Martin Stewart-Weeks discussion
Martin Stewart-Weeks
Thank you. Quick observations, I’ll do it from here because I figured I’m not part of the front part of the room, I’m part of you. I thought I would embed myself in the body politic, as it were.
Ian McLoughlin
In the UK system?
Martin Stewart-Weeks
Indeed. I am in the UK system, that’s right. I’m not nodal here, or whatever the word is. I am just a mere contributor and I’d like to say what I want to say relatively quickly because I am keen to hear what others have got to say. Just a quick bit of context. So my own background in particular has a couple of other pieces of information I’ll throw on the table, both of which are ANZOG related. There are a couple of roundtables that ANZOG has been running recently of which I have been a part, one of which has been rethinking the relationship between government and the NGO sector, which is a piece of work that’s becoming really quite interesting. It’s had a very wide range of both government and NGO people and about 70 or 80 people that have been convened by ANZOG in that classic role. But in related piece of work, which has now been developing for the last couple of years, ANZOG has been working with officials at the State and Federal level in Australia at what I would call a Track 2 process – in other words, a slightly below the line process – of trying to improve the conversation about data collaboration in the human service space across Federal/State boundaries. This forum has now been given the title of the People-Centred Data Collaboration Forum, or as we like to describe it now, the PCDC. So, talking of acronyms, that seems to work quite well. For those of us in Australia, it’s like a COAG process without all the COAG cement, essentially. So it’s quite open, it’s quite engaged; people seem to be prepared to say things there that they’re not…
So that’s all good I think. The other interest I have, apart from my general interest having been in government for many years before, although now I have worked outside of government for a bit, is I am a director of something called the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, or TACSI some people might know. So I am very interested in the growing conversation about data and social stuff. It does seem to be increasingly salient and I’m a subscriber, some of you may also note and I subscribe to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, or SSIR, which is a lot of work around social innovation coming out of – strangely enough – Stanford University. And in February next year they are running a one-day seminar on exactly the topic that we’ve been talking about. So that’s my interest.
Another quick observation I would make about context, because given all the data we’ve already got. And I’m sure you’d be happy to get a little bit more. The New South Wales Government has recently established something called the Data Analytics Centre, otherwise known as DAC. And the Chief Scientist, Ian Oppermann, I think Australia’s first chief data scientist, has a very strong ambition, and I’ve seen his work program to turn the DAC towards many of the issues we are talking about here: complex, social challenges. And I think that is very interesting and very impressive. I think the whole What Works movement, which again, I'm sure the folks from the UK would be very well aware of, to some extent now, grounded in Nesta and something called the Alliance for Useful Evidence, which is a very nice title – that is getting some salience here, I noticed. And, in a way, the What Works movement is essentially about how we make this conversation practical and pragmatic; and I think that’s worth having a look at.
A couple of other Uberisation examples I’ll give you – one of them is Hireup – people will know Hireup, Jordan O’Reilly and his sister. Basically, as they describe it, a cross between eHarmony and PayPal for the disability support sector, very interesting model. And work by FutureGov in the UK by Don Campbell and his team, Casserole, Patchwork. The Patchwork thing is interesting and it’s being developed here in Victoria and also in New South Wales, which is essentially a kind of Facebook style platform to connect people in the child protection space. And what’s interesting about Patchwork is it starts to remind you that often data is, in fact, generated in the interaction of people who are just communicating, as opposed to data in the sense of research data or big data. And Patchwork has become a very powerful tool for that kind of interaction. So that’s just a couple of quick…
Six or seven observations I am going to make and then I’m going to end with three propositions and a question that you might want to chew on – or you may have others of your own.
It’s really interesting, isn’t it, in these conversations to come back to the usual question. So what exactly is the problem here we are trying to solve. And I have a suggestion about that in a moment, that you may or may not agree with, and then we can perhaps have a debate about it, and I’ll come back to it in a minute. I think the second observation I would make is that there are two ways into this conversation. You can either have what I would call a mapping and architecture approach, which is, you try and get your hands around the whole problem and kind of map it and structure it and plan it, and off you go and start discovering. Or you have what I would call perhaps an exploring and experimenting approach, which is a much messier, much less systematic, but perhaps more productive way of doing it. And if we are going to take an exploring and experimenting approach to this, then we have to have an approach that combines legibility with learning. If we are going to let a thousand flowers bloom, we have to make sure that everybody who is planting and blooming, that once of those thousand flowers feels a deep moral obligation to make their work legible and to throw it into the common learning pot so we can all find out what the bloody hell they are doing.
So thousand flowers blooming coupled with opacity, which I think is the right word, opaqueness – you know what I mean – not being able to see what the hell is going on, that seems to be the worst of all possible worlds. But a learning and a legibility mix, where we are trying to make the system legible and the more legible it is – as in, the more legible it is, as in, we can literally read it, we can see what is going on, the quicker we can start to learn and the faster we will make progress towards a more systematic view of it. I think that might be quite powerful. As opposed to sitting back waiting until we’ve got a systematic view of it and then we get launched. I don’t know that that’s going to be all that productive in this context.
I wanted to make one other reference and I forgot to make it at the beginning, because I wanted to read you a quick quote. Sorry, I didn’t read my own notes. I wanted to make reference to a work by a guy called David Weinberger who is a Harvard philosopher; very, very interesting writer about the internet. He was one of the co-authors of something called The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was written about 20 years ago and is still worth reading.
He wrote this book a few years ago, which I still read a lot. The book’s title is Instructive, and I want to read from a review of it. This is the title Too big to know: rethinking knowledge now that facts aren’t the facts, experts are everywhere and the smartest person in the room is the room. This is the game we are now embarked on in the social space. The smartest person in the room is the room. It’s a great book, well worth reading; he is very amusing, very engaging and full of great argument and evidence. His argument is – and that’s the point that I was toing to make – we are now irretrievably at the point where knowledge is a networked phenomenon. It is a social phenomenon. This is a paragraph I want to read from a review of that book from another well-known writer and thinker in this space, Cory Doctorow, who wrote this: “ultimately Weinberger treats the Net as a fact, not a problem. It is exists. It’s remade our knowledge processes. It has bound together communication, information and sociability, so that you can’t learn things without communicating. And so every communication brings the chance of a human encounter.
That is essentially Weinberger’s thesis. So he is a philosopher by training. He was involved – for those of you who follow these things at all – in the Howard Dean campaign, when Howard Dean, about 20 years ago, or thereabouts, was trying to become President of the Democratic Party. He is kind of the precursor of the Obama internet phenomenon. Weinberger was on his team. Anyway, the point I wanted to make – coming back to my third or fourth point – given the Weinberger thesis, is that the source of the problem, the fact that we now live in this open, fast, connected, too big to know social world is, I think, the source of the solution.
Weinberger’s thesis is that we have to trust this new world as a way of helping us to navigate through its problems. Because, actually, being in touch with each other, connecting with each other, learning and growing in a very deeply connected and social way is, in fact, the only way to grapple with the problems that this world has now started to generate.
And he has a very nice line, I think, in the book, which I think is very powerful, and I think I picked out of both presentations this morning, that there is a very, very important relationship – one would like to think, anyway – between knowing and learning. And what we need to do as our way into this debate, for those of us who are interested either as practitioners in government, in the social sector, in the business world – and I’ve done some of that world as well – is that we need to find out how to be very, very good at learning rapidly, so that the more we learn, the more we’re going to know about how we get this data thing to play into our hands.
My next point is related. I think there are two ways of handling it. We either handle this problem as an institutional problem, or we handle it as a problem essentially building a social movement; a kind of network solution. I think we need a bit of both. I don’t think we’re going to get progress in the end though if we treat this as an issue of institutional design about how government works and how big business works and how big organisations work. This is, to me, a much, much more bottom-up, almost like a social movement.
Fifth or sixth point. I’ve only two or three more to make and then [10:24] my three. Is there a risk that a focus on data, the way we are beginning to focus on it, particularly in this space, becomes both a panacea and a distraction from some of the hardest structural issues that are at play. James talked about austerity and all this stuff that has been going on in Britain, some of which one would have to argue is presumably being driven partly by an ideological line. And so on and so forth.
So there is a risk, right, that we think that all of those things, the fact that we have just taken 36% of funding out of UK local government, whatever it is, our equivalent, all of that somehow will be as nothing if we can just get this data thing sorted out because that will pretty much fix it. And that is not true, I guess, well, perhaps I’m putting it as a question mark – is that true? And is that a slight risk?
Last couple of points and then I’ll end with my three propositions. I wrote this down just so I got my words right. People have to become familiar with their role as data user, data generator and data evaluator; and they are going to get better at it the more they do it and they’ll do it more when they figure there is a reason to do it. This stuff you learn as you go and I was very struck by the examples about the NHS sites where you’ve got very, very low traffic. And I guess I would caution, because it doesn’t work at the moment, doesn’t mean it won’t or it can’t.
And my favourite story at the moment, because I follow it very closely because one of my NGO pro-bono roles at the moment is trying to set up a thing called the Able Movement, which is trying to take a social movement approach to disability reform in this country as an adjunct to NDIS. There is a great Facebook page called NDIS Grassroots Discussion. It is now up to 23,000 members. It is incredibly lively. Now I have no idea what the proportion is; I suspect the usual proportions exist: lots of members, relatively small number of direct contributors. But the range, and mix and contestability of debate on that site, it’s a lot more than you might get if you were looking at some of the more formal institutional sites that wonder why people don’t come. The reason that they’re there, I’m imagining, is because they set it up themselves. And it works very, very well. In fact, it was quite interesting recently. There was quite a deal of contention about the behaviour of a couple of people who were on that site and, in a sense, the community pretty much fixed it. Steve, and others would know how that works.
Here are my three propositions then and my definition of what the question might be. Proposition 1: we have to learn and explore our way into these solutions and we have to do that in an irretrievably social and networked way. So I’m picking up the David Weinberger the-smartest-person-in-the-room-is-the-room. If we stick with that precept, we might get somewhere. So we have to learn and explore our way into the solutions, not design and plan it. And I’m being deliberately stark here because I’m sure it’s a little bit of both. But anyway, that is Proposition 1. Proposition 2: legibility is the indispensible condition to making progress. And I think legibility is more about whether we get access to and ability to see all the data than necessarily about ownership.
There was some interesting work done some years ago by a guy called Jeremy Rifkin. People might have read where he posited very strongly that we were moving into a world where access mattered a lot more than ownership. And it’s given rise to all the stuff around car sharing and all that sort of stuff. Who needs to own a car or a bike because you can go and share it? We know where some of that has worked and some, it hasn’t. Anyway, that may be interesting. But legibility is an indispensible condition.
And the third proposition I would make is there is no one in charge of this process. There won’t be a centre in the classic way. Everyone can get involved, and to some extent, can lead. But they have to get involved on the basis that if they are involved, they are involved in the social adventure, which means they have obligations to the social context in which they are operating. They have to make what they are doing clear, they have to make their data available, they have to join, in others words, the business of learning. And if they don’t, then in a sense, they will get somehow either punished or marked down.
So what is the question we are trying to answer? I think it might be something like, how do people in organisations, who want to solve complex social problems and improve the quality of social care, use and create better data for better ideas, better insights, better impact. Certainly the people I am engaged with through the ANZOG work, in government and through the stuff I get through social entrepreneurs and so on. I think that’s what they are trying to do.
I think that’s as much as I need to say because we are running a bit short of time. I am really keen, given that I am kind of interested in what the room knows, is to hear from the room. Thank you.
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Martin Stewart-Weeks discussion
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