Broadband speeds may remain painfully slow, but the desire to provide access for all will be driven by the pressing need to save money by reforming public services, cutting costs and improving efficiency, whoever is in power.
So we’ll see universal access simply because the financial benefits of online public services will only be realised if nearly everyone has access to them, although there will always be a need to provide offline provision for those who cannot be served effectively through a screen and keyboard and I, like many others, will fight for this.

Over the next five years we can expect to see increasing use of web-based tools as the primary way of accessing state-provided services. I already renew my Road Tax, register to vote, pay my VAT and Income Tax, hand over the money for my TV Licence and pay the occasional parking penalty charge online, and I expect that soon I will have no need to write or phone a single agency to transact my business with government at local or national level.

The drive to digital will also be fuelled by increasing demands for transparency, as the crisis of faith in our MPs created by the revelations about expenses claims works its way through the political system, while a desire to emulate Obama will give extra impetus to the  Googleisation of Government IT and initiatives like data.gov.uk. Any resemblance  to its transatlantic cousin, data.gov, which speaks proudly of its exciting mission to ‘increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the executive branch of the federal government’, is of course entirely deliberate.

But introducing digital technologies into society is not a simple matter of providing computers, websites and internet connections and then getting on with it.  As we have seen with attempts to use computers in classrooms new technologies do not automatically lead to a positive outcome. Within the education sector the debate over the real usefulness of laptops in school and the gradual replacement of printed texts with ebooks is becoming increasingly rancourous as evidence piles up on both sides, and we should expect similar arguments elsewhere.

The stakes in this particular game of transforming government are especially high, and we cannot afford to take a naive view of moves towards digital democracy. Fortunately the new generation of social theorists, people who have grown up with computers in their lives and are as familiar with Facebook as they are with Foucault, can offer some guidance in this new area.

One of the most important thinkers is Will Davies, who cut his teeth working with economist Will Hutton at the think tank The Work Foundation, where he was a lead on its groundbreaking iSociety project.  He is now a research fellow at the Said Business School at Oxford University, and his papers and blog posts provide a much-needed analytic contrast to the ill-judged optimism that comes from those who understand neither technology nor society but see political or commercial advantage in promoting one as the solution to the ills of the other.

A good example of his work can be found in a recent blog post, where he offers a wide-ranging examination of the ‘post-bureaucratic’ state that seems to be on offer from David Cameron’s Conservatives as a consequence of the widespread application of the ‘power of information’ to public services.

Davies brings Weber, Hayek, Weinberger, Arendt and even Habermas to bear on the question of whether decentralising information through online services like data.gov.uk can offer us good government, concluding that while it may provide transparency and even accountability it can never sustain the legitimacy that a democratic state provides.

He offers a dense, complex argument, written for an audience familiar with the thinkers he refers to and who will appreciate the joke when he mentions ‘Hayek’s resolutely post-modern claim that objective knowledge is not only impossible, but a more dangerous ambition than the distributed opinion represented by the marketplace’.

Davies’ writing is not for everyone, but it should be essential reading for anyone whiowants to develop a sound understanding of the implications for society and political structures of the technological change that we seem to have accepted as inevitable. It is the sort of thinking that we desperately need if we’re to understand the technological future being offered to us by politicians of all major parties – and in all developed countries – as they are seduced by Google, Microsoft and Facebook into thinking that search, social networks and software can help us to solve the world’s many problems.

One of the problems with the people who lead great technological revolutions is generally that they have no real understanding of politics, philosophy, sociology, literature, economics or indeed anything other than their new technology and the business model they are using to change the world.

We have to hope that the politicians who are dragging us into the digital tomorrow take time to read and consider the wider issues raised by people like Will Davies instead of just signing up to the programme. Otherwise we will all be the poorer.

Bill’s Links

Power of Information Taskforce: http://powerofinformation.wordpress.com/ (rather quiet lately)

Will Davies: The Post-Bureaucratic State http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/what-is-the-postbureaucratic-state.html

We live in a largely digitised country, so in one sense the Digital Britain report is an exercise in ensuring that the legal and regulatory system catches up with the lived reality for most of the UK population rather than a visionary document describing a far-distant future.

As such it is a serious attempt to ensure that government makes the best possible use of the network in serving us all, and that businesses offering access to the internet or providing services and content over the network are regulated, rewarded and cajoled as necessary to ensure that the UK does not fall even further behind the rest of the industrialised world.

Although I criticised the interim report when it was published in January because it had been written behind closed doors and offered few opportunities for consultation and engagement for those outside the charmed circle of invited experts, it is clear that Stephen Carter and his team have listened to and taken notice of the extensive debate around their initial proposals. The result, though far from perfect, offers a good basis for work on the detail of implementation and legislation, and there are clear signs that those who want to engage will be able to do so.

There are suggestions for how to liberalise and improve access to wireless infrastructure, with potentially transformative proposals to shake up spectrum allocation to build a next generation mobile network offering 50mbps in cities and 5mbps in rural areas.

There is a confirmed commitment to delivering a universal 2mbps fixed-line broadband service to the whole country by 2012, and a £6 a year levy on existing copper telephone lines to pay for the ‘final third’ next generation coverage if the market cannot deliver. Two megabits per second is too slow for me, but universal service offers so many opportunities for engagement that it’s definitely worth having.

And there may even be ‘cultural tax relief’ for games developers and distributors, on the lines of the model that has made Canada such an attractive place for UK developers to move to.

The report comes on a day when the importance of the internet and the services it supports has been drawn to the attention of the whole world. The protests over the election results in Iran have depended on Facebook, YouTube and of course Twitter to get their message to the world, put pressure on their own government and organise their activities.

Just last week the French Constitutional Council halted the government’s plans to give a new authority the ability to cut the network access of internet users accused of copyright violations because “the Internet is a component of the freedom of expression”, while Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote in the The Times today that “a fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water.”

The view of the network as a utility and as a tool for expression is a very different one from that put forward by the dominant players in the so-called ‘content industry’. Record companies, film studios, newspapers and the TV broadcasters have all lobbied hard for the UK government to shape its internet policy around their interests. They want copyright laws to be strengthened so they can lock up any and all content. They want anyone who dares to challenge their business to be kicked offline, fined and locked up. They want a world in which they control what can happen.

Fortunately that pressure seems largely to have been resisted, and the real thrust of the proposals is about getting everyone online and ensuring that the network is there to be used in ways that support creative expression, new forms of industry and new models of engagement. The Digital Britain of the report is one in which all have access, not one where we try to preserve old industrial models.

When it comes to newspapers the report notes that ‘Digital Britain is at the beginning of a new and possibly disruptive wave of local news, generated by communities for communities using free online media’, and recognises that ‘Government and business will need collaboratively to devise new ways of funding the news’ without simply promising subsidy to the existing players who have failed to adapt to the network reality and have sought protection and subsidy.

The debate about the future of public service broadcasting includes many progressive ideas, and both the decision to make Channel 4 more than just a broadcaster but turn it into ‘the open new media authority providing the seed-corn for creative innovation in the multi-media world’, and the message to the BBC that the license fee does not belong to it are all good ones.

Unfortunately the proposals to limit file-sharing are less well considered and seem to be hopelessly optimistic, or perhaps to betray a naivety about how the internet works. Ofcom is to be asked to oversee efforts by UK ISPs to reduce what they term ‘illegal file-sharing’ by 70%, initially through notifying those accused of downloading material or revealing their names and addresses to rights holders so that they can be prosecuted.

If this doesn’t work then Ofcom may then be granted power to oblige ISPs to limit bandwidth or block specific protocols, presumably in the hope that doing this will deter or stop downloads. But this proposal ignores the fact that work is already going on to develop new file sharing technologies that are encrypted or disguise addresses more effectively. Ofcom might well hit its 70% target just because everyone moves away from BitTorrent without actually reducing the number of files shared over the net.

However the fact that the BPI boss Geoff Taylor found it necessary to accuse the government of ‘digital dithering’ for refusing to allow rights holders to have internet users cut off – the same proposals that have just been thrown out in France – is a good sign indeeed.

In the end public service broadcasting and the protection of the content industries matter far less than the promotion of universal access and the creation of tools and services that encourage everyone online to demonstrate their own creative potential.

A digital britain is not one in which we are all sitting glued to our screens watching the same sort of television programming that we could have had on a cathode-ray set in the 1970’s, downloading blockbuster movies or listening to more dull music made by rich popstars whose only real interest is their property portfolio.

It is one in which universal access allows us all to be fully-fledged citizens of a networked world that offers opportunities for creative expression and communication instead of the passive consumption of packaged content. There’s a glimpse of that world through the Digital Britain report, and it is one that those of us who already live a networked life need to clarify, share and work to build.

Bill’s Links

Digital Britain Report

Gordon Brown in The Times:

BPI unimpressed:

French law:

• Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog): Build the Open Shelves Classification –
• 2gether08 | Spirited Away – what next for 2gether – Call for ideas from Steve Moore for all at 2gether08
• Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Could Too Much Transparency Lead to Sunburn? – "As technology evolves, the same public information laws create novel and in some cases previously unimaginable levels of transparency"
• All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad – The INQUIRER – Nvidia chips seem to have a problem. A big problem

• Lose Your Wikipedia Crutch: 100 Places to Go for Good Answers Online – Distance Degrees.com – Useful list of places to look
• BBC NEWS | Politics | Voters' data 'should not be sold' – Another sensible report to be ignored by the UK government…
• Personal Internet Security: follow-up report – Richard offers a clear-sighted view on the new personal internet security report from the House of Lords Science and Technology committee
• London Games Fringe – be there.

Since then there have been a few speeches, some ideas have been floated for general consideration, like the recently announced Treasury review of how Ordnance Survey and other trading funds operate, and there’s been an interesting investigaion into how crime mapping might operate.

But now they are putting their money where their mouth is – or, to be more precise, our money where their mouth is since they are a public body – with an online competition to find the best ideas for ways to reuse governnment data.

‘Show Us a Better Way’ has £20,000 to offer to people who come up with innovative ways to use a wide variety of data sources, including a massive amount of medical data from NHS Choices and neighbourhood information from the Office of National Statistics.

They’ve also added in a carbon footprint calculator and a complete feed of notices from the London Gazette, the official source of details of company changes, honours and awards and unclaimed premium bond numbers.

And of course there’s the best mapping data in the world, courtesy of the Ordnance Survey.

The data available is as good as the government can make it, and there are literally terabytes of it behind the various feeds and APIs.  All they are looking for are ideas as to how to mix and combine it all to do something useful, a public-service mashup.

It’s a very interesting idea, and follows the recent expansion of the data sources available from the BBC through the Backstage project which Ian Forrester announced at last month’s Mashed08.

The downside is that although they’ve got access to many of these sources they can’t be used freely yet, as there are still many restrictions on how we can exploit the data the government collects on our behalf. But if enough good ideas emerge then it will help put pressure on the various data holders to offer more permissive license, and we may eventually see a general presumption that public data is freely available to the public, as The Guardian has been arguing for a while now.

If you feel like entering, the competition can be found at ‘www.showusabetterway.com’ and runs until the end of September. But don’t expect to get rich: the £20K is for a prize fund to ‘develop the winning ideas to the next level’, but if you read the FAQs it makes it clear that it’s not about giving people money. And nor is it about taking their ideas and running with them – the site is clear that ideas remain with their inventors, they just want to help.

For me one of the most inspiring things about the project is the strapline in the ‘About this site’ section, where it  says

public data is your data

It certainly is, although it hasn’t been treated that way for quite a while.

• Civil Service: Participation online guidance – Excellent advice for all of us who venture online, not just civil servants.
• E-piphanies – Machinations – The Trojan Social Open-Source Drop-Down – Nice article outlining some of the dangers that come from widgets/clouds
• Schneier on Security: Underhanded Implementation of RC4 – Nice comment on the problems with computer science teaching today
• Future of libraries – Nice selection of material from The Guardian