publish otherwise they seem to go on forever!)
eID for Governments Federation for Government Overview Identity Providers Authentication Methods Do you need strong authentication? Tokens and Claims Another post in the “eID for Governments” and we need to cover off what happens when a user bearing a SAML token arrives back on the site they want to access.
The process the site needs to go through is simple:
- Is the token from an STS I trust
- Is the signature in the SAML token valid
- Does the user have the claims I want.
As long as we pass those test we can then allow the user in and give them the roles, determined by their claims.
This is again why I like federation, we now have a consistent authorisation model. Instead of writing new code for every new way of authenticating we just need to add in that we trust a new STS and make sure the claims they are sending can be linked up to something that we understand.
Even if your site has its own authentication, but architecturally splitting the authentication into an STS means that you have a structured way of authorising users. When you need to change it and add other provides or methods, you just have to configure new STS’s rather than changing the code in your site.
Kim Cameron explains this very clearly in his PDC session Identity Roadmap for Software + Services (i cannot get the embedded video to play, if you cannot then you can get to the recording here and the slides are here). As he says, the first two lines of every connected application (actually these tend to be large and complex blocks of code) is:
- Who are you?
- What are you allowed to do?
We need to have a consistent architecture for dealing with authentication and authorisation, developers have spent too much time writing complex logic into their application to deal with it. All the major vendors are coming together and working on the same standards, hopefully one day soon authentication and authorisation can be handled by the platform rather than in code.
Andrea DiMaio the Gartner eGov blogger posted yesterday about Governments needing to be “employee-centric” to get Gov2.0 to work – ie. without support from within their own organisations and from their own employees their transformation efforts will fail. The post entitled Citizen-Driven Government Must Be Employee-Centric, Too outlines his arguments and there is also further research if you have access to Gartner docs.
Anyone who has worked within or with governments will understand this position; the type of change that is needed to enact Gov2.0 can only really come from within – mandating policies will not deliver the results that are needed, only empowered employees can deliver it.
However I think we still need more. We need governments to start understanding how all of their decisions and actions impact upon the goal to transform the way government works. Current systems, policies and legal frameworks need to be triaged and actively worked upon to bring them into line with the open and transparent goals of governments.
The same way new policies and initiatives in government have to be examined for potential environmental impact, why cannot the same be done to see if there is any impact on their transformation goals?
Hopefully the UK government will be positively influenced by Tim Berners-Lee (see my post Gov2.0 and Data) and be more proactive in opening up data; but they need to get this sort of thing ingrained into their DNA rather than just use it when they want to.
An important thing happened today, and hopefully it will influence the Gov2.0 direction that the UK takes. The Cabinet Office has announced that Tim Berners-Lee is helping the UK government to be more open and accessible on the web. So aside from some kudos points for getting the inventor of the world wide web to help, why is this such a big thing?
His talk at TED outlines his position and is well worth watching; we need to get data onto the web in a format that we can link together. In his words:
‘a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together’
There is vast amounts of data on the web, but it is designed to be read by humans rather than computers – and it gets really tricky to reverse engineer links back in. An example of this is the new Google Squared project that tries to take data on the web and present it in a tabular form – ie linked. For example, try searching for US Presidents and it shows a nice list of Presidents, all works well because it is a pretty simple query. Now add an additional column of ‘weight’, and now we start to hit problems. Richard Nixon is apparently 11 pounds and Harry Truman is a pretty impressive 66,200 pounds.
It is just a really good example of what happens if you do not link data. Without that link specified, you have to infer link. Harry Truman’s weight of 66,200 pounds is actually the weight of the propeller on the US aircraft carrier ‘USS Harry S. Truman’, not really what we wanted.
A better example of Linked data can be found at dbpedia.org which has taken all the structured data within Wikipedia and hosted it as raw linked data. So I can now query my home town Oxford and get back raw data such as location, famous people who live here etc etc and also linked data, for example it is on the A420 and therefore linked to Swindon and Chippenham (not the most gripping example I know…). With linked data, someone (with more inspiration that me) can mine this data and use it. 
Take for example Hans Rosling and his use of statistics on TED (again well worth watching), this is what you can do when you start linking data.
There are still issues, can you trust the data, is it correct? For example Oxford does not have a population of 38 as reported. The problem is Wikipedia should feed off the dbpedia site and then add the text around it, that would ensure better quality data.
Another way of doing this is through Microformats, which allow us to build context into the data on a web page to allow machines to consume it For example the HTML:
<span>The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown lives at
10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA</span>
and compare it to:
<span>The <span class="Job Title">British Prime Minister</span>,
<span class="Name">Gordon Brown</span> lives at
<span class="Address1">10 Downing Street</span>,
<span class="City">London</span> <span class="PostCode">
SW1A 2AA</span></span>
The first example we have to infer what the data is within the human readable text, the second can be easily and accurately read by computers. Once rendered within a browser both will look the same to a human, but radically different to a computer.
We need to publish data in a structured manner, and then build web sites that consume that data. Just building websites and including data means that we have to infer what the data means.
Without a doubt Cloud Computing is going to open up a whole new world of possibilities. Looking through the volumes that have already been written about Could Computing this quote is often referenced when talking about the business impact:
What happened to the generation of power a century ago is now happening to the processing of information. Private computer systems, built and operated by individual companies, are being supplanted by services provided by a common grid — the Internet — by centralized data-processing plants. Computing is turning into a utility, and once again the economic equations that determine the way we work and live are being rewritten.
Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch – Rewiring the World from Edison to Google, 2008
Great punchy analogy; however I think it is far too simplistic to compare computing power to the creation of electricity. The business decision to either run your own generator or buy in electricity in is pretty binary, there are only a few situations that warrant both (normally when people’s lives are at stake). However computing is a far more complex beast, computing power can exist on everything from high end servers to phones and can be used in offices, home, in the streets, underwater, airplanes – it is a far more complex scenario.
I think Cloud computing can be seen in the same way as we moved from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. People did not throw out all of their existing ideas, processes and tools; and different areas of the world moved at different rates. Some things were left alone, some things were enhanced, some things were replaced, and it opened up possibilities to design new things that were previously not possible. Bronze has not gone anywhere, we still use it today – but it is complemented with other metals each with its own strengths, weaknesses and costs.
We need to understand how cloud computing fits, where it should be used and sometimes more importantly where it should not be used. As we become more comfortable with it, and as we better understand its strengths and weaknesses we will adopt it more. Don’t get me wrong, Cloud Computing will be huge, but it is not going to replace everything we have.
One area where I see Governments utilising Cloud Computing for its strengths is hosting public data, as it not affected by the data sovereignty issues. There have been a number of initiatives in the UK and US (if anyone has any international examples, please reply with them). This latest example is the 'Open Data Government Initiative' from Microsoft, showing how a Government can host public data on the Azure platform. The code to do this is going to be released as open source on Microsoft’s Open Source site CodePlex so that people can get their hands on it.
The site currently shows US data that is publically available, and in the era of Gov 2.0 and greater transparency it is good to see more and more examples of this.
![UK_Passport[1]](http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/james_brown/WindowsLiveWriter/TokensandClaims_A01A/UK_Passport%5B1%5D_thumb.jpg "UK_Passport[1]")
So where were we….
The last thing that we looked at was authenticating somebody at the identity provider. If we assume that this was successful we now need to be passed back to the original site so we can gain access to whatever we were trying to get to.
However, just because we have been authenticated somewhere does not mean that we are going to be authorised on the original site to perform whatever action it was. For example, I can authenticate against the UK Government Pension site that gives me permission to view my pension, but not being retired there is a significant number of actions I cannot perform.
We need to pass something back that states who has authenticated me and gives information that the original site can use to determine if I can perform the action. The most commonly accepted way of doing this is via a SAML token (Security Assertion Markup Language), which contains a set of claims digitally signed to ensure it has not been changed.
What is a ‘Claim’
‘A Claim is a statement made by one entity about another entity’. This could be Microsoft making the statement that I work for them, or the UK Driving Licence agency making the statement that I have a valid UK driving license.
The Identity Provider knows where this request came from, and can therefore generate a set of claims that are relevant for the requesting site. This could be anything from an ID number (like Social Security number), to proof that I am over 18. You should restrict the information you send to the information that is needed, you should not leak additional information if it is not needed.
Notice as well that the Identity Provider was not asked to authenticate the action; it was not asked ‘Can this person perform action X’, it was instead asked to provide information so that original site could make that decision.
Tokens contain claims
All the token is, is a wrapper for the claims. It adds elements like a unique ID, expiry stamp, issuer etc etc. and most importantly it has a digital signature that means that you can check the contents have not be tampered with.
A real world example of a token would be your passport. It was issued by an identity provider (your government), it is protected by anti-tamper devices and contains statements about you from your Government (your name, your photo etc).
The power of Identity Providers and Claims
Claims are immensely powerful, and to be honest is what we have been using in the real world for 100’s of years. Combine them with the concept of ‘Identity Providers’ and they really shine as the same data from different people comes with different levels of trust.
A perfect example of this is the note in the window of my local wine and spirits store that reads “We only accept Passports and Driving Licences for proof of age, letters from your mum will not be accepted”
(Taking a quick break from my Identity posts…)
I am currently out attending the Local and Regional Government Solutions Forum in Bilbao, which is turning into a great event. One thing that has just been announced is the Microsoft Business Value Framework. This is a three layer model that links technology solutions to the UK published government indicators. It is there to show the business how investments in technology can improve the following business imperatives:
- National Performance Indicators
- Cost Savings
- CO2 efficiencies
This two-step assessment tool helps you identify your current maturity level and provides a tailor-made report detailing the benefits that your organisation could expect from moving to the next maturity level.
A beta version has gone online here which the UK team will be tweaking over the coming months and there is a more comprehensive offline tool that is going to become available as well.
At the session in Bilbao we also had Jan Duffy the Research Director from Government Insights and Health Insights, IDC talk about the tool and they are going to release a paper assessing it. Once I have a link I will post it up.
A great first day, and now on to dinner (the food in this region is so very very good!)
