I’ve previously commented on this topic and think I’ve made my views fairly clear. However, it’s comforting to know that I’m not alone in questioning whether IPSV serves any useful purpose.
I picked up a report on a recent meeting of local authority webmasters and managers held in Birmingham (England), where most present appeared to conclude that IPSV, now the official Government Metadata Standard, served no useful purpose and should be ignored and not implemented. As a delegate at the meeting pointed out, search engines don’t use government metadata – at all. IPSV is not used. So really then, what is the point? The report went on to say that delegates wree not sold on formal taxonomies for websites, and definitely not centralised taxonomies like this Vocabulary. The ability to produce a site map from a taxonomy is a benefit, but a fringe benefit at best. Current thinking appears to be arriving at a much less prescriptive model of metadata, in which, rather than forcing editors to select a term from a taxonomy for the area of business the content relates to, they’re provided a ‘finger buffet’ of metadata to choose from, including schemes for geographic, demographic, subject (i.e. topic) and business tags. (I think we’re heading into the realms of folksonomies here).
However, this will no doubt upset those that want to see a tidy hierarchical view made possible by a formal taxonomy, but does that matter if it provides vastly richer possibilities in terms of interrogating and presenting content?
One of the central selling points of LGCL and now IPSV was the broad view of government services relating to a given term (e.g. see everything that all government agencies and local authorities have on animal welfare), but the reality is that’s both a pipe-dream and of absolutely no use to the vast majority of users. A broad view of government services however that relate to, say, a single mother, under 30, recently made redundant, with children under 5 living in Birmingham would be of real value. This is only possible though if one gets away from thinking like librarians and stops trying to neatly categorise every single one of a council’s services and information nodes based on universally understood terms.
I thought this Flash animation from the University of Ottawa was a neat introduction to facilitating a Peer Assist session for a community of practice. A Peer Assist is an established knowledge management technique for gaining input and insight from "experts" and practitioners from a wider sphere, in order to reuse and reapply any relevant knowledge and experience to a particular (peer) problem or issue.
I wonder how many UK businesses have complied with the e-commerce legislative requirement to include company registration details on their web sites and in their emails? The law became effective from 1st January 2007. If you are a business owner (as I am), you may be forgiven if you didn’t hear much about it, because there was little in the way of any direct communication with businesses. Unfortunately that will be no excuse when the bureaucrats come to dishing out the fines. Details of the legislation can be found here.
I saw this earlier this week on Public Sector Forums and reflected on its significance. The Information Commissioner’s Office will today (26th Jan)
publish revised guidance for local authorities wishing to make
secondary use of Council Tax Data, for example to populate CRM systems. Previous government guidance on data sharing has created uncertainty in many local authorities on whether they can use this data for other council functions, despite the prevailing common sense that having one authoratitive data set is preverable to building several sets of data about a citizen’s residantial status. The ICO guidance asks a series of questions together with explanations
which outline the ICO’s latest approach, answers to which will
determine the permissibility of using the data. The questions are as
follows:
- Is it necessary for the local authority to use the information to carry out its statutory functions?
- If council tax information is used for another purpose, what effect will this have on the people the information is about?
- Would using the information cause unwarranted detriment to any individual?
- Would using the information for another purpose benefit those the local authority provides services to?
- Is the information particularly sensitive?
- Will the information be adequately protected from improper use or disclosure?
- Is there an alternative to sharing information in a form that identifies individuals?
- Do individuals understand how the local authority will use their information?
The guidance is available for Download ICO_Tax_Guidance_2007.pdf
.
I notice that eGov Monitor has partnered with Socitm for the launch of GovXchange, which, according to the press release is “a knowledge-sharing platform that can support communities of interest around specific topics. GovXchange will not only collect and disseminate published information (like its forerunner, egov exchange), it will also enable users to create and share new knowledge and information by building private or public ‘spaces’ around their professional interests.”
Sounds great, but having signed up to several of these ‘spaces’ back in December 2006, I’ve yet to see any sign of collaboration or knowledge sharing. Despite having an average of twenty or so other members in the communities (spaces) I have joined, there are no discussions, no forum entries, no wiki contributions and nothing in the ‘knowledge’ sections – in fact, they are probably better described as ‘empty spaces’. And before I’m taken to task on this, I have started the one and only forum thread in the ‘spaces’ I have joined.
The key issue here, is the belief that a community of interest or practice can self-germinate. This is not the approach we’ve taken in developing the IDeA Communities of Practice. Similar in concept to GovXchange in terms of providing a platform for providing (and encouraging) knowledge sharing, but with no commercial baggage, and with each community being professionally facilitated. There is little risk of having empty spaces, because the facilitator ‘seeds’ the forum and knowledge library as part of the pre-launch planning activities.
However, this might prove an interesting experiment in community dynamics – i.e. how effective is a non-facilitated community compared with a facilitated one? I’ll keep an eye on this and provide an update in a month or so.
This is a riveting good read! Released under a creative commons licence from Demos, available here for download (87 pages) (Download receivedwisdom.pdf ). Extract:
Since 1997, there has been a flowering in bodies such as the Health Protection Agency, the Food Standards Agency and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) that turn science into policy. At the same time we have seen more and more ad hoc expert groups pop into existence, tell the government what to think about public issues such as mobile phone risks or radioactive waste disposal, and fade into the background. All feed the growing need for evidence-based policy. But expertise has always been about more than evidence. Expertise is also about judgement, about wisdom, about asking new questions and challenging convention.] …[The physicist Werner Heisenberg defined an expert as ‘someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in their subject and who manages to avoid them…
The pamphlet provides a further contribution helping government and its stakeholders to challenge existing ways of practice with a view to ensuring the best possible policies for delivering environmental protection.
The government’s proposal to introduce road pricing will mean you having to purchase a tracking device for your car and paying a monthly bill to use it. The tracking device will cost about £200 and in a recent study by the BBC, the lowest monthly bill was £28 for a rural florist and £194 for a delivery driver. A non working Mum who used her car to take the kids to school paid £86 in one month. On top of this massive increase in tax you will be tracked. Somebody will know where you are at all times. They will also know how fast you have been going, so even if you accidentally creep over a speed limit in time you can expect a Notice of Intended Prosecution with your monthly bill.
If you care about our freedom and stopping the constant bashing of the car driver, you may wish to sign the petition on No 10’s web site.
Bruce Nussbaum at Business Week has written an article entitled "Lessons from Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli – Why Command and Control is So Bad".
Now here’s a lesson from the private sector which could easily be applied to Government; autocratic top-down, command and control works great when you focus on
process, e.g. cost and quality, Six Sigma measures and all that stuff. However, if the UK Government is serious about giving local authorities and and local communities more influence and power to improve their lives – as described on the DCLG Local Government White Paper issued last October, then the present culture of centrally imposed targets and measurements must be relaxed.
Process controls and metrics may still have a place within any organisation that is accountable for its actions – whether this is to shareholders, in the case of a publicly-quoted company, or to citizens if it is a local authority. However, as the article states, controls and metrics are now commoditised sediment and should make way for the discipline and process of innovation. It remains to be seen whether Central Government is serious about devolving power to locally elected representatives, or whether it will insist on maintaining it’s ‘we know best’ attitude and the associated micro-management mechanisms it has established over the past few years.
For anyone that didn’t catch this headline on the BBC web site yesterday – "Hundreds of government websites are to be shut down "to make access to information easier" for people.Of 951 sites, only 26 will definitely stay, 551 will definitely close and hundreds more are expected to follow".
For anyone even remotely connected to the public sector, as well as ordinary citizens, this can only be good news. The proliferation of webs sites across central government is a consequence of an entrenched attitude that every project or initiative should have a web site – in fact this was usually the first thing that project teams did once they had been handed funding. No thought was ever given to what would happen to the site once the project had completed and funding no longer available. This ’silo thinking’ is endemic across the public sector, and created huge problems in being able to find relevant information – that could well be split across several sites. The fact that it’s easy in web-land to provide links between sites and content hasn’t occurred to many of the site owners. Removing out of date or irrelevant content is clearly a step in the right direction, and should remove some of the clutter from search engine results.
Government plans for a single authentication system for citizens accessing
public services online may be derailed by procurement issues branded by one
industry insider as ‘rank bad practice’, according to a recent article in Computer Weekly. Seems the crisis was triggered by a ‘no punchs pulled’ letter from the Director General to the CIO of the DCLG – a full copy of the letter is attached. Will be interesting to see how this one pans out….lots of squirming in the corridors of power! Download intellect_letter_on_gc.pdf