Some words on the future from my 5th anniversary address

…so what of the future?

First, I am more convinced than ever that mySociety offers something quite unique, and something must survive if technology is going to be best applied on the side of the citizen. Despite the explosion of so called web 2.0 technologies being adapted by newspapers, government and other media companies, the tools mySociety builds remain unique. They don’t just involve repurposing generic new communications tools like blogs, they involve conceptualising how technology can empower people from first principles. Nobody else is in the UK even attempts to build services like WhatDoTheyKnow or TheyWorkForYou, they’re just too different from what’s out there to copy. And when we do build them, they get copied across the world – one of the things I didn’t expect five years ago is that I’d be celebrating tonight with Rob McKinnon,  the man who took TheyWorkForYou and made it work in New Zealand, and being toasted from Australia via Twitter. But we know from the continued influence of newspapers, some born in the 19th century, that political media needs longevity to gain the reach and legitimacy required to transform whole systems and to challenge the expectations of whole populations. mySociety needs to work out how to be here not just in 6 months, but in 20 years.

To do this, however, we must do something about our funding. mySociety remains deeply financially insecure, and if we’re to celebrate our 6th birthday, let alone our 10th something urgent has to happen.

Next, we need to admit that we’ve shifted the culture of government internet usage less than we might have hoped over the last five years. Nevertheless, I honestly believe that a relatively minor shake-up at relatively low cost can see a massive step change in the way that government delivers services online, the way that it talks to citizens, and the way that it makes information available. But so long as the cult of outsourcing everything computer related continues to dominate in Whitehall, and so long as experts like Matthew and Francis are treated as suspicious just because they understand computers, little is going to change. Government in the UK once led the world in its own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire’s worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.

In one way that’s great for mySociety’s reputation that government progress has been so slow – even on a bankruptcy budget mySociety will continue to at least appear to out-innovate the entire UK government. But from a public welfare perspective it’s a tragic farce.

What we want from the government is technologies that empower and uplift, not depersonalise and degrade.  mySociety wants to be part of this change, and I hope we don’t have to wait until a new government comes in to have a decent shot at slaying some of the shiboleths that stand in our way to decent reform.

Last, but not least, I want as many of you as possible to be part of making mySociety’s vision of easier, more accessible, more responsive democracy the minimum that people expect, not the best they can hope for. This will take lots of volunteers, and lots of funding funding and ideas and newspaper stories. It’ll take lots of brilliant coding and better design. It will take political leaders who understand that the internet is the big, unique chance their generation has to shake things up and get into the history books.

And, more than anything else, I want to do it with you people. I want to do it with mySociety.

4 Comments

  1. Well said Tom,

    The problem with government is the huge variations in the level of comprehension of what the web means …
    I see that clearly in the commission
    In many cases it is the blind leading the blind …

    It is courageous of you to admit that mysociety feeds on the governments blindness and incapacity

    I hope when they will get their sight back they will recognize the visionaries such as mysociety and allow them to continue being the frontrunners opening up the way not only in the UK but Globally …

    Your scope is much larger than UK though …
    If the UK keeps not getting it, I am sure you will find visionary politicians and Government officials(yes they still exist!) in Europe or other elsewhere …

    Xronia polla!

    Christoforos

  2. I’d suggest that the “problem with government” is half that they can’t do “small”, but also that they understand quantity not quality – as you say. I’d translate that to “amounts of money” not “value for money”.

    Example from this morning: the £80m “moderate Islam” fund.

    Do they have any idea what could really have been achieved with that?