Ian and James talks 021216
Ian McLoughlin
We felt that whilst there have been recurrent phases of innovation, especially technology-driven innovation and government, we were kind of moving into a different situation than we may have had before and there are a lot more unknowns and a lot more things that were less than well understood in this particular way and this particular area of data-driven innovation. So we kept the navigational method for going to this particular presentation as you will notice. Although when I saw Into Unchartered Waters at the lift entrance this morning, it looked more like abandon hope all ye who enter here [00:42]. Anyway, we’re going to start in the time honoured way with a quiz and I just wondered whether, we’ve got big money riding on this, anyone can name these four people, is the first part of the question.
Speaker
Should we clue people that we took David Bowie off?
Ian McLoughlin
We took David Bowie off to make it harder.
Speaker
That’s a shame.
Ian McLoughlin
Okay, I’ll start to put you out of your misery. The only political scientist in the room, and everyone will kick themselves, that’s Salvador Allende in the top right hand corner there, as you look, the top left hand corner. The gentleman on the bottom any technical people in here will kick themselves, that’s Stafford Beer, one of the founding fathers of cybernetics. And I can see a few people in my kind of age group they must have a knowledge of 70s art glam rock in the room I would’ve thought, so we’ve got Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. So second question you’ve got no hope on, which is what’s the connection between the four of them. Well the connection is this, it’s called ‘Project Cybersyn’ and this was written up in a book called Cybernetic Revolutionaries three or four years ago; and there’s a little bit of commentary in some of the popular pressure times. And Cybersyn might now be called one of the first attempts to do big data to inform government policy making and planning and to start to get more predictive analytics into policy making. What happened was that Allende’s government hired Stafford Beer in the early 70s to come and look at how they could use computer technologies, as it was then to try and develop, to grow to socialism, how they wanted to develop in Chile. And they focussed on state-owned factories and tried to gather real time data on production issues and real time from factories deliberately involving workers as the source of information to make this very participative system and on the ground they probably knew more about what was going on than what the management did.
And all this data is gathered, this was in pre-internet days so the Telex was actually the means by which this information was communicated and was drawn together into this control room where policy makers and decision makers would sit. Stafford Beer had a custom designed chair, he smoked cigars and drank whisky all the time, so there was a drinks holder and somewhere for his cigars at the same time. And they used to plan production in this room as best they could in real time – that was the idea. There were no graphical user interfaces and HD screens and all the rest of it in those days. So it was an army of graphic designers who created visualisations of this data, you can see some of those coming up. It was a great time to be a graphic designer in Chile, they were in much demand to draw the visualisations of the data to enable the policy makers. And the seats were deliberately set out like that to allow conversation and interaction and not have fragmented silo thinking. So everyone faced each other and exchanged their views and observations in the decision making process. So that’s the connection between Stafford Beer and Allende.
The other two are quite interesting in that Brian Eno became very interested in this project and in Beer’s work altogether. In fact he wrote performance to several of Stafford Beer’s books published in the mid-70s onwards, and Robert Fripp who worked with Eno and indeed with David Bowie as we mentioned earlier, also took a keen interest and they had a correspondence with Beer over this experiment. And the David Bowie link, we haven’t been able to establish it, it’s alleged in this top 100 books his brain of the factory, this one of Beer’s, although I have looked online at Bowie’s top 100, even his desert island top 100, it’s not there so I’m not sure. But Fripp definitely is in the frame. So there you go. So we won a lot of money there because we didn’t think anyone would get any of that.
So what we’re going to do in the presentation is I’ll say a little bit more about the nature of these unchartered waters, some of the opportunities, challenges, problems and issues that we can find at least in current research that’s been done in this area. Start to think a little bit about how we might chart the waters a bit more effectively so I can attempt to understand them a little bit more effectively and I’ll introduce a term that gets talked a lot here on new information, ecology, data ecosystem, civic technology ecosystem are the words you can find in some of the literature now. But also some of the other ways that we try to understand the issues of bringing that transformational change in government and public services. And then we’ll talk about what we’ve been finding in terms of our research, in terms of testing the waters in new information ecologies as they’ve been… find them in New Zealand and Australia. When I say Australia, we’ve mainly focussed on Victoria, so I apologise the Victorian-centric nature but we only had a year, other states may be later.
And as I say, some things at the end I’m speculative about navigation in these waters and an idea that comes from good tools of government which was updated a few years ago and called the digital tools of government. And one of the arguments in there about the implications of digitalisation for the nodality of government as the centre of social and informational networks in society and the challenges that this new ecosystem that’s emerging may be posed in terms of that modality into the future.
Okay, we’ve introduced everybody there so I think I would acknowledge the work that Yolande and Chi Wei have done in their research assistant time on the project but everybody else you know. So a little bit more about the project first of all, funded by ANZSOG Research Committee, really interested in the implications of attempts to exchange, link, share data and focussing broadly on the social sector, which I’ll say something more about in a moment and the issues of, in particular, governance that may have been involved with this increased potential of the actuality of data sharing to do things such as open data and big data. Comparative, so looking at New Zealand and Australia in particular, but also importantly with a benchmark, if you like, from experience in the UK and James will say something more about that benchmark in his observations. And this event, we always planned to do a validation workshop, it feels more like a trepidation workshop to me at the moment. But really to try and feed back to a knowledgeable policy makers and practitioners and academics and see whether what we’re saying is resonating and where we may be a little bit off-key or whether we’re tuned in pretty well.
And just to say something about the outputs, we’re producing an ANZSOG teaching case based on part of the work we’ve done, we aim to do next year an evidence-based review if we can get that accepted into the ANZSOG journal, and as part of the research requirement that’s if they fund it, so I’m [08:24] we have to write academic articles and we’re busy doing that as well in the near future. So there will be some written output from the project and in terms of today, the recording if it comes out okay and the slide deck we’ll make available to everyone who attended and please share them with interested colleagues if you wish to do so.
Now it’s a very big topic and our strategy for trying to make it doable in the time available to us was to say, “Well let’s try and take a slice through the whole onion, if you like, of the topic and not focus on one layer”. So we’re not focussed strictly at the government, just only at the government level, not focussed necessarily at the user, the citizen level or the community of service providers level. But try and take a slice through the whole onion. But in order to do that we had to really say we focussed on broadly the social sector, in practice we’ve focussed on the care sector and in practice we’ve focussed on the social side of the care sector. So we haven’t said too much about health, focussed too much upon health on deliberations. This is really, it’s not because things aren’t interesting, it’s just to make the project, give some focus to the project to make it doable in the time available. Critically to try and look at the thing in the different layers and not focus on one layer only, it’s not just look at this as what this government’s problem.
But try and look at the problem and issues and opportunities from the point of view of users from public agencies, non-government organisations, intermediary organisations who are coming into this space and in the user space distinct providers of care that was so new entrance into this space, social enterprises and social entrepreneurs. So try and take soundings, if you like, across the unchartered waters in a number of different places and to do that in Australia and New Zealand.
Okay, while on the social sector, I think this a great quote that kind of summarises it, although arguably applies to many other sectors as well, fragmentation, interests, parochial, silo-based, things never join up, disparate advice even at cabinet level, people are presenting their own data to support their own interests. There isn’t any genuine visitors through the system as a whole. There’s no understanding of the whole customer of the pathway they take through the system. There isn’t any ability really to know what’s going on, no one really knows what works, what doesn’t work and why in both cases and there’s little social learning that occurs across the system to enable sustainable change to take place. We can say that about health, we can say it about other sectors as well. It definitely applies in the social sector. James Mansell is a very influential thinker in New Zealand and this comes from his report to the New Zealand Productivity Commission on how to improve social services, and it pretty much nails on the head why the social sector broadly and [11:33] are worthy of focus, they certainly lag behind other sectors relatively speaking, and the take up of digitalisation, even basic computer infrastructure and so forth, has not spread and diffused, is not used as much in other sectors, the wickedness of the problems that are dealt with are obviously acute and quite different issues for policy and practice in many other sectors. There are well known constraints which are captured, in part, in James’ observations there in relation to fragmentation and overall system visibility and so forth and there are some really unique challenges around sharing and linking of data because of the nature of the information data that’s collected in relation to personal, social problems and so on and so forth. So our rationale for focussing on this sector is whatever the opportunities, challenges and problems and issues might be, they’re going to be quite amplified in this sector.
So what are some of these opportunities and challenges? This is a quick flick through some of the existing literature and this definitional problem with different types of data, this is derived from a number of resources Open Data Institute and a few other things. The notion of closed data, the stuff the government collects itself for its own purposes, it’s not quite clear what it collects, what it does with it and why but it’s obviously to do with things like national security and border protection, fighting crime and counterterrorism and so forth. And from time to time it’s a great concern, the Wiki leaks issue, for example, the idea that Obama used to be able to listen to everything you said which was current a couple of years ago. All things in this world are closed data, we haven’t really looked at that area that hasn’t been in the scope for us. What has been is broad world of the way government shares the data and collects on a routine basis, or by and large, doesn’t share very well the data it collects on a routine basis.
A few years ago that was seen as an information sharing problem and James and I were involved in certain projects in Europe about the difficulties of increasing the sharing of information in government.
Then we have got this relatively new phenomenon now of open data, which in the last four or five years has become a key trend to be involved in from a government point of view, and interestingly I need to get my notes for these scripts, I can’t remember, but one of the better definitions of open data I’ve come across is this one, which says to be open data it must exist, it must be indexable or [14:26]. So I quite like the idea that data just doesn’t exist, it must exist in some sense, you must be able to index it in some way. You must be able to engage with it, so it must be in an open and machine readable format, and thirdly it must empower, there must be a legal framework, a governance framework that allows it to be used and repurposed. So I think one of the better definitions exist, engage and empower. And then in this world of peer to peer data which is a very difficult one to pin down, some of the interest in the semantic way of a web too that was talked about in government circles is related to this and it’s to do with social media. I think the key thing is that an enormous amount of this data isn’t generated by government but it’s about stuff that’s with interest to what government does and we’re going to touch on that in some of the things that we look at.