William Heath’s blog

The best part of working life since I went indy in 2007 has been working with great designers. I love thinkpublic and wish huge swathes of public services could be transformed to work along the lines they espouse: more not less please. The original design work – mainly by Paul Thurston and Alice Osborne – for Mydex has stood the test of startup time wonderfully.

But the surprise has been working with recent design graduates, fresh out of college who haven’t even got their first job. Projects have included (in chron order):

1. Creating the independent Malmo09 event with Donagh O’hArgain. Tom Steinberg’s idea, this was my “farewell to e-government” in the form of an ideal-government unConference to face down just one in the series of interminably tedious European e-Government conferences. Donagh conceived and delivered it just as we thought it should be done (and on zero budget too). We couchsurfed, found a wonderful location – the Garaget (see event photos), Sir Bonar delivered an absurd speech I wrote for him and to cap it all the Swedish finance Minister showed up and did a pechakucha. It was a supreme blast. The old domain for our Malmo09 blog is now cybersquatted, and it never got recorded for the WayBackMachine, so I hope Donagh kept some records.

2. Engaging the wonderful Veronica Massoud to do ethnographic research for Mydex. This destroyed many of my preconceptions about why people would want to take control over their personal data and exposed the true human condition in terms of how we get stuff done online. It still defines the problem we’re working to solve.

3. Working with Barking’s finest Andy Millar to produce The Twitters of Sir Bonar Neville-Kingdom (ravings of the unimaginably senior Whitehall official for whom I act as unpaid speechwriter). Andy did a staggering job to design and publish on Lulu a book comprising entirely Tweets. Far better than the miserable old knight deserves. He also produced some hand-bound limited edition policy papers that helped get the personal data issue into national political manifestos.

and now….

4. I’m blown away by the landscape designs delivered this week by Alice Malaiperuman for the old barn at Kelston Roundhill. In just four days (she says) Alice has set this small but fine ruin in proper landscape and planning context, and visualised how it could be reached, used, enhanced. Her drawings are deceptively easy on the eye, convey something I’ve tried to get my head around for a year, and visualise how it could be transformed.

Fresh from college and before their first job each of these designers has completed – to my mind – brilliant, highly varied and utterly professional work. The first three are all LCC masters graduates, now working, and Alice has just done her first work experience at SEED in Bath (who were by all accounts very helpful and supportive). I’m convinced they’ll all go far. People say “quick – hire a teenager while they still know everything”. I do say hire students now, because they need work now and their rates quadruple the day someone else is charging them out. If we could buy shares in them, we should. Read the rest of this entry »

Wild food foraging holds all sorts of appeal. I’m not so into the “end days” scenario of post-holocaust scavenging or that “Gone with the wind” image of gnawing at indigestible roots. But we need ways to reconnect with the landscape, to find out more about the plants we walk past and ignore, to try out new and original tastes and food. And the sheer freebie factor of cutting out Mr Sainsbury the middleman feels good.

Aldeburgh marshes

So while in Suffolk we hooked up with Henry from Meldwith for a foraging adventure starting from our back door in Aldeburgh. Henry is Scandinavia-trained and Thorpeness-based, and brought lovely family and friends which made for an extra-cheerful party.

Our lot took bets in advance on how many edible species we’d find: range was from one to 12. In the event we found 17, including some real surprises. Everyone loves blackberries of course, which served as the pretext for getting small people out on an adventure-forage (the word “walk” is a big no-no). But then we also found and ate:

wild fennel: (part of the carrot family) which brewed up a tasty tea
stinging nettle: tasty if you crush tender leaves and chew them. They say grasp the nettle and you don’t get stung, but someone always does
greater plantain – nothing like as “great” as the plantain you’d get in a Caribbean store, but entirely edible nonethless; chop it up and cook it
ribwort plantain – same applies; bit tougher
chickweed – Henry will have to confirm which species, but I think a sort of mouse-earred chickweed. Quite nice and salady; stem is hairy on one side
horseradish: quite a surprise; strong clear taste. Who knew wasabi was related to cabbage in the mustard family brassicaceae? Well, any botanist I suppose. Need to return with big fork to dig up the roots and make fresh relish for the roast beef. The divine Wikipedia informs that 85% of world’s commercial horseradish comes from SW Illinois. Well, not this plant. Plucky Suffolk not to be outdone etc)
Hogweed: Genesis shd add a verse in which the sinister giant gets eaten. Well, the seeds at least are quite tasty
marsh mallow: gelatinous, like okra. Pretty flowers; potential for patisiers I suspect
dittander: big surprise, part of the mustard family. Really spicy; definitely alternative relish possibilities
wild beetyou can use the leaves just like other beet leaves for salad

Then we moved down into the flooded sea marsh area and found pre-salted vegetables:
samphire (later seen on the menu that night at posh local restaurant to go with seabass)
sea blight (which Henry tactfully renames sea pine when selling it to local butchers)
sea purslane also available in posh food servings

Back into town we found
wolfberries (from the Duke of Argyll’s fake tea plant) There were only a couple and I didn’t try one. But I understand they’re sold as a posh miracle health panacea as goji berries
hawthorn berries not much memorable taste but v high in pectin apparently

So, this is clearly not the easiest way to feed a household of seven. But it’s definitely an eye-opener, an underused resource, and it makes for a great walk. Definitely recommend give Henry a call if you’re up Thorpeness way. Sorry about my poor quality photos below; next time we’ll invite @paulclarke along…

Stinging Nettle

Dittander

Hawthorn berries

Stephen Roberts’ latest GNM Kable analysts’ newsletter is pretty dismissive about Liam Maxwell’s prospects in his new Cabinet Office IT role (see blockquote below), and has a fair old dig at my own work. Stephen and his team see no chance of Liam making progress on open source, or on SMEs. They’re scathing about what they call the “metaphysics of data ownership” of his VRM paper (which I reviewed here).

Remember that Stephen’s bread is buttered by big government awarding big suppliers big contracts, not by anything smaller, cheaper and more effective, not by the innovation of SMEs, the satisfaction of the general public or the easing of the burden on the taxpayer. His team measures big government IT spend – man has it been big – but they have no measure for how much time people waste and how much grief is caused by poor data logistics and ineffective online public services.

Declaration of interest: I co-founded Kable and suppose I therefore helped create these jobs. I completely understand how hard it is to ensure that being paid by big suppliers doesn’t affect underlying judgement, and always to keep front of mind that public services are done for people in need and paid for by taxpayers. It’s always tempting to provide the reassuring advice that wealthy clients want to hear, but one has to resist and instead offer them the truth however challenging. I fear Stephen himself may still be mourning Transformational Government and the benighted National ID Scheme as he adjusts to contempory reality.

I can’t speak for whether Stephen and his team now accurately understand Liam’s views, and we’ll just have to find out whether their dim view of what he’ll actually get done is justified. The newsletter goes on to have a dig at “unrepresentative” digital rights enthusiasts (like me, I guess). So what? No-one suggested the canary was representative of the coalminers, but it still served them a useful purpose.

From what they write about Mydex (the new project I and others are working on) I suspect they don’t entirely understand what it proposes, how it goes about it, and what else is going on in this world. Kable advises that “suppliers shouldn’t assume that Maxwell’s appointment means that they need to engage with this particular provider”. The tech is pretty simple they say, anyone can get access to banking and credit data, and government IT suppliers will find it straightforward to enter the market as personal data intermediaries themselves.

The point is there are real and substantial markets to forecast here. If I were a supplier wanting to understand the implications of this new personal data ecosystem and my role within it, I wouldn’t limit my horizon scan to this one analyst. I’d work out what Mydex and others have to offer, I’d look more broadly at the WEF work, deveopments such as the new Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and its members, and check out Ctrl-Shift’s take on Mydata and the ID Assurance programme.

Happy to debate this with Stephen any time in any suitably neutral forum. Read the rest of this entry »

So AFC Wimbledon has broken into the Football League after just nine years. I saw every second of 120 minutes of play-off final; the ball was in the net eight times. Yet I saw not a single goal scored.

Read the rest of this entry »

Next week May 10th sees the launch of a new viral trust framework called Connect.me. It’s the work of a friend and former collaborator Drummond Reed.

People behave badly online, and we’re badly treated even by law-abiding organisations. They do not trust us (how can they?) And they abuse our personal data (how can they not?)

Drummond’s idea, working with his attorney Scott David of K&L Gates, is that we voluntarily enter into binding contracts to treat each other well online. We agree to avoid the online equivalents of the century-old “privacy torts” established in US law:

1. (cf trespass) you agree to respect others’ right to control their ID and personal data
2. (cf theft) sharing is by permission only, people agree to be honest and direct about what they seek permission for
3. (cf duty to prevent 3rd party harm) you provide commercially reasonable protection for the data
4. (cf false imprisonment/kidnapping) you agree to allow portability
5. (cf defamation) you share the metadata which supports health of the network and avoid any practice intended to game the system

This is all based on broad principles, not statute law, so it can scale globally anywhere contract law is enforceable. It can embrace organisations as well as people.

Scott describes it as an online implementation of the Golden Rule. The work by various spiritual leaders on “the other”, the Charter for Compassion and how to get along while respecting each others’ traditions is clearly more urgent and valuable because the world is rapidly more interconnected online.

So I think Scott’s description is apt and profound. Connect.me looks highly complementary to what we’re doing with Mydex. I’ve signed up as one the first “trust anchors” and look forward to seeing how it launches and works out.

Quakers in Britain agreed earlier this month to boycott products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank (NB not produce from Israel). I blogged here about Godalming Friends questioning Waitrose’s ethics on this two years ago, I reflected on the flak you can expect here and reported Waitrose’s rather sour-grapes decision to stop selling West Bank goods last year.

This modest action isn’t on the scale sought by the boycott, divestments and sanctions (BDS) movement which also targets legitimate Israeli interests. And there’s no sense or value in taking sides, punishment, revenge, or being pro- or anti- any religious or ethnic group. The problem is the human rights abuses of the military occupation of the Palestinian Territories. These are a fatal breach of the Golden Rule very powerfully expressed by Rabbi Hillel “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

This Charter for Compassion looks important:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves…

Full text (see below) is short, well worth reading, signing up to and spreading wider. It’s a Karen Armstrong thing: progressive, interfaith deep sense drawn from the common ground of the world’s great spiritual traditions.

The point is we can put up with more or less anything in the way of flood, famine and disaster if people look out for each other. On the other hand even peace, prosperity and sunny Bank Holidays are a nightmare if people succumb to their worse instincts in how they treat each other. I think the interfaith movements are on to a profound truth in seeking out what unites rather than divides us.

The Charter for Compassion currently has just 69,428 signatures while Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s perfectly worthy Hugh’s fish fight attacking North Sea fish waste has 10 times as many- 664,004 just now, with celebs like Branson and Stephen Fry signed up. I wouldn’t begrudge the Fish Fight 10x as many ie 6m. But the world would be a much better place if 100,000 times as many of us signed up to the Charter for Compassion. That would make the entire 6.9bn world population with a few to spare.

Read the rest of this entry »

Three weeks ago I searched for a holiday in Spain at a specific hotel (don’t recall which site I used). Yesterday my favourite online newspaper served me a travelrepublic.co.uk banner ad for precisely the same hotel, just £6!! I clicked to see what was going on, and got a travelrepublic.co.uk form pre-completed for two adults and one child of precisely the correct age….WTF??

No surprises that as you clicked through travelrepublic.co.uk had no places at that specific hotel for £6 or indeed at any price. So travelrepublic.co.uk offered various alternatives starting at around £90….

Thoughts:

1. This is creepy, and I dont want to book holidays from people who do creepy things.
2. They also fibbed in their banner ad, so it’s misleading (the hotel in question was not available at all, and not for £6)
3. Does it make sense to do a Data Protection Act subject access request on travelrepublic.co.uk? Or will they say they dont have any PII? They dont offer an email address for enquiries, so it’s either a letter or an 0845 call to their call centre (and who would look forward to that experience?)
4. Also: is the computer’s IP address personally identifiable information? It seems to be good enough for the BPI to get the disconnection process going under the Digital Economy Act, so isn’t it also specific enough to allow an SAR?

The awkward squad know all about Phorm, which is making progress elsewhere in the world while its toxic legacy continues to taint it’s would-be UK partners. There are other firms doing this sort of creepy stuff much more aggressively such as http://www.audiencescience.com

Oh man. This is all going to be a long and hard fightback.

UPDATES:

1. Today travelrepublic.co.uk did it again, this time advertising the same hotel for £11 (so I checked it out again. And again that hotel is not on offer, but expensive alternatives were)
2. @futureidentity says “report to OFCOM and local Trading Standards”. Others say ASA.
3. @lastknight says “are sure you’re not dealing with Criteo targenting you for customer TravelRepublic?”
4. @TravelRepublic itself keeps an eye on Twitter and has now been in touch to ask “Could you please let us have a bit more information on the issue youre having so we can take a look?”

Well, that’s good, thanks. My qq are:
- how does TravelRepublic track and record my interest in this specific hotel and the age of my child from one search weeks ago to casual browsing front page of national newspaper weeks later?
- how can I opt out of being tracked?
- can I do a subject access request on TravelRepublic and if so how?
- is it not misleading to offer stays at a specific hotel “from £6″ on a banner ad which are then not available on the service itself?

Note that I booked elsewhere weeks ago so booking the holiday is not an issue any more….

Friends’ House just issued some guidance on the Census (see below). It focusses mainly on the Lockheed Martin arms-trade angle, and mentions other resources and campaigns such as www.countmeout.me.uk.

The broader problems remain that this is an expensive, inconvenient, excessively time-consuming and ineffectual way of achieving a socially important result. The particularly toxic issue is the breadth of the new privacy exemptions in section 39 of the 2007 Statistics and Registration Service Act. These allow our personal data to be given to a wide range of parties, despite ONS’ disingenuous protestations. My friend Douwe Korff has published his analysis of this here (we put his concerns to ONS here).

Random series of thoughts at this stage:
- Whitehall still needs a fat wake-up call about its attitude towards personal data and people’s right to privacy. If they just won’t take this on board we have to take any and every chance to remind. This isn’t specifically ONS’ fault, but it has become their problem
- if this were part of some sort of Lockheed Martin “swords into ploughshares” corporate renewal we should of course support it. But it isnt.
- However, any resistance or refusal to participate on our part wont stop taxpayers’ money going to Lockheed Martin.

So this is a bind. It doesn’t feel right at all; it feels wrong in many ways. All that’s left is we’re being coerced into doing it with the threat of a fat fine and a criminal record.

Read the rest of this entry »

Much moved, as many others were, by last nights C4 Dispatches “Secret NHS Diaries” on terminal care. But surprised and disappointed by the reaction to it.

Many people vented their anger on NHS carers (@pinacio: i cried watching #dispatches. f*** those heartless nhs carers; @kelly1985: #dispatches tonight was disgraceful, how can people leave people and treat people like that?) There was much more in the same vein including abuse specifically for immigrant medical staff. Others blamed cuts, suggested NHS management remedies, or rehearsed political prejudices.

The narrative trigger point for the anger and frustration was two-fold: unresponsive people (nurses, GPs, social services, call centre staff) and unrelieved pain. When the pain got too much, people were left begging for their morphine.

Hang on. Small point: isn’t this morphine to which we’re apparently entitled in our hour of need the same heroin that Channel Four Dispatches vilifies? Our society has problems with the poppy: we don’t have practical attitude towards this powerful natural remedy. And the state reinforces the paradox with War on Drugs on one hand and an inefficient, highly regulated NHS on the other. If you could buy heroin at the newsagent the core problems in this Dispatches show would go away.

But of course the real problems wouldn’t. The larger point is about the deeper issue.

We can’t deal with death. We don’t understand it and don’t have a context or framework for dealing with it. This isn’t an NHS management problem or political problem: it’s a spiritual problem. When I heard the Tibetan Bon-Po lama Kemsar Rimpoche speak of death it was with urgency and specific practicality. The dying person must face this way, you have to take certain actions within a specific period of time. I admired the specificity and clarity. Though I was confused by the recourse to Tibetan words and panoply of specific deities, it makes sense to treat death as an important, central and unavoidable fact of life.

In the British-based tradition I find more helpful the simple and practical advice is:

Are you able to contemplate your death and the death of those closest to you? Accepting the fact of death, we are freed to live more fully. In bereavement, give yourself time to grieve. When others mourn, let your love embrace them.

The evidence of reaction to last night’s show is that most of us can’t contemplate it, and that our reaction when faced with it on TV is anger, blame, avoidant denial. There’s no point fulminating against nurses foreign or otherwise, managers, politicians. It’s just displacement from something far bigger we all have to face up ourselves.

There’s everything to learn from the dignified widow Lynn Pinner last night, who was with Harry through all the suffering and (despite endless hanging on for call centres) held his hand at the end. There are helpful resources such as Compassion in Dying and Respect our Wishes or (for cancer sufferers) Marie Curie cancer care. The best feedback service on the NHS is Patient Opinion (no issue too distressing, all feedback handled with sensitivity). The best movie on this topic is Les Invasions Barbares.

Let’s hope the War on Drugs is long over before our time comes. But above all that there’s a loved one who can spare the time to be with us.