Public Service and the Web

My Public Services Conference

"Stories can change the world" is the maxim. Check it here.

A one-day London gathering to reimagine public services, especially health, in the light of the web’s abundance of information, contact, choice.

This is a transformationist agenda: they want us to imagine how choosing can help to create change and improvement. Not just give the chooser an advantage for themselves

The premise: the tools now available for managing the interface of consumer and provider are so utterly different from what we have had, that we should re-design the entire system. Don’t copy the old models and just digitise them. We are working with new materials.

This analogy from organiser James Munro:

Ironbridge by Telford the first ever iron construction. It was built using carpentry techniques, jointing and pinioning as for wood. Yet the material allows entirely different possibilities. We need to avoid making this mistake for public service delivery now that the web is here.

Questions for our age in online delivery of Government:

• Why do we have centralised departments (to locate files in)
• Why do we have queues ? (because expertise is concentrated)

Probably none of this is necessary now

Tom Loosemore of 4ip

Tom says that Govt’s first job on the internet is to stop running websites. They are not good enough for the cost. Big public organisations are bad web publishers. BBC.co.uk is poor value for money. When Tom ran all the bbc's community outlets, he shut them down. They weren't listening. The conversations were happening elsewhere, and the BBC wasn't going to be the place they were taking place. In fact, hosting those community conversations was just trouble: defamation etc... When NHS hosts conversations about health services, you know it is going to be following a corrupt editorial policy and not be transparent about it. The fifth estate (the web) has to hold power to account.

Government should be publishing information and keeping it up to date. Other people should be using it to create services and interfaces.