bmwelby

Benjamin Welby · @bmwelby

28th Jan 2011 from Twitlonger

@peterbrowning concern for your safety is obviously not something to be dismissed, I wasn't trying to do that. Sorry if you felt I was.

I think perhaps there's a bit of fatigue in the discussion about potholes because those who shout the loudest aren't cyclists but motorists. We have a story locally today about a fixed-term pothole busting team being brought to an end. It doesn't come from the perspective of the cyclist when probably it should. But the paper are there to sell copy and praising local government doesn't do that.

So I agree that they're important...for the purposes of the discussion we'd been having I feel they take on a life of their own and make local government seem to be only about the state of the road and the regularity of bin collections. The extent of what councils actually do is lost because we're bad at telling the story. And perhaps that is because we're scared of instant communication channels.

But in raising that point I think you've nailed why events like LbyS, UKgovcamp, localgovcamp are vital and why people give up their own time and money to attend them.

We all know that tech makes things easy right?

Except if it's government related. Everybody's perception is of massive IT projects that steal your identity, cost ridiculous sums, be late and not deliver what they're meant to.

The story of Birmingham's £2.8m website being countered by http://bccdiy.co.uk or Leeds' £1.8m proposals being discussed http://coproduction.wordpress.com/ shows that people don't have to sit on the sofa waiting for us to drop a clanger or get round to delivering a service but can make their own tools to do something we're not (or improve something we've done badly).

And Fixmystreet.com is a brilliant example of that.

It should be as easy as possible to report a pothole. It ought to be possible to do that immediately you see it from your phone so you can even add a picture. That ought to be on a public platform (anonymous if you wish) so you and your neighbours can see it's reported, and can hold the council to account for repairing it and to highlight those occasions when it fails to deliver an agreed level of service. So the data on how many are fixed, how many are reported, the time between the two should be available, so too the geographic information about where the problems exist. But it is reasonable (isn't it?) for us to use the same premise to talk about what we do achieve. To talk about the budget and what that means is possible and to apologise that we can't do everything but look, aren't you surprised at the actual numbers involved in how often we successfully repair a hole in the road.

And all that should have been in the same place.

But some councils made things, and others didn't and some are nice and user friendly, but others aren't so the public had to reclaim that and build something instead.

So why didn't we build it? One reason is the fear you highlight - that instant communication is all very well until something goes wrong. Another is that we build systems to suit our processes, rather than, perhaps, to suit members of the public.

If you think about it where's the motivation? As you've commented there is contempt for us. And that's a contempt that people have faced for years, and years, and years. They're clearly quite jaded and so that feeds a world where what members of the public say or do is to be seen with suspicion because they'll likely just bad mouth whether it's true or not.

For a number of people they have maybe lost focus on why they go to work and what they're there to do - deliver what you need (although more often than not we do that by delivering what we think you need).

After all, we are the experts, the public don't know any better.

That's the attitude which you come up against. The assumed arrogance of the bureaucrat (although I would defend Weber's bureaucratic ideal). So we're scared to let people share information, rate services or access the full story because we don't want to lose control.

What I fear you've missed out on by not being able to see the webcast is that today isn't about building tools per se. One of things that drives a desire to better digitally enable members of the public to access their public goods and services is democracy. They're what you pay for, make them work better and they're what you pay for, you should have immediacy of contact especially when it's inconvenient.

LbyS and the other events like it provide space for ideas and information to emerge. They're days that spark off networking and collaboration. And their fruit is often seen in the discussions and the comment that happens afterwards - the quantity of material written about UKGC11 (http://buzz.ukgovcamp.com) for example is huge.

But perhaps one of the most important things they do is provide support to those who are generally quite lonely voices in their councils who are trying to say, look, we can save a fortune if we use open source, or we can deliver exactly what people want if we only listened to what they were saying, or we could definitely repair the potholes that are a priority if only we would flag up these freely available tools to make it easy for the public to let us know.

I would rather that we had developers, citizens and officers working on those solutions together because the real benefits from the spending of tax are there to be unlocked but building that momentum takes time and getting those people round tables requires leadership, diary space and not a little skill.

I'm as much a citizen as I am a public servant. I want government to work. I want democracy to mean that people are involved with discussions that affect them and set the priorities that are important to their local community. But I recognise that someone, somewhere, is going to be disappointed with those decisions - transparency isn't just about publishing some csv files of spending, it's about engaging and involving people in discussion and decision making. Using social tools makes that possible in a way that a public meeting could never achieve.

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