Small steps to innovation
Directgov has shown itself to be open to testing new ideas and innovations to resolve some of the implicit challenges it faces in trying to join up services that are essentially separate. The Directgov Innovate website39 has been created for technical developers to share new ideas with the aim of supporting and encouraging innovation. By opening up data to developers and having the right structures in place, Directgov has been able to respond quickly to events. For example, the searchable information created for schools closed by the snowfall in February 200940.
Elsewhere, in 2008, the Cabinet Office’s ‘Power of Information Taskforce’ ran a competition called ‘Show Us A Better Way’ inviting ideas on different types of Government data could be mashed together to create better information, among the winners selected for further development were:
- ‘Can I recycle it?’ inputting a postcode reveals what a council recycles
- ‘UK cycling’ a one-stop site for planning a cycling route for different skill levels
- ‘Catchment areas’ showing the boundaries of school catchment areas, including where there is potential uncertainty
In 2009, the Ministry of Justice launched the Public Experience website41 which aims to use public insight and experiences for improving public services. Examples of ideas submitted include buying pro-rata season tickets on public transport for people who are regular but not daily commuters; and removing the need to register lots of personal data before receiving basic information from NHS24 in Scotland. These examples show how users’ perspectives on public service can result in innovative ideas. This might be a good starting point for exploring changes to Directgov.
Box 5: Rewired State
The Rewired State team is a group of developers who have reconfigured Government sites to demonstrate how things like job searches, planning applications and Company’s House data can work better for people with more user-friendly features. Directgov and Government Departments including Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) recognise the value of working in this way with digital activists, and part sponsored their latest ‘Young Rewired State’ hackday in August 2009.
www.jobcentreproplus.com, http://ukcompani.es and http://planningalerts.com see their blog for details of the Young Rewired State hackday http://blog.rewiredstate.org/
These developments suggest that an appetite for innovation is emerging in Government and among citizens. They also suggest that Government is positioning itself as a medium for empowering others to innovate and co-produce services by opening up its data for a wider use42. This allows for much more good practice to surface than would happen if Government was solely responsible for innovative public services.
- Directgov Innovate. Available at: http://innovate.direct.gov.uk/ [Accessed 9 September 2009].
- Link no longer available
- Public Experience. Available at: http://publicexperience.com [Accessed 9 September 2009]
- A message central to the Power of Information: an independent review for the Cabinet Office by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg, 2007
Show Us A Better Way sounded good, but what has it actually delivered?
Two of the three chosen projects actually already exist – http://www.recyclenow.com/ and http://www.cyclestreets.net/ , as pointed out by people just after the competition announced the winners, but there’s nothing on those sites that suggests they actually got any funding, I presume both could do with it!
Others still like the JobCentre one seem to be messing about scrapeing google for postcodes for lack of funds, because of the idiocy of having to pay for the postcode database, which should a national asset if ever there were one.
And the SUABW website seems not to have any kind of follow -up report, again suggesting that they didn’t actually use the money that was allocated!
It looks as if they came up with the idea but didn’t follow it through which is a great shame given what the voluntary sector seem to be doing, seemingly with few funds.
Tom