Ideas
Suppose the government really got IT
Published 31 July 2006
Successive prime ministers have experimented with new media, but how would things change if Whitehall really got the net revolution?
In 1994 PIPEX, one of the earliest UK internet service providers, installed an internet connection in Number 10 Downing Street so that the prime minister's office could experiment with this new communications channel.
It is not known whether John Major surfed the then nascent World Wide Web for policy ideas, or whether Norma ever used it to research the history of Chequers for her book, but one man inside Number Ten certainly had a use for the connection to the outside world.
Alex Allan, at the time Major's principal private secretary, was and remains a fan of the US progressive rockers The Grateful Dead, and traffic logs from the time indicate that Deadhead newsgroups were frequently being read.
Under Tony Blair Allan went on to become the UK's first e-envoy, but despite his geek credentials and obvious ability, his impact remained minimal, largely because few ministers, and certainly not the Prime Minister, really understood anything about technology.
As a result online government hasn't shared in the buzz around the idea of Web 2.0 companies like the photosharing site Flickr, social networking service MySpace, user-rated news service Digg or the products of the Google behemoth.
Yet the world would have been very different if Allan had been able to persuade Whitehall that the Web was worth taking seriously as more than just a cheap way of publishing documents and engaging in token consultations.
Instead of the rather pathetic collection of websites put up by public sector bodies, only to be ignored by the public, we might have had an online presence that matched or even outstripped them.
But we're stuck with sites like Customs and Revenue, where the design was clearly inspired by the forms-based functionality of an old mainframe system. Clearly they haven't kept up with the newest tricks and latest acronyms, and probably have no idea that AJAX is a way of creating interactive websites rather than a bathroom cleaner.
And what about social networking? We could get far more interaction and engagement with government if we had myspace.gov, with a profile and blog for every minister or even MP. It would also make it a lot easier to tell who was up and down in the system, since those ministers who didn't have Blair as a friend would clearly be on the way out, while we could watch the wannabee Brownites flock to Gordon's home page.
Perhaps there is scope for 'wheresmymptoday.org', tracking every MP by their mobile phone and plotting the whole thing on Google Maps to give us real insight into life in parliament. With sufficient detail we could even see who was in the Chamber, who was in the tea room - and who was in the backrooms of the palace of Westminster with a "colleague". Another great service to democracy.
And what about Digg-style rankings for press releases and ministerial speeches, helping those who have only a passing interest in what the government is up to find the interesting, relevant or embarrassing stuff faster?
Of course, we'll never see such innovations coming out of government. The Web 2.0 world is one of constant innovation, prototyping and beta software, where new features are imagined at breakfast, implemented before lunch and abandoned before the cucumber sandwiches have gone stale at high tea.
Government doesn't work like this, and probably never will, but they could do something equally innovative with relatively little effort. Instead of building sites, local and national government could publish APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, to their services.
An API provides a program with a way of asking for help from another program, through a clearly specified communications channel. Google, Amazon and others offer APIs to programmers and, as a result, people around the net build new and innovative services around them.
The BBC, with its backstage project, is trying in its own slightly unfocused but well-meaning way to do the same, although sensitivities over how licence fee-payers' money is being spent mean that it has had neither the resources nor the freedom it really merits.
If the data and services were made available like this, rather in the way Amazon provides its catalogue and e-commerce facilities, then there is no need for anything other than a very basic state-provided website - the real work can be left to the innovators online. Some may offer commercial services, others may prefer to build free software that does the job. Why go to a revenue and customs website to file a VAT return when you can get a plugin for your accounts program that does it, using the same interface as the site would?
The Ministry of Interfaces, run by newly-enobled Lord Tom Steinberg of Writetothem, would be charged with developing new ways for citizens to inter-act with the state and making them freely available, building government of the people, by the people, providing interfaces to the people.
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