Share and share alike

Recent weeks have seen speeches from both Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband on the continued reform of public services, stolidly invoking the Blairite mantra of citizens as ‘consumers’, armed with the weapon of ‘choice’. Hot on their heels is Tom Watson, the erudite and scholarly minister responsible for the transformational government agenda, who this week announced his new Power of Information Taskforce.

The Taskforce is predicated on ideas expounded in the 2007 Power of Information report. Commissioned by the government and written by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg, the report examines the ways in which we ‘use, re-use, create, recombine and distribute’ information. It also considers how people organise around information dependent on how it is presented. New ways of packaging and sharing information lead to new groupings and communities of understanding, which in turn lead to new ways of solving old problems. Against this context it looks at the use of technology to augment what we as a species already do and always have done – communicate and share information.

Tom Watson is very keen on sharing. In the crèche of government obstreperous ministers and civil servants are rarely willing to share their toys. However, there is more to Mr Watson’s task than simply getting one department to share information with another. Government must also share with citizens and, worse still, must let them play.

At the recent joint Cabinet Office/Intellect transformational government symposium, Tower ’08, Mr Steinberg cited the example of how his own organisation’s website theyworkforyou.com has profoundly changed political behaviour. Using publicly available information, made easily intelligible and accessible, the site has made MPs’ activities in Parliament much more transparent. This in turn has prompted parliamentarians to behave much as chefs in an open kitchen in a restaurant; there is a clear incentive towards demonstrable best practice.

In his speech on Monday Tom Watson invoked H. G. Wells’ idea that one day the ‘whole of human memory can be... made accessible to every individual’, what he called a ‘world brain’. This idea can be taken further, towards what Andy Clark and David Chalmers called the ‘Extended Mind.’ They suggest that everyday objects used to aid cognitive thought actually form part of that cognition. For example, directions written on a notepad are no more removed from the thought process than the same directions committed to memory.

Technological advances now mean that citizens need be no further removed from social policy than ministers or civil servants. If you make services ‘with boundaries porous to external ideas’, the users can shape the services to deliver maximum benefit. The community of knowledge becomes a community of participation, a kind of extended cognition: instead of government thinking for citizens, each citizen can think and act for themselves based on exactly the same information.

With opportunity comes risk, however. Those currently out of the loop are in danger of being left further behind. In this the government still carries the weight of old-school responsibility. Closing the ‘digital divide’ is a pre-requisite for removing barriers of principle to freer exchange of information. Without it we run the risk of a developing a schizophrenic ‘world brain’.

This should hold as the key tenet of how we as citizens think of our government, our services and ourselves. With technology, with opportunity, as with information, we must share and share alike.

Matt Mulley, Transformational Government Programme Executive