fisharepeopletoo

If you want a smarter city ask a policeman #TEDxLeeds

I've noticed a few references to the Internet of Things recently, a phrase I haven't heard for about two years (Nicolas Nova notes its reappearance, in concept if not in name, here) and to Smart Cities, about which the Guardian weirdly had a pull-out advertising supplement a few weeks ago. I'm glad these ideas are back, just for fun if nothing else, because I like both of them.

In between this time around and the last time around though I've done a bit of work with a neighbourhood police team, and one of the things that experience made me think was that if you wanted a working example of a real-time sensor-enabled city-wide "smart city" system then 999 calls in a city full of people with mobile phones is it.

Think about it: you've got a very widely distributed sensor network, that's us with our eyes, ears and bodily presences which might be under threat, and that sensor network is being monitored in real time - we can ring 999 from anywhere because we have mobiles - and the alert from the sensor (us and our phones) triggers a response - flashing blue lights - that aims to restore the system to its balanced state.

And it's this restoring the system to a balanced state which is by far the most important and illustrative part.

The balanced state is a state in which no laws are being broken.

And what are these laws? They are the rule sets for how we live together. And they are technologies.

I'm not saying we have the right laws, or even that we need “the law” to live together, but we do need rule sets, many of which we act on without even knowing just from the look on someone else's face. I might also be misinterpreting (wilfully or through dumbness) Paul Romer's Long Now talk by saying he says rule sets are a kind of technology, but it's a useful idea, so if he didn't he should've.

And this technology for living together doesn't just fall out of the sky, even if it might as well do, for all the say most of us have designing it. We have to choose what laws we want, what balanced state we want the system to be in (though if you read about autopoiesis that idea of choice isn't quite so clear!). And it is the rules for making and enacting those choices, the rule sets for making rule sets, for governance, the rule sets that are the constitutions by which we make decisions about how we want to live together, which are the real smart city technologies.

A city isn't smart because it produces lots of data. Or even opens up that data to lots of developers. It's smart because it continually monitors itself and uses that feedback to maintain the state it wants to be in. It's worth remembering that the word “cyber” doesn't mean having metal arms, it means to steer. Cybernetics is the study of how to steer systems.

So what state do we want the system to return to and how do we steer it? What do we want our technologies of governance to give us? Wealth? Happiness? Innovation? Fairness? Long life? Environmental sustainability?

I don't know. You decide. Pick the ones you want. Then when we have deliberated, agreed and built those technologies - the constitutions and laws - we set up our sensor networks (made up of all sorts of technology - you can have a smart city without any rifd chips or data visualisations of real-time traffic updates whatsoever, just look at ancient Athens) to monitor the system and give us feedback so that we can adjust our smart city technologies - the rule sets of governance and the laws that are enacted - to give us more of what we want and less of what we don't. Or we can decide we want something else in which case we design new governance technology and enact new laws.

And it's these technologies that are most desperately in need of innovation. Because at the moment they are awful.

At the moment, how does the system of Great Britain, for example, decide what counts as the state it wants to return to?

Every five years or so around 40% of the people in the arbitrary and outdated unit of organisation called "Britain"* who can be bothered to vote, people who are quite possibly mostly living hundreds of miles away from most of the other 60%, get a poll result that is roughly what they hoped for without really caring all that much either way, and a simple majority from a group of around 600 men and women out of a total of 60 million - whose job is now to design technology (rules sets, laws) for the whole arbitrary unit but who really all owe their allegiance to only one city (usually London regardless of whether they are meant to be designing technology to benefit the people of, say, Sedgefield) - then tell all the other cities (systems) what counts as the right state for their system and how to achieve it for the next five years or so before the next poll which might or might not lead to the reversal some of the previous rule sets.

And that is a very dumb way to run a system.

And it is the dumbness of the technology that makes me a little bit suspicious about the re appearance of smart cities (were they called smart cities last time, when it was that place in Korea? Maybe it was Ubicities?).

Is it just a way for big, multinational technology companies to fleece the dumb city?

Is it a way that by doing a bit of wining and dining of a few of the 600 people who at the time are designing the governance technologies, they can be persuaded to enact some laws to outsource, to these same big technology companies, something or other that we didn't even know we needed, in the same way in every city/system no matter how different, for dozens of years, because it's more "efficient". And call it "smart cities"?

I don't know, but it's worth looking at the names of the companies paying for the pull out newspaper advertising supplements.

This is a little bit like Adam Greenfield's argument in his book Everyware - this stuff is coming so we better debate it now while we've still got chance to decide what we want it to be like, because otherwise it will be decided for us.

But debating "advancing and emerging digital technologies", as they did at this seminar in Manchester organised by consultants, is debating the wrong kind of technology.

What we should be debating, and more importantly innovating with, is our governance technologies, the ways in which we decide the kinds of systems/cities we want to live in and the civic rule sets from which those systems/cities will emerge. If we do that, the rfid chips will look after themselves.

And the people who should be debating and designing the technologies for their smart cities are the people who live in them. And they should be able to to debate and design, as often as they want, everything. Every. Single. Thing. Because you don't get any meaningful innovation, enterprise, responsibility, energy, commitment, problem solving, or engagement if you don't have the power to do things and the risk of failure when you do.

And all sorts of people think it would be a good idea to innovate with governance technologies: Paul Romer, these bonkers Americans who want to live under the sea, the writer of this essay on local economics and places, and even this bonkers government minister saying we should have "home rule for cities".

Because compared to governance technology, having a wheelie bin that gives me whuffie points when I put some tin cans in the recycling, or a mobile phone that tells me where the traffic jams are, or even a smart electricity grid, couldn't be more trivial**.

 

* (if you don't think it is arbitrary why does the governance technology change just above Newcastle? The boundary for any system on the land mass of the UK is either the whole lot bounded by the sea or its constituent city-regions, not a line drawn two thirds of the way up.)

** As John Tolva, who is the director of “Citizenship and Technology” at well known philanthropic organisation IBM said at a city camp event the other day “burying the sensors in the pavement, that is easy”.

Themes from All Sorts of Technology and Democracy. Pls comment on anything missed, misremembered or misrepresented

Based on nothing more reliable than my memory a few days later, these are the themes (if that is the best way of putting it) from All Sorts of Technology and Democracy.

In no particular order, except putting the first one first:

* Starting from the local and ground up

* Listening and assuming everyone has things they can contribute

* Names matter (words matter?)

* ways of people getting things done for themselves [I added this on the strength of Diane's great discussion here ]

* Politics is everything/everything is politics

* What is democracy?

* The councillors are missing

* Civic pride drives innovation [innovation is an over used word, and words matter, but for the want of anything better at the moment]

* A bus is a platform

* Rules are technology

* Any plan will do

* What next?

* Rational ignorance

* Who has the power?

* Taking part is a good thing [- participation in democracy makes people happier: Frey, B and Stutzer, A (2000), Happiness, economy, and institutions. Economic Journal, 110, 446, pp918-938 - referenced by Mckenna in the Localopolis essay]

* "Man is a political animal" - Aristotle

* innovation - how does it happen? How can it be helped or hindered? What we are trying to do is be innovative with the rule sets of local democracy (politics)?

* the local economy is part of local politics - how can the council's commissioning of digital services contribute [this one was by implication a bit based on some of the people in the room being developers, and some were people who might commission digital services]

Notes from All Sorts of Technology and Democracy introduction

Ideas 1 Conversational democracy

- seventy- seven per cent people felt “disconnected” from councillors and MPs by seventy-nine per cent.

complained that their MPs came from a different world – an alien planet - and people said this a lot 

people complain they are not connected to politicians people don't really trust or respect politicians but tend to think much better of them if they've actually met them

And the qualities people want in politicians seem to be things like empathy, listening, respect communicating and being “like us”

and what they want from politicians is a genuine two-way, ongoing conversation

“Citizens of a mature democracy want to be part of an ongoing conversation”

Straightforward implication for the use of social media in that things like twitter and facebook allow policians to express themselves as people - this doesn't have to be always about politics eg cllr tim

but any presence in these spaces might help people to respect politicians

Ideas 2 Deliberative democracy

“rational ignorance”
If my opinion is 1 in 10 million - plus all the other imbalances such as don't being able to afford to employ a professional lobbyist for £5000 / day - then it doesn't make any sense at all to bother to think very much about any issue because it doesn't matter what I think.

So, people then tend to have “off the top of the head” opinions about everything, including who to vote for, and these opinions are manipulated by the persuasion industry.

But when small groups of people who are representative of the population as a whole are brought together along with enough information to make up their own minds about an issue rather than rely in the persuasion industry, they tend to come up with very different decisions to the ones that the population at large would claim to support

this result is “counter factual” - if you survey the population they would say one thing, and that is their real opinion, but in fact their real opinion is something else

the problem with this is how to scale it up - author proposes “democracy day” before every election, in which people are paid to attend deliberative meetings

Will that happen?

How about using the internet?

Internet debates are notoriously angry and ignorant.

But the scale problem might be different if power is at a local level - how big is a ward?

And if councillors try and educate debate and conversation wherever they find it - either in the pub or facebook

conversational democracy paper the bloke says that the widest type of political participation is talking about politics

- should councillors try and widen that debate - represent all views-  so Labour councillors duty is to represent a conservative point of view when necessary

help to supply deeper information,

help to make sure everyone gets heard

Idea 3

Paul Romer - rules are a kind of technology

So eg the most important tecchnology for runing a social media surgery is not facebook, or even wifi, its the idea of running a social media surgery and the “recipe” that explains how to do it,

and that technology is open source - anyone can read the blog post and copy it.

And it doesn't become worn out no matter how many people read it

Localopolis - Dave Mckenna

How can we redesign the technology of local democracy, that is to say the rules by which it is done?

so for example - local elections aren't a proper mandate - no one turns out - so instead of having elections, just ask for volunteers, and everyone who volunteers takes part

so 50 or 60 people from each ward volunteer and they become the management committee for the ward

put structures in place to make sure they educate themselves in deliberative style

arrange exchanges with other parts of Kirklees so that everyone is aware of problems of all parts of the area - good model from ancient athens

these people decide everything

How is that worse than what happens now?

might be, might not be

point is that it's experimenting - being creative with the rules - like developing new technology - rapid prototyping of political systems

[other thing about Localopilis is that it asks whether local areas have any meaningful power at all, and shouldn't we just scrap local government and have everything decided centrally]

sources: http://www.delicious.com/fisharepeopletoo/all_sorts

Any Plan Will Do. But We Came Up with a Good Plan

We had a very thoughtfull and committed discussion about All Sorts of Technology and Democracy yesterday, which was great credit to the people from all sorts of places who came along.

And credit to the weird and wonderful place that is Huddersfield. (One of the things we touched on was civic pride as a source of innovation, and, lets hope, rebellion.)

There is a concise and insightful summary of it in the @huddsocialmedia twiiter feed here.

I came away from it thinking, and even now I'm still thinking, that I hadn't even begun to get my head round what we started on, but that there was something very productive and enjoyable there to carry on with.

And maybe all we really did yesterday was find out where we were starting from.

But to give the event any sort of structure we had decided the aim was to come up with a plan, and that any plan would do.

So for now I think it's enough to say that we came up with a plan. And not a bad plan at that.

We are going to create a database. Or rather we are going to create some interfaces - made with all sorts of technology, including pencils and paper -  and a database, then anyone who wants to can add to it.

And the database is going to be a collection of places to listen, to hear what's important to people.

And the places in that database are going to be as concrete and local as possible.

So it won't be "Facebook" in the database. It'll be "That Facebook group where they all live in Kirkburton and talk about chess."

And it won't "the bus stop". It'll be "The bus stop outside the Marsh House where two women always get on at half eight Monday to Friday and talk about allotments."

Because that way it will be a database full of places where you can hear people who really care.

And that is a plan. At least to start.

A baby in its mothers arms in transit illegally between countries is worth nothing. Official. #opendata

The lowest worth of a child is of a baby found dead in storage in a lorry coming through the channel tunnel.

If the baby is alive the lorry driver is fined 2000 pounds.

If the baby is dead there is no fine for bringing in an illegal immigrant.

The dead baby example was given by a minster in the house of commons who was confirming under what circumstances a fine would be paid. 

So that is the baseline figure for what a child is worth. Zero.

On top of that, just having a place,  any place, is worth...

Then what? Or, which place?

(With thanks to Danny Dorling for the information.)

Thanks England, it's been emotional, but it's already time to call it quits. #wc2010

England is a country of 50 million people run in the best interests of a small city of 100 000 people called Canary Wharf. Or a city of about 2.5 million if you include hangers-on and the rest of the shameless rich.

And those 50 million people and 2.5 million people don't have any shared interests at all. Because it is impossible to govern the City of London and the city of Sunderland by the same rule set. What is good for one is bad for the other, regardless of which one you prefer.

What is unfair about England as it stands is that there is only one city that is governed by a rule set that allows it to benefit from the dynamism, innovation and creativity that cities generate, and that is London.*

The other cities of England are ruled by a nation state that is just a dead weight. It's an extra layer of middle management that nobody needs.

So why don't we just admit that to ourselves and call it quits?

If we've got a once-in-a-generation opportunity to think about what the state is for, as the middle manager in charge of the accounts department said the other day, why not just scrap it?

What is so difficult or terrible about saying that England has outlived its usefulness?

Get rid of the "England" layer of bureaucracy and everyone benefits.

The City of London can stop having to subsidise the rest of the country out of its profits.

And the other cities can stop paying the price of being the nation-state ballast that allows the government of London to borrow money by claiming to be the government of Britain, in order to bail out the banker-princes when they get so greedy they manage to blow a gasket on their money-printing machine.

Even the unbankers of London are better off, because they get chance to decide for themselves whether all that money swilling around from bonuses is worth the price.

And at a stroke, the relationship between the city of London and other cities becomes that of trading partners.

As soon as you reframe it like that, how much healthier does it sound for everybody?

London simply becomes the biggest potential trading partner of Sunderland, along with all the other cities of the world.

Of course Sunderland may not be able to produce anything that London or any other city wants to buy.

And it may not be able to survive any longer without the subsidy of taxes skimmed from the profits of the banker-princes (leaving to one side as ancient history the reason that Sunderland ended up in that state in the first place, which was to clear the way for the banker-princes to set up their money-printing machine).

But so what if Sunderland can't survive on its own resources?

Let it die.

The world owes absolutely no one and nowhere a living.

But at least untie their hands and let the people who care about that city - and those people will exist, and they will really care - let them step forward and fight with all the resources, energy and initiative that they can muster for the place that matters to them.

Because that's what cities are. Places that are meaningful, graspable, changeable, and with self-organising structures that generate resources, energy and initiative without middle managers giving the orders.

Unlike nation states, which have to be glued together with crap like national anthems, patron Saints and Saturday evening TV.

And football teams.

So bollocks to England. I'm going to watch as many world cup matches as I can, because football is a beautiful human endeavor to play and to watch. And I say that as a lifelong pub-league centre half so I've seen football at its fattest, muddiest and most hung-over.

But there is no Manchester United, no Inter Milan, no Barcelona and definitely no Huddersfield Town in this year's tournament.

So why should anybody give a toss who wins?

Some light reading for the post nation state century:

Charter Cities idea of economist Paul Romer, independent city-states within failing nation states with their own rule sets to encourage enterprise. He describes Charter Cities in the developing world, but I can't see why we shouldn't have them here, and it's a catchy name.

Seasteading bonkers Americans who want to live in cities under the sea. The reason being, they can organise their new cities by any rules they want to try out, and why shouldn't the rules of government (different from the laws that governments pass) be open to innovation?

Cities as labs for government - great essay about ancient Greece as a lab for government. Athens wins because it has the best mechanisms for knowledge exchange, bridging social capital, collaboration and participation.

[square brackets and asterisks]

* There is a lot of spurious, self-serving bollocks talked about "the city", not least by the trendier end of ubicomp and people who make experimental stuff for mobile phones (such as me), but even so, the world has just about come to the point where half of humanity lives in cities and that number will probably keep rising so there must something about them.
* by city I mean a city-state, a city and its surrounding region, like ancient Athens. So Huddersfield, for example, would be the most dissident and innovative part of the city-state of Leeds ;-)
* I think England have got half a chance of winning this world cup, so it's the perfect time for the nation state go out on a high.

Community Micro-coordination

Micro-coordination is the sociologists Richard Ling and Birgitte Yttri's name for the finely grained coordination and efficiencies we are able to find because we are all connected, everywhere.

So, for example, I might send a text saying "Can you get some milk on the way home?"

What happens if we scaled up these efficiencies by one notch, so that as well as being part of the intimacy of our personal and domestic lives they extended to our civic lives, but still at an intimate, local range: to the civic lives that we have no choice but to care about, because it's where we are?

What changes might happen if we made tools to be used for micro-coordination among small neighbourhood groups, activists and local public services?

This is my be-careful-what-you-wish-for wish to the special magic pixies of fate #opendata

I wish for a web site called "What Is My Child Worth?"

I wish to get Danny Dorling to help.

I wish to use databases to tell a radical, not a conservative, story.

I wish for all sorts of data from all sorts of places.

I wish for the analogue data as well.

I wish for help from someone who knows about databases.

If you are reading this, and you understand what I'm on about, we were destined to meet. Email me: andrew at blinkmedia dot org

If not, it wasn't meant to be.

I'll Take My Fee In Green Shield Stamps

Having bollocksed up my first attempt to form a co-operative because I cut and pasted an out of date document off the internet, I decided to go and see Co-operatives UK and find out how to do it properly.

The reason I was first interested in workers' co-operatives was the democratic governance structure, meaning that the organisation we were setting up would have to be an ongoing discussion among its members, the workforce, about what to do.

Part of the reason I wanted to set up that kind of organisation was that over the last few years, I've started to think that at least one way to be creative is not to have any ideas at all.

Just to listen carefully to other people and the things they need solutions for, and then have a talk with them about what might be worth trying out. After that, tell yourselves as detailed a story as you can about what is going to happen, put it into practice based on that story, then learn from your mistakes. Whether it is creative or not mostly depends on whether you listen in good faith and how much effort you put into the story.

So is that a good way to run a company? When the first thing that needs a solution every day is what the company is and what it's going to do about it.

Could we make coming to work creative? And would that make the work we did more creative?

What I hadn't really given much thought to before is that one of the foundations of a co-operative is that it can distribute a bonus to its members if the organisation does well. A co-operative is a self-help organisation (self-help in this context meaning to fight against The Man), and if it helps itself effectively, the members should benefit from that. After all, they did the work.

Before my talk with Co-operatives UK, we were going to set up a cooperative community interest company (c.i.c). I like the c.i.c. structure because the legally binding community interest statement means that you have to think through and declare a kind of value that isn't just financial profit, and then live up to that.

But one of the things a c.i.c can't do is distribute a bonus.

At the moment, this is all a bit "what if" because there are only two founder members, but, what if the co-operative became modestly successful, and it could afford to distribute a bonus to its handful of members?

I can imagine that the yearly bonus day in an organisation is very good for collective spirit and motivation, especially if the organisation is one where members have as much invested as they do in a workers' co-operative that they manage for themslves. People will feel it is a reward for shared effort and endeavor, earned by working together, and they will go on into  the following year ready to use their individual and collective energy and initiative to develop the organisation further for the good of themselves and each other.

That individual responsibility for shared endeavor is a much better way for an enterprise to organise itself than top-down dictates from management. If the enterprise is a self-organising system, in which the parts of the system take responsibility for being innovative at all levels all the time, then the job of the leadership, elected from the members, is to define the system, to put a boundary round it by asking questions rather than issuing orders.

But what systems need, if they are going to regulate themselves, is feedback, and a bonus is a blindingly good feedback mechanism, that can be easily read by everyone involved. Bonus is up this year? What are we doing right and how can we do more of it? It's down, what are we doing wrong?

But what about the wider public purposes that are written into the legal bones of a c.i.c.

Our cooperative will exist to "develop and implement new ways to use mobile and internet technology for public participation and civic engagement." Which is a bit wordy but I can't do better at the moment.

If we become a c.i.c. we will be legally bound to do that in the interests of the community as we define it, and we can be held to account if we don't. And because a c.i.c exists to benefit a community that is wider than just its own members it can't distribute any surplus.

Which is fine for me. I'm a founder member and it's my principles that the structure is founded on. Everyone who bought into it at the time (all two of us!) knew what we were getting into and why.

But what about the people who join afterwards? I'd hope they might agree with those principles, and it might even be a reason for wanting to join the organisation, but they don't really get much of a choice. They are bound by my decisions whether they like it or not. Which is fine for people with well paid and fulfilling jobs in the creative industries, why wouldn't they put a bit of commitment into their work? But what if the organisation is modestly successful enough to employ, say, a cleaner? I'm sure the cleaners in the old NHS took pride in being such an important part of a great and worthwhile collective effort, and that affected the way they did their work. But cleaning is still a boring, unfulfilling job. I know, I've done it. And I'm not sure I'd like to ask someone to forgo a little bit of extra personal reward in order to uphold my principles for me.

And more than that, is the law the best way to make those principles meaningful anyway? Is the best way to inform how an organisation acts to have it legally bound to act that way?

I'd hope that any organisaton that is a co-operative considers a value beyond just financial gain, and offers something to a wider community than itself, but shouldn't the guarantees of that be its own internal principles of self-education and participation, rather an article of law set in stone?

Isn't it better to allow the organisation to repeatedly decide that for itself through the collected individual choices of its members, who might agree to accept less than the maximum financial reward in order to contribute something to the wider civic world in which they live, however that contribution is defined.

But that should be their choice, to be made and remade over and over again, and the remaking of the choice (or not) will be what defines the character of the organisation. If it decides in the future not to make the right choices, that will reflect a failure of leadership (as opposed to management), or maybe an unescapable entropy.

Everything comes to an end, after all. It's what happens on the way that is important.

How To Split the Lib Con Coalition and Have Fun Doing It. #ge2010 #ge2015

We've woken up with a whole new political rule set, and everything from now on is going to be lots of fun.

The rules of politics in the age of coalitions are about listening, negotiating, collaborating and coming up with unexpected solutions.

But most of all the new rules are about shifting alliances.

Everything is always to play for.

And in our day and age, "everything to play for" is the best and most beautiful state to be in.

Everything is fluid, uncertain, changeable, unexpected, chaotic and complex. Any state we are in from now on is always just another state waiting to be born.

From this morning onwards all sorts of wonderfulness from science and economics and even maths have come into play. Ideas about self organising systems, game theory, evolutionary biology, autopoiesis, complexity science and systems thinking, all of which I can't even pretend to properly understand, are suddenly our guiding principles.

And one of the things these ideas reveal is that small actions can have big effects, which is great if we don't want to wait around for the over-networked posh idiots to sort the world out for us. Things that we can all do in structures outside of party politics matter. In complex non-linear systems the small things have unexpected consequences, it's a mathematical fact!

There are lots of big challenges of course, but that is great because you can't have a decent story or a decent game without risk of failure.

And best of all is that this new rule set is perfect for, and demands, creativity. Political systems become a subject for creativity.

I read a smshing definition of creativity in neuroscience the other day: "creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way. "

And if nothing else, what was sadly sadly missing over the last 13 years was anyone ever doing anything "non obvious". They made an obsession of finding out the obvious and doing it. No one ever, ever, took a step back and looked at the system as a whole and said "ok what is really going on and how can we really change it?"

For all the battered nobility of his last few days, all Brown ever wanted to do was sit in the centre and command the world to change based on the force of his will and his absolute understanding, and his chosen mechanism for doing so was to throw tax revenues at it skimmed from the City.

But the world just doens't obey that command any more, if it ever did.

So here is a policy to test out in breaking up the current coalition:

Local income tax.

It's a Lib Dem policy I think anyway. The Cameron wing of the Conservatives would have to pretend to be in favour given how much they have gone on about localism, but the devolutionary implications would be too much for the right. If it passes then the control of revenues and the autonomy that goes with it will allow Labour to build up the independence of its English regional strongholds and push for greater freedom from London regardless of which coalition is in power there. And a hundred city states all experimenting with the rule sets of government is million times more creative.

God knows whether that would work or not in any way.

But that's not the point. The point is the process. Release early release often. Prototype. Beta test. Declare a republic in Sunderland and see what happens.

That is the world we are in now, and it is miles better than the old one, regardless of who it is that thinks they are in power.



A great essay about creativity and experimentation in political rule sets here.

A useful primer about systems thinking here.

A bonkers and almost mystical introduction to autopoiesis here.