While it was very interesting to see parliamentary work, it is fair to say that the debate did not hold many surprises. The few interesting points worth mentioning are:

• The (usual) excuse for why government sites are just not as good as commercial sites: because governments are far more complex. While there is surely something different about governments and businesses (or so you would hope…), eBay, Amazon and Facebook are not exactly trivial as well and still reliably cater to millions of people in a simple and straight forward way.
• Alexis Cleveland, the Director General for Transformational Government (the ones that close down websites and move the rewritten content to Directgov) said that she would like to see more opportunities for citizens to give their views on sites and services which can only be welcomed. (As a side note, really a bit of a give-away for the government. Searching for “Transformational Government Cabinet Office” on Google brings as the number one hit an error page at the Cabinet Office website)
• There was a lot of discussion about how the move to more online channels will disadvantage those who are not capable of using the Internet who are often the ones who need public services the most. While it is surely a problem if attention (and hence money) is focused on online interactions on the expense of options for traditional face to face contacts, I was surprised that nobody mentioned the obvious benefit of the online strategy:
  1. most people do not want interpersonal communication (ie. queuing at inconvenient opening hours) but turn to the Web as hassle-free way to get things done quickly,
  2. which should in turn leave staff in offices with more time to deal with the people who really need and appreciate their help. Now one might argue that the whole point of government web services is to save money by getting rid of civil servants but you still have cost-savings by having people volunteer their information in electronic form (although I reckon it is probably printed out and then again keyed in by someone…)

You can listen to the full discussion here (should you REALLY wish so) but only for the next 28 days. You wonder why that is. Cannot be that difficult to keep the stuff. But it seems not uncommon these days for UK officials to get rid of important data …

The presentation was meant to give some overview of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and what implications it has for how government should make its information available. I argued that out of the two main distinctive features of Web 2.0 – collaboration (user-generated content, social web, etc.) and sharing (XML, APIs) – arise a number of challenges to the way governments provide their information:

1. visibility – People do not any longer turn to the government or indeed, any particular trusted information provider or brand. Instead, they use a search engine and in the UK that is usually Google.
   Data from our experiments in which we invite people to our computer lab to find pieces of government information on the Internet shows that 90% of them would go to Google to find the answer to a question. Only 1 or 2 out of 10 people would eventually end up on the government portal direct.gov.uk.
2. competition – What is more, due to this heavy reliance on search there is no guarantee that people will obtain their information from government. Instead, Web 2.0 technologies have been used for a number of non-governmental projects that mix and mash the information available on public sites to add real informational value and enable easier access. Some of these projects have been highly successful, such as UpMyStreet.com for local area information and TheyWorkForYou.com about parliamentary affairs.
   As a matter of fact, in our experiments we tend to find that some questions are answered without any government sites at all despite the fact that all the information we were asking for was essentially produced and provided by the state.
3. control – Now, whether or not you think this is a problem is a slightly different question but evidently there are issues around accuracy and control when public sector information is used and re-presented by third parties (be they social enterprises or businesses). Obtaining school league tables from the BBC website might seem less critical than for example travel advice.
4. license – Last but not least, the rapidly evolving technology has enabled a variety of applications current licensing models for public sector information need yet to find an answer to. A case in point is the recent controversy about the use of UCL CASA Virtual London model in Google Earth that was stopped by Ordance Survey because as Andy Hudson-Smith notes “The OS currently does not have the ability to license models for public usage and this is from a government-funded and approved agency.”

While I am not an expert in this arena, from my point of you there are some basic steps government should take in order to make PSI 2.0:

1. provide structured formats – this increases the value of the information both for the private sector as well as for volunteers who want to play with the data. I am not talking about some laboriously defined standard – anything that provides some unique identifiers and a basic structure will do
2. leverage the wisdom of the crowds – Following on from that I think government should not spend too much money on information visualization themselves. There is simply no way departments can come up with some of the more ingenious ideas of data representation and cross-referencing that the Web community has generated. Instead it makes sense to offer the data, let others make interesting stuff with it and if it works, incorporate it into the state site. There have been some interesting examples of that for the BBC (see BBC Backstage) and the UK parliament (who now gets its post code – MP lookup from UpMyStreet).
3. government certified data stream – one way to leverage the creativity of the Web community while at the same time providing some form of guarantee for the accuracy of the data is a kind of “government certificate” for sites that basically states the project is using the official government data stream and incorporates changes to the official stream in real-time.
4. sort out the licensing – Yes, this is difficult. Does not necessarily mean everything should be available free of charge.

Some of the things that came out of the subsequent discussion will be available via the APPSI meeting notes soon. For now, let me know your opinions on the question of how government should deal with PSI in a Web 2.0 world.