Can government remember? Is it condemned to repeat mistakes? Or does it remember too much and so see too many reasons why anything new is bound to fail?

Commissioned by Geoff Mulgan, CEO, Nesta, and led by Gavin Starks with Constellation members, ‘Can government stop losing its mind?’ looks at the many ways the government has organised its data and knowledge, and examines examples ranging from the Ministries of Defence and Justice to the BBC and ODI. It shows how research, policy design and tracking can be managed more effectively.

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Commissioned by Nesta

On Wednesday 18 April, Nesta is hosting the launch of a new report prepared by Gavin Starks.

The report entitled ‘Can government stop losing its mind?’ looks at the many ways the government has organised its data and knowledge, and examines examples ranging from the Ministries of Defence and Justice to the BBC and ODI. It shows how research, policy design and tracking can be managed more effectively.

Registration will open at 17.30 with the event starting promptly at 18.00. The event will close at 19.00 followed by networking drinks until 20.00.

I’ve joined the Advisory Board of DECODE, which is exploring tools that put individuals in control of whether they keep their personal data private or share it for the public good.

https://www.decodeproject.eu/

I joined the judging panel at FutureHack, the first ever Hackathon to take place around Davos during the week of the World Economic Forum, as a call to action to hack for solutions for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

https://futurehack.io/

Supported by the Slovenian Government, the hackathon focused on Social Impact and Partnerships to demonstrate that blockchain projects can be compelling solutions for the United Nations SDGs for the future of humanity.

I’ll update with the results here when we have them.

“The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data” says The Economist

“Data is the new oil”, said Clive Humby and many others [*update: or “new water”, “new electricity” etc… ugh]

Some people have described why it is and that it’ll be a new currency.

2014 Wired said it was and that “data infrastructure should become a profit centre”

In 2012 Forbes asked “Is Data The New Oil?”, saying “Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals…”

And, while it’s easy to run with these kinds of comparisons, they are shallow.

They miss at least three critical attributes.

1. Data doesn’t run out — data can be for everyone

2. You can make a copy of the data for (effectively) zero cost

3. Data increases in value the more it is connected

The economic model for a commodity that doesn’t run out is more like solar power than oil.

The value of data is not based on scarcity (even if you think it currently is, it wont be).

The economic model for a commodity that increases in volume and value the more it is connected is, well, more like the web. It might be more accurate to say that the ‘web of data’ is the new ‘web of documents’. Extrapolating… the value of data is greater than the value of oil.

Oh, and since I’m a climate geek, setting aside the carbon footprint of the internet (which is big), data doesn’t cause catastrophic climate change in the same way that oil does. Although, we may soon need data sequestration for all our binary dust.

And, lest we forget how organisations often relate to data, here is a potential vision for the future of data—if we don’t pay more attention.

(NB: original photo is copyright Richard Olsenius and used with permission here)

Other links

https://hbr.org/2012/11/data-humans-and-the-new-oil by Jer Thorpe

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/03/05/heres-why-data-is-not-the-new-oil/

Data is the new Water I: Water gives life (oil takes it)

This is not a thought piece, it’s a call to action.

We have failed to create smart cities. We have failed to create truly scalable and sustainable mechanisms to enable our cities and countries to benefit from the internet age. We are not addressing the challenges we face, from housing to healthcare, from taxation to climate change, in line with the pace of change.

We’ve built incomprehensibly complex systems and infrastructure, to the point that no one understands them, and therefore the ability to affect change is throttled. I don’t just mean physical or technical systems, but also political, legal and social constructs.

From a range of perspectives, we have created the wrong incentives, been caught up in technology utopianism and sales jargon. We have missed the point of urban design and its role in the creation of social inclusion in both our physical and digital realms, and this is actively damaging to our free-market economy, our environment and our society (both in damaging existing culture and in preventing evolution to new systems).

The issues we can see and feel in our physical spaces: runaway property prices, housing developments and city-as-airport designs—that undermine the principles of an inclusive culture—are echoed in our digital space, except there they are not visible to many, and certainly not understood in terms of infrastructure or in a frame of reference that would suggest you are building our pervasive societal structure upon.

We are in an unprecedented age: an anthropocene that affects our ecosystem as a whole, and in which the digital and physical blur. Where the definition of an asset, whether physical or digital, may be only rendered in the digital domain as a transaction. There are now more mobile phone contracts on Earth than there are people. More sensors than phones. More X than Y.

Whether ‘big data’, the ‘internet of things’, ‘blockchains’, ‘augmented reality’, ‘artificial intelligence’ — the words so noticeably missing are ‘people’, ‘society’ and even, given where the money comes from, ‘business’.

We have seen decades of technology-first, technology-will-save-us unicorns, about to tip over once more. We see the enthusiasm and investment at the beginning of the hype-cycle not followed through (either conceptually or with deep investment) in the longer tail. As our attention spans have shortened, so has our ability to commit to the difficult challenges of systemic change, at a time when we need this more than ever. We have drowned our sense of urgency.

There are, of course, exceptions. But they are that: exceptions.

Having worked online for over twenty years, I am tired of explaining what has changed, and what will change. There seems to be a sense that incremental change is ok. Meanwhile our global population has doubled in my lifetime, and there are more people online today than existed on the planet when I was born. And, we have hit peak everything (from antibiotics to chickens). Looking forward, I expect the combination of digital technologies, data, and artificial intelligence to make huge swathes of blue and white collar workers redundant (from truck drivers to accountants to lawyers).

Yet, the one thing we know (apart from change being only constant) is that we are a deeply creative species. We constantly invent new things, new jobs, new economies, and always at new scales.

To bring out the best in people, and give them agency over the process of creative destruction that they are now in we need to do two things. Firstly we need to accept, really accept, that everyone is connected and that we cannot control this fact, however hard we might. Secondly, we need to embrace a transition to an open culture.

What do I mean by open culture?

With one lens I mean open innovation. I mean that there are no parts of our economy that are not wholly dependent on the internet in some way. If you look at the web itself, it has evolved remarkably quickly from a context where it echoed our built environment into something else: a ‘website’ was something you built and put all your own things into and it all existed in a place where you had complete control. Today, there is no way to tell what a website is: the front page of a news service may be made up of feeds from a dozen other places, in random locations around the world, with content that any one of the 3.6B people in the world may have added. There is no ‘website’. There is a porous collection of content. This is a modal shift that has happened and we must build upon it to address other challenges.

In businesses we see continuous ‘innovation programmes’ that try and build in-house teams to bring the world ‘inside’ and build their new thing, which they will store in their silo of IP.  Except a lot of what they are trying to box up and contain is a set of fluid knowledge from an unknowable number of connected sources. This represents closed innovation.

From a culture of closed—our default since the inception of the industrial revolution— the rules are such that we instruct people, by default, to collate, store and protect everything in our chosen constructed framing of company. This is entirely at odds with the way that the system from which the innovation was gathered worked and, only rarely does it feed back into that system.

Open innovation is porous.

With another lens I mean open society.

As more than half the world’s population lives in cities (or more correctly, cities and urban environments), we are developing new social responses to enable people to interact with each other, and with their environment. I have long believed that the invention of the internet, and the web, are social responses to globalisation: tools that provide the only way to maintain a sense of community. Aligned with a Dunbar number of your choosing— when the population density of your train exceeds your psychological capacity to feel engaged as a social group, how do you respond? You see it every day. Heads down. Faces illuminated. Connecting—digitally—to a human network that provides a sense of place.

But it’s not just the social network. It’s the rise and rise of ‘civic tech’, as people start to understand the power of using information, connecting people, helping people recapture a sense of agency, or community and purpose in our population-dense world.

Governments and leaders around the world are struggling to understand this shift. There are many investments, many initiatives, many programmes. We know it’s important. Yet, in my view, we are failing. We haven’t yet truly accepted that addressing the pace of change requires us to change our default.

We need to design for open.

This does not mean making everything open—far from it—but we must design, provide the architectures for, embrace and lead with an open agenda.

I hear, daily, that this is a challenge. I also hear, daily, that people are trying to change. From global health companies to housing, from the financial markets to retail, from local governments to the World Bank, people are pushing for greater partnerships, for systemic impact from their investments, for solutions to epidemics, to helping refugees and mass migration, to addressing climate change. It feels like there are tentative steps toward solving problems together.

If we design for open, ‘together’ can involve everyone. Whether it’s a teenager in <US example of medical research paper opened up by Aaron Schwartz that led to cure> or the human genome project, whether its the <transport API example of 1,800 developers making things> or <open banking>, this is a systems change.

A huge challenge is that countries and national governments can’t move at speed: their own institutional challenges are huge. There is momentum, and it is powerful, necessary and we can help it directly and indirectly.

Companies cannot create systemic change in isolation. There are millions of partnerships that are wonderful, but limited in scope and impact, and not connected to broader impact. There are NGOs who struggle, with limited funding, to create impact. And, to address issues at the scale I have touched upon requires the connection of industries and systems that currently have no incentive to connect.

And individuals, and groups, simply cannot influence at the scale and pace required.

All options are complex. We need to find a unit of complexity that has boundaries, yet contains all the issues, that can be brought together. We need not spin up a new organisation that will take a top-down, systems-level approach to ‘design’ a solution. We need to enable everyone to engage in solving the problems that matter to them. We need a system that we can use as an exemplar for open design.

I believe cities, and their communities, are one such system.

One of the challenges with cities is that they simply don’t have the information or control that everyone thinks they do. Companies have some. Citizens have some. The State has some. If we help them design for open, we can give people permission to innovate without asking. We can provide the tools for businesses or startups, to governments and their agencies to explore their own solutions or partnerships without having to constantly reinvent new programmes.

If you’ve ever run a time-limited impact initiative and watched what happens at the end of the funding, you’ll know what I mean. A sustainable, malleable, living solution requires continuous engagement. An open design lets people, administrations and businesses build products and services that embrace users, create supply chains and ensure that there is an economic model to keep them going. If not, the product or service can adapt or die, but the underlying raw materials must be available.

In my view, one critical material is data. Data about everything and everyone. Data that is closed, shared and open. We need to work out ways to create open standards that enable our data to be treated as infrastructure. Opening access to data, as infrastructure, will have as profound an impact on our society as providing electricity.

Action

And this is my call to action is: let’s unlock our city data infrastructure. Let’s create open city standards that address the user needs, business needs, policies, training, tools, processes and techniques that cement the underlying assets for our digital economy (as, rest assured, our economy is already digital, as much as we are all data now).

Let’s do this in collaboration with the administration, the local businesses, civic bodies, and citizens, to ensure that our process is porous, and our outcomes are open and usable, creates open innovation, and that unlocks knowledge for everyone.

A selection (partial) of references and sources that may be interesting:

http://futureeverything.org/events/city-api/

http://www.connectingbristol.org/

https://github.com/Liverpool-UK/somebody-should

http://opendata.brussels.be/api/v1/console/datasets/1.0/search/

https://lsecities.net/media/objects/events/the-future-city-cruel-or-consoling-utopia-lse-cities-literary-festival-discussion

http://chicago-ctos.com/ (nb: the fictional connected city from hacking videogame Watch_Dogs)

http://faculty.washington.edu/plape/citiesaut11/readings/Low%20Gated%20Communities.pdf

http://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/60747

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/A_Pattern_Language.html?id=hwAHmktpk5IC

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Invisible-Cities-Vintage-Classics-Calvino/dp/0099429837?tag=hohtel0c-21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

http://www.meetup.com/Economics-and-Big-Data/events/227867413/?a=socialmedia

https://medium.com/the-development-set/the-reductive-seduction-of-other-people-s-problems-3c07b307732d#.em1mbeqb3

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/exhibition-engineering-the-world-ove-arup-and-the-philosophy-of-total-design/

http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web/transcript?language=en#t-40986

https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations#t-1024086

During the Olympics Opening Ceremony, the creator of the web tweeted “This is for everyone” to millions of people around the world.

Decades since their invention, we are still discovering and unlocking value from the innovations catalysed by the open web, open internet, and open source. The Open Data Institute‘s mission is to demonstrate and unlock the value in Open Data.

Today, I am joining Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt at the ODI, as its CEO.

The ODI is a new institute – the first of its kind in the world dedicated to open data value. We have ambitious plans, and aim to have a substantial and positive impact for many, many people.

• Incubate and catalyse innovative new companies
• Help large and small companies develop and derive value from open data
• Provide the right environment to inspire, train, and develop world-class talent
• Enable organisations publish high-quality open data
• Help shape standards in this emerging space

We have had fantastic support across the political spectrum, from academia, from the private sector, and from individuals.

Open Data creates the potential for anyone to innovate. The web was created using, and exists because of, open source and open data. I want to explore how we can best deliver;

• data presented in a structured, “machine-readable” form so that data can be used by and between services (for example, using Apps)
• data that is addressable via the internet and can therefore be linked together

I believe that

“information causes change, otherwise it’s not information”
James Burke, dconstruct 2012

There are massive benefits of getting this right. Governments, businesses, and individuals around the world are gradually coming to understand the power of data. The World Economic Forum has now categorised Personal Data as a new “Asset Class”:

“Personal data is the new oil of the Internet
and the new currency of the digital world.”
Meglena Kuneva, European Consumer Commissioner

And this is just the beginning: there is an emerging shift in our collective understanding of the power of connected, addressable information.

The ODI will help us reveal this power, guide us towards best practices, fair usage, and empower a new generation of innovators to create value – and in this definition I include economic, environmental, and social value.

What is Data?
This may seem like an obvious question, and to help anchor our language I want to be clear what this means. We live in an age where almost everything is, or will be, digitised. We are familiar with government spending data, health statistics, company financial reports, school assessments, and our own personal records. We are less familiar with data that is collected when we (as governments, businesses, or individuals) use the web, or devices that generate new data (such as location data from your mobile phone, or using Facebook).

I see two trends here: one is a growing set of opportunities for innovation – creating new services that improve our lives, the other is a growing sense of anxiety – that we are monitored and not in control of our information. I want to address both these areas.

What is Open Data?
Firstly Open Data does not mean “all data”, or that it’s a free-for-all. For example, your personal health data is extremely private. There are benefits, for example aggregated anonymous statistical analysis can help us make better decisions. There are also risks – we know that companies, governments, and individuals are not always as well equipped to handle information as we may want.

Examples (please send me more – I am keen to learn!)
– Public data released around MRSA has contributed to reducing death rates
– Company data released around environmental data has helped to catalyse the transition to  more energy efficient operations
– And even remarkable stories involving individual data could help to find new cures…

NB: I will remain on the board of AMEE.

[repost of my AMEE post on Energy Identity]

Since AMEE’s inception in 2005, we have recognised that the emerging sets of data needed for carbon calculation and energy assessment present huge privacy issues.

Combined with the automation of data capture through smart-meters, mobiles, purchases and other “digital identity” sources there is a real need to address some fundamental issues.

As we help to glue together the instrumented world, what are the outcomes and what are the risks?

Energy Identity = The digital embodiment of
your physical consumption

(from slide 32 of my eTech presentation)

This concept applies to everything from individuals to businesses to countries, a product to a supply-chain, a home to a bank.

Issues include;

1. Data ownership
2. Data privacy
3. Data portability (sharing) and control

The good news is that we’ve “seen this movie before”. In the 1990s we stumbled online, throwing our digital identity information all over the place, in an unstructured manner, and didn’t consider these points until it was too late. Initiatives such as OpenID and OAuth are only now trying to re-invent control mechanisms to address what we all need.

With energy, we have an opportunity to pre-emptively declare the rules of engagement. Some activity is already evident in this space (e.g. Google Powermeter testifing to congress). In the UK, since we have the UK Government as a client, I was able to seed some of these ideas some time ago (the UK is also gifted with the presence of MySociety).

To summarise, the issues include:

1. Data ownership

This should really default to you/your business (i.e. the source of the consumption).

The EULA of your service provider should ensure that you own your data and have expressly given permission to use it. Standard stuff really, but we’re a long way from that in this emerging dataverse.

From AMEE’s perspective, when we hold your data it’s subject to the EULA of the provider you are coming through (e.g. Dopplr) and defaults to you otherwise.

2. Data privacy

As with other services, the default should be to use a series of seperate silos.

AMEE holds each client’s data in separate silos (e.g. Google in one silo, Morgan Stanley in another). This allows for both digital separation and, if required, physical separation. AMEE can shard to enable this.

Further we anonymise the data on the way in – in fact we insist that clients don’t use AMEE to store e-mail addresses etc, and just use the anonymous key AMEE provides to link their user data. This key is held in their user database and points to the anonymized “AMEE Profile”. Given how much personal data is stored about businesses and individuals in AMEE we wanted to pre-emptively push away this risk, and instill confidence in our clients that even if AMEE were compromised, their users would remain anonymous.

3. Data portability (sharing) and control

Having established that ownership and privacy are the two foundation stones, we can then acknowledge that the ability to share information is extremely important. To do so opens a lot of issues, which we’ve been working on for a long time now, but we are confident that AMEE’s model enables extremely rich data portability without compromising ownership and privacy, by pushing control back to the data owners.

Thanks to effective anonymisation and security, we also believe that data mining and interpretation can be carried out without compromising privacy. Because AMEE has an effective security strategy in place, we can interpret and analyse the Energy Identities of, and on behalf of, our clients, and their clients, in an aggregate fashion, without becoming a “big green brother”.

The results of this research can be used to track the impact of policies regarding energy generation, distribution and use; and to confirm and develop carbon accounting protocols.

Summary

Thankfully most of the these issues are recognisable trends in the online development.

The challenge, and more importantly, the opportunity is to pre-emptively address these issues as we move to a deeper interconnected world.

The potential is for all of us to become involved in the development of our low-carbon economy, the democratization of energy and sustainability and, we hope, to avoid mass extinctions.

At last, I think the nature of [AV] transmission is beginning to reveal itself.

Do we need a new term? Probably – many other terms (p2p, broadcast, webcast, bitcast, torrent, web2.0, hive, etc) all describe an evolutionary step, so it does make sense to have a phrase to describe this one (note that edgecasting has already been monopolised by the CDN community and doesn’t actually describe “edge” in the context we need it to).

Cloudcasting is a term to describe usage of cloud (or meta-cloud) infrastructure to super-distribute content to, and from, edge devices.

Design requirements

:: Addressability
Permanent, guessable, as per the Coatsian rules of linkage.

:: Viewer Identity Management
Viewer-controlled at the edge, as per the O’Brien rule of Digital Identity Management.

:: Distributed storage
Both at the edge and in the cloud, as per the Loosemore box of imposs and the O’Brien rule of infinite scaling.

:: Open, anonymous publishing
Via tor networks, embedded on every mobile, home router, myth … devices.

:: Access control and content-owner identity tracking
Enabling edge-to-edge rights-control and reporting for those who want/need it. Commercially-enabling is important.

A cloudcast needs to enable content owners to be identified so that they can be paid (via direct and/or syndication channels) but doesn’t need to explicitly identify users, only views, which can be managed via oauth-escrow.

A p2p+tor+S3+mythTV+hive+impossibox mash-up, but with good addressability…?

Consolidated Independent (CI) is a world leading digital distribution company.

Acting on behalf of the Independent Music sector, it delivers music, audiobooks and video to iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Vodafone and literally hundreds of digital retailers.
20% of the music available in the Amazon download store at its launch was delivered by CI.

CI is still the world-leader in pure digital distribution for the sector.

Clients include Beggars Group, Sanctuary, Vital, Mute, etc. One of the most advanced (we built our own cloud compute), detailed, and scalable music-industry platforms in the world.

We enabled albums such as Radiohead’s In Rainbows to go from studio to hundreds of online retailers worldwide within hours of completion.