Adrian

This feels like something I would want to support, and well done for getting on with it. But can you be a bit more specific about what you want councils to stick on their RSS feeds. If it’s ‘news and events’, and it’s data in the technical sense, but it’s not the real data by which the public can assess performance, challenge inequities of delivery.

The press releases from my Council are full of half-truths, manipulation and exaggeration, and one of the tasks on my blog is to challenge some of the crap they come out and present as the ‘truth’. There is, essentially, a risk of unintended consequence, that your project might simply end up with biased tosh being more widely exported than before.

I wouldn’t support a project trying to get the Daily Mail into people’s RSS feeds, so can you give me a jusitification as to why I’d support yours. This is not meant be to be negative about your project which, as I say, ‘feels’ like something to support, but a challenge to set out the substance and benefit more clearly than I get them at the moment.

I second what Paul says. Every time I get something through the post from the Council, there’s literally no frame of reference as to whether or not it’s accurate or complete distortion. I’m averse to the notion of a Standards Board for England having power over elected representatives, but I don’t trust the elected representatives – Labour, Tory or Lib Dem. The news they put out is self serving bullshit – and most of the stuff we want to get at, especially data relating to impending privatisations, construction of new supermarkets etc don’t have to be released, and we get fed nonsense about prejudicing competition and so forth.

Throwing down the gauntlet to….improve services?…deliver better value?…cut council tax?…er, no…it’s RSS feeds we want. And we want them….by Christmas.

Hi Paul and David,

Good points. First, let me be clear that Mash the State is about more than councils, more than news and more than RSS. It’s an ongoing campaign to get every single bit of public sector information and every transactional service available through open APIs. APIs (application programming interfaces) are doorways onto data and RSS is a simple API.

That’s a grand (and effectively, infinite) ambition. We have to start where we are. Right now, the public sector generally and especially local councils see “e-government” largely as trying to make better websites for themselves and seeing themselves as the sole providers of these services. I think this approach is fundamentally wrong. Whether it’s someone that just wants to read news through their RSS reader or large-scale sophisticated applications like Planning Alerts, people should have the opportunity and choice to get information or interact with public services in the ways that suit them.

So I chose council news through RSS as the most modest request possible that would represent public information being delivered through an API. If we can’t even get that — and 80% of councils still aren’t doing it — then what hope is there for any more complex or possibly contentious data being served up in ways that the councils will find harder to implement and possibly have qualms about distributing?

No sophisticated reader takes anything at face value, whether it’s the Daily Mail or press releases from their local council. The difference between the two is that if you don’t want to get your news from the Daily Mail you choose an alternative. You don’t have an alternative to consuming your local council’s services and you will have to pay for them whether you try to avoid using them or not. If councils are putting out misleading information then being able to read that conveniently where you want to read it and challenge it is more useful than having it buried away on the council site that you don’t bother to visit very often. Once you start doing mashups and display information from several sources alongside each other you very soon start to see the difference between one organisation’s line and another.

To take a simple example, most councils don’t let people leave comments on their web pages. What if someone took the news RSS feed and built a simple site that displayed the council’s news and allowed open commenting? Getting data out into the open isn’t about circulating propaganda but about allowing it to be contextualised with supporting and competing sources and challenged where desirable.

RSS news from councils is Mash the State’s “Challenge 1”. It’s only running until Christmas. Sometime before then we’ll choose another challenge and go after a different data set from the public sector. It could be the councils again, or central government, or perhaps the police or NHS. There will be an open process for deciding on Challenge 2 so if you’ve got any ideas, let’s hear them.

Cjcjc, don’t underestimate the power of information. Most people don’t know how local government works – and more importantly, when they are disinformed, their opinions on those aspects they do know are likely to be based on faulty premises. When Tories down here can claim that high council tax in this area is the fault of Labour – despite Tory control of the city council and county council – then there’s some serious problems with the nature of information being distributed. This stretches to include matters of local development which, despite local opposition, councillors will approve and then claim they opposed. It includes matters of privatisation – especially figures which document just how inefficient SERCO is, and how much officers are paid. The list is long.

And it is this information around which campaigns for better services, better value and reduced council tax can be built. In principle then what the OP is advocating is a good idea. In practice, I think it would just be an extension of the baloney Councils serve up as it stands. Bearing in mind the capacity for residents to build their own campaigns, armed with the right information, I’d have thought that increasing the amount of information available to the public would be a good idea regardless of party political allegiance.

cjcjc,

Wouldn’t you say that being able to get timely and accurate information about what your council does is essential if you want to work to “improve services?…deliver better value?…” and if it matters to you, “cut council tax”?

If so, how would you like that information delivered? In one format as prescribed by your council, or in infinite ways limited only by the imagination of anyone with moderate programming skills and a desire to do things differently?

What success have you had with asking Dept for Communities and Local Government to back your request? Or getting Tom Watson to help press CLG on the topic?

I haven’t had any direct contact with CLG or Tom Watson. Mr Watson is aware of the campaign and has tweeted appreciatively but I suspect he’s had other things on his mind lately.

http://twitter.com/tom_watson/statuses/1482581778

Mash the State is a grassroots campaign so the first priority is to get individuals on board and lobbying their local councils directly. Many are already doing this and there are some signs of progress. While a nudge from CLG may be helpful (though possibly counterproductive in some councils), putting in a news RSS feed is something that the councils can quite easily achieve on their own. With local pressure to do so I’m confident that many will.

Adrian, thanks for that quick and full reply. I’m very glad to see that your original piece was a ‘starter for 10’ and that your thinking behind it is fuller than the space a first blog piece perhaps allows for.

Of course, the risk with what you propose – the easy stuff for starters, then the tougher stuff – data that is less easy to manipulate to the council’s advantage – is that council’s will go for stage 1 then start to obsfuscate around stage 2 until project drift sets in, but you will be well aware of that, and a risk does not mean your strategy of getting the foot in the door is wrong.

The other aspect is that even the fairly ‘objective’ data will often be skewed as a measure of the performance of a council, or its effectiveness. As a simple example, remininiscent of the way hospital trusts ‘game’ therir 4 hour A&E data to suit the target, sometimes even to the detriment of patient safety and care, so councils may routinely game their performance indicator methods, for example by reallocating resources to ‘major planning’ waiting times at the expense of ‘minor planning waiting times’ when it suits.

More complexly, but also more importantly, councils and their delivery agents (the private sector etc) will manipulate data before presentation to the outside world in ways which conceal growing inequity of delivery. Thus, in relation to the Serco data which I think Dave @5 may possibly be referring to (because he reads my blog), Serco Leisure Operating Ltd tried to spin the lie that they were improving the service in my area after it was ‘out-sourced’ to them, but the figures they presented actually concealed both massive differences in investment and outcome in rich vs poor areas, and actually included mathematically incorrect average price increases (undercalculating) by a massive degree). See http://www.bickerstafferecord.org.uk/?p=114 on this , as well perhaps as http://www.bickerstafferecord.org.uk/?p=377 on the way, when I wanted to seek external resources to do a rigorous analysis of one council’s area of spending using its raw data, the Council exerted its authority to stop my application for funds going forward.

Of course, such an example backs up to some extent what you are trying to do – get the ‘raw’ data out there for people to analyse and make appropriate challenge on – given that I could only get the Serco raw data in the first place by a) winning a council seat b) demanding the data and making myself a real pain in the arse till I got it. It also, though, brings into relief the assumption you make that there may be an army of people out there wanting to seize on the data and computer programme it till the truth outs. I’m not convinced there is that army at the moment.

This brings me, I think, to why I’m so interested in this project of yours, and keen to hear more. I think it’s potentially valuable (and I restrict myslef to local councils here) but this data supply project needs to be balanced by another one – a data review/analysis project, where people getting the stuff off the RSS feed know what to do with it and how to do it. Such a concept is linke to what Dave @5 and I are working on at the moment – basically a local blog development project which provides both local capacity to get local news out in new media ways, and the skills to make that news an over ‘left’ challenge to the status quo. Contact me if you want to know more.

All the best, at any rate, with your plans.

Info from the Police. Hah!! Good luck with that.

We’ve been trying to get decent info from them for ages for our site: mindyourstreet.com. FoI requests are ignored or they give us rubbish. Heather Brooke has been trying to get this data too [https://liberalconspiracy.org/2009/03/21/watch-bloggers-summit-at-coml/]. I know some academics at UCL got hold of the sort of data we’d like but they’re doing little of use with it. Our software is now being developed using real data – from the US. We live in hope…

I can get behind this but I’m curious about the title as ‘Mash the State’ sounds rather confrontational for a campaign with such reasonable demands.

Aren’t you likely to put off people for whom ‘Mash the State’ cunjours up images of tattood hippies with a face full of buckshot lobbing bricks at their local Starbucks?

(And I say this as someone who deliberately chose a violent-sounding pseudonym!)

Chris,

Sounds like a campaign to get the data you need for your site is exactly what’s required rather than trying to do it all on your own. If the data the UCL people have got were open licenced then anyone would be able to use it for whatever purposes they chose. That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to do.

Shatterface,

“Mash” refers to mashups, bringing together data from many different sources and doing something with it that’s greater than the sum of its parts. There’s no implication of violence intended, except, perhaps, to the data. 😉

My suggestion about CLG was rather tongue in cheek. People who I am working with get absolutely nothing from CLG, because it didn’t pick up topics that ODPM backed (but the ODPM team depended on contractors to provide the skills, and they were all discontinued when ODPM transferred responsibilities to CLG). However, CLG has given some money to people who do things on the web, such as NWeGG [1] and LEgSB [2]. Across the Pennines, Yorkshire Forward supports all kinds of initiatives, tending to support businesses that, among other customers, work for LAs.

[1] A side bar at /www.nwegg.org.uk says “Following numerous public sector initiatives and workshops relating to information sharing, the North West Information Sharing group has been formed.”

[2] Which I think is dormant again, after someone used it to try to further a different project.

Certainly a very laudable aim, and I certainly agree that Govt. information should be so accessable that non-availability is really comment-worthy

I was surprised when I did my recent survey of 20 random councils just how few had RSS feeds.

In order to have success at getting more RSS feeds in place, I think it’s important to understand why so many don’t have them. For many I think it isn’t just a matter of 30 minutes work (even if it should be!) because, for example, their site is supplied by an outsider supplier to contracted specs and using a system that is deployed across several clients and not updated speedily in response to requests from individual customers.

That’s not to say we should put up with poor excuses, but it’s also a matter of finding the best arguments and lines to take – which I think includes pressure on suppliers, councillors, council staff and those setting the standards and good practice standards councils are so often driven by.

@ Mark,

You’re right that there are a whole host of reasons why councils don’t have feeds. I suspect the most common one is that they never really thought it was important. But having convinced them of that (and we’re a way off that!), technical, resource and even political factors can stand in the way.

One CMS supplier, Jadu, is already actively helping to get all their council clients using RSS. It suits them, suits us and hopefully will suit those councils.

I’ve also done a bit of unofficial tech support with some councils that need it that are developing their own systems in-house.

Many councils are at the mercy of their CMS suppliers. Some councils are already pushing those suppliers to improve their systems.

I hope that the period until Christmas is enough time for all these different factors to come together to either get RSS in place or well on track for all the councils.

Adrian – if you are not already in contact with them, you should check out the work that mySociety have been doing – http://www.mysociety.org/

They have set up projects like:
* http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
* http://www.fixmystreet.com/
* http://www.pledgebank.com/
* http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/
* http://www.writetothem.com/

This seems right up their street (as it were).

Ignore the nay-sayers – easy access to public information is very important and very powerful.

While my previous post waits to be moderated, another project in a similar vein is http://planningalerts.com/ which allows you to subscribe to receive e-mail notification of applications for planning permission near a given location. They claim to cover over 250 local authorities, scraping the details from the websites, which is probably the best you can do until each council presents the data in a consistent format.

Oh, my second one went straight through. I was trying to point Adrian towards the work that http://www.mysociety.org/ have been doing, and suggesting that he contact them if he has not done so already. This idea has close parallels to projects like http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

I’m a huge fan of Planning Alerts. In fact, seeing all the work they had to do to scrape all those sites was one of the reasons I set up Mash the State.

And now my first post has appeared 🙂 Like buses, they are.

Perhaps asking for an RSS feed for planning applications – rather than the council’s news and events – would be good second step, or even a more useful first step?

Is the idea to wean the councils on to RSS as a vehicle for wider dissemination of their self-promoting literature, and then persuade them to use it more widely for things that are of more use to the public?

Anyway, good luck.

Andrew @ 22:

Lots of people are interested in getting better access to planning information, including me. While RSS is adequate for sending human-readable information to people about applications it’s not really good enough for transferring all that information between programs.

RSS has a few basic fields: title, description, date, link. A planning application has many more. Wansbeck and Lichfield councils have developed APIs to link straight into PlanningAlerts.com and Barnet council have just been given a big grant by CLG to develop an online planning application and discussion tool. I’ve started a petition to require that software and others in the same funding programme to be open source:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/open-source-tic/

It’d be good to co-ordinate these people and try to produce a single API structure for planning applications that everyone can use. As far as I know no-one’s trying to do that at the moment.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your question about Mash the State’s strategy. 🙂

This piece implies that there is a significant difference between information held by the state and non-state held information – logically there does not seem to be a difference with the consequence that all information whereverit is held should be made publically available.