Update 20 May:  I finally got around to scanning in the piece of paper with the seating plan given to me before entering the room.  The angle from which pictures were taken meant that some folk were not visible.  There has been some interest in the attendee list which hasn’t made it out yet – i should imagine that cabinet office are simply ridiculously busy – so i hope this helps.

Today the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister kicked off the big society work with a seminar in No10 around the cabinet table.  I was privileged to be there with fellow hyperlocal web person Ally Tibbit of Greener Leith and web campaigner Martha Lane Fox.  There were a host of luminaries from the community activism sector about 20 in all . I’ll follow up with the some detail later, but this is an impressionistic write up shortly after the event (mainly written in the back of a taxi picking up a new cat from Battersea).

For me, as an old Whitehall hand (my day job before talk about local) this was the first time the coalition thing has really sunk in.  It was remarkable to see two leaders of different political parties sit opposite each other at the cabinet table and govern together.  The big society is perhaps easier common ground, the deputy prime minister said that the liberals and the conservatives had been talking about the same thing but with different labels.  For the DPM a big society that embraced community grass roots action and self empowerment was core liberalism.  The Prime Minister said that he wanted a major part of his legacy to be a government that ‘laid the foundations for the big society’.
The PM and DPM were in listening mode and responded positively to the attendees.  I made points about how the web can help people be more effective and active citizens by bringing engagement into the modern age from the C19th, the importance of open data to transparency and accountability and the importance of Martha’s work on digital participation.

The last couple of months, all the big society chatter in the civic society and volunteering sectors has been ‘do they really mean it?’. Nat Wei has been highly effective in the background convincing people one on one.

In the theatre of Whitehall, symbolism is important.  You don’t get a much more symbolic commitment than your issue being the first joint outing on policy issue by the new prime minister and deputy prime minister.  So today was a strong symbolic ‘yes’.  As ever with any government, especially a new one you need to be vigilant and hold them to their word and i shall do my share of that.

Martha Lane Fox has already tweeted that ‘I am putting aside all cynicism’. I believe that a massive increase in civic activism and engagement would have a profound impact on making Britain a better place.  It’s great to see such committed government leadership on the big society and i am happy to play my part.

I wrote a piece on my hyperlocal Kings Cross site on how data from the London Data Store showed a puzzling rise in ambulance call outs to assaults.  In general crime is going down, but there was a strong upward trend in ambulances being called out to assault incidents. I asked people to check my data as I am not a statto.  I tried to get a comment out of the police, but they went quiet on me – as I run a lot of articles supporting the police this was irritating.

The local paper the Islington Gazette rang me having seen my article.  The Gazette had done some maths of their own and looked a the London Data Store site.  The Gazette covers the whole borough (an urban area about five miles square), my site just one ward (a mile long, half mile wide).  So the Gazette grew the story, got quotes from people across the borough and turned it into a bigger piece.  They did get a quote from the police, despite having a generally ‘granny scaring’ approach to covering local crime.  I am still waiting for the police to get back to me.  The Gazette in their traditional rather sad way managed to giv me a quote but no link to my original article and no mention of the plucky Kings Cross website that made the story in the first place.

I also emailed BBC local TV to see if they were interested.  I got the ‘it’s a bit too local to cover‘ (quote from email) response.  However if they look at the data for themselves they will see that the trends across the whole of London are sharply up.   Let’s wait and see.

Overall an interesting case study in how local data transparency can be used locally to bring some accountability to local public services and feed the mainstream traditional media.

UPDATE

Within minutes of posting this the police came back to me apologetically with a quote for the Kings Cross site and thanking me for my helpful quote in the Gazette (coincidence of timing I think).  Nonetheless they still went to the Gazette with a quote some time before me.

Crime and anti-social behaviour are the most challenging topics local websites have to tackle.  But most local sites don’t  want to add to local fear of crime by just reporting incidents – we want to publish results and support our local criminal justice professionals in the police, crown prosecution service, courts and prisons.  Finding out what is going on in local courts would be very useful.

Ante-diluvian court processes combine with the minefield of contempt of court to make it tricky to write about local justice being done.  As a local web publisher in an area with a long, tragic history of ASB with a sizable local audience I’d like daily court results and timetables posted to a courts website, preferably with an RSS feed.  After all, you can go to the court and watch from the gallery or see the screens.  So this little noticed (by me) excerpt from a  Ministry of Justice green paper earlier this year seems wrong to me.

‘210. It is clear that there needs to be a balance between providing communities with information on court outcomes, which is in the public domain, and the need to ensure that such information is not misused. This issue is particularly pertinent because of the power of the internet to collect and make available information from a wide range of sources, and the difficulties of regulating the way in which such information is stored and reused.
211. We believe that it is not in the public interest to facilitate the creation of uncontrolled, privately held databases, and therefore intend to place the following restrictions on how information is accessed: Access to court outcomes online will require registration at level 1 of the e-Government standards66 to provide substantial assurance that the registrant’s identity has been verified. Registered users will be able to choose to see results for two courts of their choice; changing these preferences will require application to the systems administrator. Users will then be able to search all results from these two courts from the past four weeks. Information on the website will be copy protected so that it cannot be copied and pasted into other documents.
212. A prototype of the website will be made available for the duration of the Green Paper consultation.67 This will report specifically on the outcomes of knife possession cases tried in the adult magistrates’ courts, supporting the current initiative on tackling knife crime. Comments are invited on the level of security and accessibility of information. We will also look at how we can link this website to the continuing development of crime maps, to support the aim of ensuring that members of the public can get the maximum information about crime, policing and justice in a joined-up way from a linked set of sources, at as local a level as possible.’

Engaging Communities in Criminal Justice Cm 7583 April 2009, Page 81′

I appreciate the argument about long term rehabilitation and spent convictions, but this piece suggests that websites are different from newspapers, which are now almost wholly online.  If say The Times or the Islington Gazette reports an individual arrest, charge or trial in progress in the paper, it also appears online.  At no point do the articles link forward to the outcome of the trial if the subject is found innocent.  They effectively create a primitive unregulated database online.  And whilst i enjoy working with the police, even the best forces would admit they have a very long way to go to publish criminal justice outcomes in a way that reassure local people.

What do people think of this position – is it reasonable or is it out of kilter?  Is it worth lobbying to change it?  Do we think that the senior politicians who recently gathered in Downing Street to talk open data are aware of it? As it is a green paper from Ministry of Justice, this usually means that minds are open and can be influenced.

I guess i must share some blame for the Ministry of Justice position as I had worked inside the system up to that point (declaration) but i feel this doesn’t stick to the principles of the power of information work i was involved in.