Recruiting a Head of Digital or an experienced CIO is not a task to be taken lightly. But the right skills in the right positions can revolutionise the way you offer your services online – and potentially the way the entire organisation works.

Contact mySociety now to talk about our high level digital recruitment consultancy.

Finding senior digital staff, capable of folding a whole organisation around digital possibilities, is a tall order. It’s especially tough when you’re caught in a Catch 22 – your organisation needs good digital skills in order to hire good digital skills. And classical recruitment agencies are not themselves famed for their understanding of what makes for strong or weak digital skills, especially not at the most senior levels.

mySociety is different. We are not a recruitment agency. We are a not-for-profit organisation which happens to have a unique, in-depth knowledge of the internet and experience in how it can best be used in organisations of all sizes.

That’s because we spend a lot of time researching and discussing best practice in the ever-changing field that is digital technology. We offer you our hard-won knowledge as a consultancy package specifically tailored to help you find and hire the right person to move your organisation forward.

“The consultation was very valuable. The breadth and level of experience, plus a preference for simple solutions, was really refreshing” Anthony Smith, Chief Executive at Passenger Focus

Blue Chip Clients

mySociety have worked with clients as wide-ranging as Channel 4, Passenger Focus, No 10 Downing Street, East Midlands Trains, and many UK local councils.

We have been building innovative, usable websites and online tools for over a decade, and providing advice to CEOs and senior managers for years. We are ruthless in our prioritisation of usability, simplicity and user-centred design, and we’ll ask  the right questions to ensure that the person you hire has a similar outlook.

Contact us now to talk about hiring a CIO or Digital Head.

mySociety is a not-for-profit organisation: revenue from our commercial work goes towards our charitable projects.

The local press in Islington has just reported the accidental release of quite a bit of sensitive personal data by Islington council.

One of our volunteers, Helen, was responsible for spotting that Islington had made this mistake, and so we feel it is appropriate to set out a summary of what happened, to inform journalists and citizens who may be interested.

Note – Concerned residents should contact Islington Council or the Information Commissioner’s Office.

On 27th May a user of our WhatDoTheyKnow website raised an FOI request to Islington Borough Council. On the 26th June the council responded to the FOI request by sending three Excel workbooks. Unfortunately, these contained a considerable amount of accidentally released, private data about Islington residents. In one file the personal data was contained within a normal spreadsheet, in the two other workbooks the personal data was contained on four hidden sheets.

All requests and responses sent via WhatDoTheyKnow are automatically published online without any human intervention – this is the key feature that makes this site both valuable and popular. So these Excel workbooks went instantly onto the public web, where they seem to have attracted little attention – our logs suggest 7 downloads in total.

Shortly after sending out these files, someone within the the council tried to delete the first email using Microsoft Outlook’s ‘recall’ feature. As most readers are probably aware – normal emails sent across the internet cannot be remotely removed using the recall function, so this first mail, containing sensitive information in both plain sight and in (trivially) hidden forms remained online.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only mistake on the 26th June. A short while later, the council sent a ‘replacement’ FOI response that still contained a large amount of personal information, this time in the form of hidden Excel tabs. As you can see from this page on the Microsoft site , uncovering such tabs takes seconds, and only basic computer skills.

At no point on or after the 26th June did we receive any notification from Islington (or anyone else) that problematic information had been released not once, but twice, even though all mails sent via WhatDoTheyKnow make it clear that replies are published automatically online. Had we been told we would have been able to remove the information quickly.

It was only by sheer good fortune that our volunteer Helen happened to stumble across these documents some weeks later, and she handled the situation wonderfully, immediately hiding the data, asking Google to clear their cache, and alerting the rest of mySociety to the situation. This happened on the 14th July, a Saturday, and over the weekend mySociety staff, volunteers and trustees swung into action to formulate a plan.

The next working day, Monday 16th July, we alerted both Islington and the ICO about what had happened with an extremely detailed timeline.

The personal data released by Islington Borough Council relates to 2,376 individuals/families who have made applications for council housing or are council tenants, and includes everything from name to sexuality. It is for the ICO, not mySociety, to evaluate what sort of harm may have resulted from this release, but we felt it was important to be clear about the details of this incident.

Quick question – don’t think too hard about it: what is Amazon?

At one level, Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, a public company listed on the NASDAQ. At another level – the physical – it is a collection of over 50,000 employees, hundreds of warehouses and zillions of servers.

But for most people Amazon is fundamentally a website.

Sure, it’s an extremely impressive website that can send you parcels in the post, and which can relieve you of money with terrifying ease. But to most people the company has very little reality beyond the big white-blue-and-orange website and the brown cardboard packages.

Vanishing Act

The same process is happening to the bits of the government that I interact with – the physical reality of bricks and mortar and people and parks is starting to disappear behind the websites.

Government is increasingly a thing I don’t have any mental images of. I don’t know what my local council looks like, nor am I even clear where it is. I’m sure you all have plenty of interactions with HM Revenue and Customs, but do you know where it is or what it looks like?

Increasingly, when I form a mental image of a branch of government in my head, what I see is the website. What else am I supposed to picture?

Governments no longer just ‘own‘ websites, they are websites.

Heartless Bourgeois Pig

Wait! Stop shouting! I know how this sounds.

I am not so out of touch that I don’t know that there are plenty of people out there who are only too familiar with the physical manifestations of government. They see the government as manifested through prison, or hospital, or the job centre. They have no problem forming a vivid mental image of what government means: a waiting room, a queue, a social worker.

And I also know that most of the poorest people in the UK aren’t online yet. It’s one of the great challenges for our country in the next decade.

But…

The majority of citizens don’t have deep, all encompassing, everyday interactions with the state – at most they drop their kids at school every day, or visit the GP a few times a year. That’s as physically close as they get.

To these people, interacting with government already feels somewhat like interacting with Amazon. It sends them benefits, passports, recycling bins, car tax disks from mysterious dispatch offices and it demands money and information in return. The difference is in emotional tone – the Amazon online interactions tend to be seamless, the government online interactions either painful or impossible – time to pick up the phone.

Increasingly, when a modern citizen looks at a government website, they’re literally seeing the state. And if what they see is ugly, confusing or down-right-broken, increasingly that’s how they’re going to see the state as a whole.

This change in public perception means that a previously marginal problem (bad websites) is now pointing towards a rather more worrying possibility.  As government websites continue to fall behind private sector websites, governments will slowly look less and less legitimate – less and less like they matter to citizens, less and less like we should be paying any taxes to pay for them. Why pay for something you can’t even navigate?

It is time for the directors and CEOs of public bodies everywhere to wake up to this possibility, before the ideologues get hold of it.

Governments have the wrong management structures for a digital future

I don’t buy the argument that government websites are bad because all the ubermensch have gone off to work for the private sector. The public sector can often teach the private sector a lot about information design, like British road signs and tube maps, which are fantastic. And, of course, there’s the super team at Gov.uk, who represent the kind of change I’m writing about here.

The real difference is one of management structure and focus. At Amazon, CEO Jeff Bezos and his executive colleagues worry all the time about whether their site or app or Kindle are as good as the competitors. But in central and local governments around the world, the top bosses do not stress every day about whether the user experience of their website is up to scratch, or whether conversion rates are lower than desirable.

The main reason that they don’t worry is because their management boards don’t historically contain anyone whose job it is to worry about the performance of digital services. A council chief exec will worry about finance because their finance director will constantly be nagging them about money. But a council CEO won’t be worrying about whether 10,000 people left their website bitterly disappointed last week, because such issues are not ‘normal things to discuss’ at a board level.

Getting digital people to the top table

The solution, at least in the near term – is to recruit or promote people with digital remits and experience right to the top tier of decision making in government bodies. It means creating new roles like ‘CIO’ or ‘Head of Digital’ which have the same seniority as ‘Head of Adult Social Care’ or ‘Head of HR’. And it means empowering those people to make painful changes that are required to make digital services become brilliant and user-centric.

Clearly, this presents dangers. How do you know what powers to give the new role? How do you stop them damaging critical services? And, most problematic of all – how can you tell that a digital expert isn’t a charlatan? After all, they have niche expertise that you don’t have – how are you supposed to sniff them out?

The answer is that it isn’t easy, and that a lot of knowledge sharing and learning from mistakes will be required. As a shameless plug – we can help here – we can help vet candidates and define their roles in Britain and abroad. But none of this hides the fact that becoming digital – learning to run a public organisation that is a website, will be a fraught affair. The reward, though, is nothing less than helping to guarantee the ongoing legitimacy of government (quite apart from all the happier customers). To me that seems well worth going through some pain for.

If you live anywhere in Britain, it won’t have escaped your attention that it’s been raining a bit, recently.

This has been causing quite a bit of flooding. And when flooding happens, people need to know if it is going to affect them.

Unfortunately, the Environment Agency flood warning website leaves something to be desired. It is, quite frankly, a usability dogs’ breakfast, with problems including:

• It doesn’t answer the main question: Most users arriving at this page simply want to know if they might be in danger. The page should be all about answering that question.
• It is trying to serve national and local needs: Information about flooding across the whole country might be useful to journalists or civil servants, but it shouldn’t be the main element.
• Clutter, clutter: A massive grid of numbers which don’t really mean anything, plus lots of sidebar links.
• Confusing graphics: The page contains a national map which doesn’t actually make it clear that the colours relate to the seriousness of flooding, or that it provides links to further content.

There are also some non-design problems with the postcode lookup, but today we want to stick to just the design issues.

Not just moaning minnies

At mySociety we try to be constructive in our criticism, and so whilst the flood waters are still draining from many people’s homes, we thought that we could do something positive. We want to show that a flood warning page could be an exemplar of clear, user-centered information design. So we made a mockup.

Some of the improvements we’d like to point out are:

• A big page title that makes it obvious what this page is, and the fact that it is official information.
• All the main elements on the page are now focussed on the most likely needs of potential flood victims – journalists can follow a link to a different page for their needs.
• We’ve removed roughly 90% of the links on the page for clarity.
• We’ve removed all numerical data because it wasn’t adding value. Nobody can know if ‘5 warnings’ is a lot or a little without some context. As a nod to the overall context we’ve put in a simple graph, similar to a sparkline.
• It presents a clear button to click on if you’re actually endangered by a flood.
• It gives you a way to find out if other people near you are talking about local flooding via social media.

We hope you like this. It’s just the product of a couple of hours’ work, so if you have any suggestions on how it could be better, please let us know.

And, of course, we’re always happy to do similar work for other people.

All of us at mySociety love the fact that there are so many interesting new civic and democratic websites and apps springing up across the whole world. And we’re really keen to do what we can to help lower the barriers for people trying to build successful sites, to help citizens everywhere.

Today mySociety is unveiling MapIt Global, a new Component designed to eliminate one common, time-consuming task that civic software hackers everwhere have to struggle with: the task of identifying which political or administrative areas cover which parts of the planet.

As a general user this sort of thing might seem a bit obscure, but you’ve probably indirectly used such a service many times. So, for example, if you use our WriteToThem.com to write to a politician, you type in your postcode and the site will tell you who your politicians are. But this website can only do this because it knows that your postcode is located inside a particular council, or constituency or region.

Today, with the launch of MapIt Global , we are opening up a boundaries lookup service that works across the whole world. So now you can lookup a random point in Russia or Haiti or South Africa and find out about the administrative boundaries that surround it. And you can browse and inspect the shapes of administrative areas large and small, and perform sophisticated lookups like “Which areas does this one border with?”. And all this data is available both through an easy to use API, and a nice user interface.

We hope that MapIt Global will be used by coders and citizens worldwide to help them in ways we can’t even imagine yet. Our own immediate use case is to use it to make installations of the FixMyStreet Platform much easier.

Thanks OpenStreetMap!

We’re able to offer this service only because of the fantastic data made available by the amazing OpenStreetMap volunteer community, who are constantly labouring to make an ever-improving map of the whole world. You guys are amazing, and I hope that you find MapIt Global to be useful to your own projects.

The developers who made it possible were Mark Longair, Matthew Somerville and designer Jedidiah Broadbent. And, of course, we’re also only able to do this because the Omidyar Network is supporting our efforts to help people around the world.

From Britain to the World

For the last few years we’ve been running a British version of the MapIt service to allow people running other websites and apps to work out what council or constituency covers a particular point – it’s been very well used. We’ve given this a lick of paint and it is being relaunched today, too.

MapIt Global is also the first of The Components, a series of interoperable data stores that mySociety will be building with friends across the globe. Ultimately our goal is to radically reduce the effort required to launch democracy, transparency and government-facing sites and apps everywhere.

If you’d like to install and run the open source software that powers MapIt on your own servers, that’s cool too – you can find it on Github.

About the Data

The data that we are using is from the OpenStreetMap project, and has been collected by thousands of different people. It is licensed for free use under their open license. Coverage varies substantially, but for a great many countries the coverage is fantastic.

The brilliant thing about using OpenStreetMap data is that if you find that the boundary you need isn’t included, you can upload or draw it direct into Open Street Map, and it will subsequently be pulled into MapIt Global.  We are planning to update our database about four times a year, but if you need boundaries adding faster, please talk to us.

If you’re interested in the technical aspects of how we built MapIt Global, see this blog post from Mark Longair.

Commercial Licenses and Local Copies

MapIt Global and UK are both based on open source software, which is available for free download. However, we charge a license fee for commercial usage of the API, and can also set up custom installs on virtual servers that you can own. Please drop us a line for any questions relating to commercial use.

 Feedback

As with any new service, we’re sure there will be problems that need sorting out. Please drop us an email, or tweet us @mySociety.

As you may already be aware, mySociety is putting considerable effort into making it super-easy to set up versions of our websites FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow in other countries.

These ‘websites in a box’ are a key part of our strategy to help people develop more successful civic and democratic websites around the world, but they are only the first half of our plan. Today I wanted to talk about the other half.

The Challenge

There are some use-cases for software in which most people are entirely happy to take some software off the shelf, press ‘Go’, and start using it. WordPress is a good example, and so is Microsoft Office.

However, there are some kinds of social issues that vary so much between different countries and regions that we believe one-size-fits-all tools for attacking them are impracticable.

This problem is particularly acute in the arena of sites and apps that allow people to track the activities of politicians. In this area there are several dozen different sites globally, almost all of which are powered by software that was written bespoke for that particular usage.

What drives this pattern of people re-writing every site from scratch is that people in different places care about different aspects of politics. In some countries what really counts is how politicians vote, in others the crux is campaign finance contributions, in others it is information on who has criminal records, and in others still it is whether public money has been vanishing suspiciously.

To build an off-the-shelf software platform that could handle all this data equally well in every country would be an immense coding task. And more important than that, we believe that it would create a codebase so huge and complex that most potential reusers would run away screaming. Or at least ignore it and start from scratch.

In short – we don’t believe there can be a WordPress for sites that monitor politicians, nor for a variety of other purposes that relate to good governance and stronger democracies.

The Waste

We believe that the wrong answer to this challenge is to just say “Well then, everyone should build their own sites from scratch.” Over the years we at mySociety have been witness to the truly sad sight of people and organisations around the world wearing themselves out and blowing their budgets just trying to get the first version of a transparency website out the door. All too often they fail to create popular, long lasting sites because the birthing process is just so exhausting and resource-consuming that there’s nothing left to drive the sites to success. Often they don’t even get to launch.

A painful aspect of this problem is that the people who work on such sites are genuine altruists who are trying to solve serious problems in their part of the world; too much of their passion and energy is used up on building tools, when there’s still so much work beyond that that’s needed to make such sites successful.  However, as we pointed out above, giving them a complete package on a plate isn’t an option.  So what can we do?

Our Proposed Answer – The Components

We start from the following observation: coders and non-coders like simple, minimal, attractive tools that help them achieve bigger goals. Simple tools don’t make anyone run away screaming – they encourage exploration and deliver little sparkles of satisfaction almost immediately. But simple tools have to be highly interoperable and reliable to form the foundation of complex systems.

Our plan is to collaborate with international friends to build a series of components that deliver quite narrow little pieces of the functionality that make up bigger websites. These include:

• PopIt – A Component to store and share the names of politicians, and the jobs they have.
• MapIt – A Component to store and share information on the locations of administrative boundaries, like counties, regions or cities.
• SayIt – A Component to store and share information on the words that public figures say or put out in writing.

Characteristics of each Component

There are some crucial architecture decisions that have been baked into the Components, to truly make them ‘small pieces loosely joined’.

• Each Component is fundamentally a tool for storing and sharing one or two kinds of common data – they’re intentionally minimalist.
• As a developer, you just use the Components that make sense for your goals – you simply don’t have to look at or learn about the Components that contain functionality that doesn’t matter to you.
• You don’t have to install anything to get started – you can always begin by playing with a hosted Component.
• We won’t impose our taste in programming languages on you. You can code your website in whatever language you want. The Components are not ‘modules’  – they don’t plug into some overarching framework like Drupal or WordPress. They are stand-alone tools which just present you data over REST APIs, and which you can write data into using REST APIs.
• Each Component’s data structures will offer as much flexibility as makes sense given the goal of keeping each Component really good at one or two tasks. We’ll listen to feedback carefully to get this right.
• Each Component has a clean, simple web front end so you can explore the data held in a store without having to write lots of SQL queries. Often you will be able to edit the data this way, too.
• Get started in seconds – each Component offers at least some functionality which is available inside a minute after getting involved.
• Non coders are welcome – we are building the Components so that non-coders can start gathering,  editing and sharing data straight away, possibly long before they are in a position to launch a ‘real site’.
• Data can be added to the Components both through write APIs and through manual editing interfaces, suitable for non-coders.
• Learn from our mistakes – it is really easy to get the wrong data structure for civic, democratic or governmental data. Good practice data structures are baked into the Components, to save you pain later.
• Use our hosted versions, or install open source code locally. It will normally be quicker to get started in using the Components in a hosted environment, but if you want to run them locally, you’re entirely welcome. The code will be open source, and we’ll work hard to make sure it’s attractive and easy to install.
• The Components will talk to each other, and to the rest of the web using simple open schemas which will evolve as they are built. Where possible we’ll pick up popular data standards and re-use those, rather than building anything ourselves.

What the Components Aren’t

Sometimes in life it can be easier to describe things by what they aren’t:

• The Components are definitively not modules in a framework or platform. Each one is totally independent, and they will frequently be written in different languages – partly to force us to ensure that the APIs are truly excellent.
• The Components aren’t either Hosted or Local, they’re both. We’ll always offer a hosted version and a downloadable version, and you’ll always be able to move any data you have stored on the hosted versions down to your local copies.
• The Components aren’t all about mySociety. We’re planning to build the first ones in conjunction with some friends, and we’ll be announcing more about this soon. We want the family of Components to be jointly owned by a group of loving parents.

 When can I see some of the Components in Action?

We’ll be blogging more about that tomorrow…

Footnote – To see the provenance of the extremely useful  ‘small pieces loosely joined’ concept, see this.

Speaking at today’s Activate conference in London, Stephen King from the Omidyar Network just announced a grant of extraordinary importance to mySociety.

Over the next three years, the Omidyar Network is granting mySociety an amazing $2.9m.

This unprecedented donation is tied to clear targets which, when translated relate to the following goals:

1. Internationalising our current British websites, and helping people around the world to build sites and apps that will drive greater transparency and accountability.
2. Growing an ever-stronger commercial team, to help cover our costs which remain unfunded (still substantial).
3. Continuing to grow the impact of our UK sites.

If you’re someone who’s ever given us £5 or £10 to support our work, or who’s given your time volunteering on any of our projects, we have a special message for you: we would never have been able to get to the sort of scale of support that today’s grant represents if people like you didn’t believe in us all along. Thank you, and thank you for your continued support – our  growing ambitions to make ever greater positive impacts on the world means we need more friends than ever, not fewer.

We’re Open for Business, Partnerships and Conversations

The overall impact of this grant, plus continued support from groups like the Open Society Foundation, Hivos, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Indigo Trust – and many smaller donations – is a huge increase in our overall capacity. We can build more software, help more partners, work with more clients, give more advice.

So if you’ve thought about working with mySociety, or using our open source tech for your own goals, there’s never been a better moment. Get in touch or talk to us on Twitter.

One of the most common grumbles heard within the political and governmental classes is that the public doesn’t understand the need for compromise.

The argument goes something like this: left to themselves the public will vote for low tax and high public spending, resulting in eventual bankruptcy and collapse. The State of California is usually wheeled out as exhibit A here.

Assuming that this is even true, I find it hard to blame the public for a general lack of awareness about the compromises involved in running a functional government.

This is not because big budgets are complicated (although they are) but because most governments waste hundreds of thousands of opportunities a day to explain the nature of compromises. They waste them because they’re still thinking about the world from a paper-centric mindset.

Linking to explanations

My argument is this: key compromises or decisions should be linked to from the  points where people obtain a service, or at the points where they learn about one.   If my bins are only collected once a fortnight, the reason why should be one click away from the page that describes the collection times.

Currently, in order to obtain an explanation for why a service functions as it does,  I’d probably have to pick up the phone to my local councillor, or use this handy service to make a few FOI requests. In terms of effort and clicks, these explanations describing why a service is like it is are so far away from the service itself that they might as well be on Mars.

Here are some of the wasted opportunities to explain which I would like to see seized upon:

• A “Why aren’t there more bin collections?” link on local government waste pages, linking through to an explanation about council budgets, what would have to be sacrificed to have more bin collections, and who made the decision to adopt the current compromise.
• Updates by local governments on FixMyStreet that say “We’re not going to fix this problem because it wouldn’t be good value for money”, linking through to an appropriate analysis about money spent on street fixing, versus other things.
• On the NHS’s ‘Choose and Book’ website, I’d like to see links saying “Why can’t I get an appointment sooner?” These would then be linked to data on NHS waiting lists, budget constraints and specific decisions that set the current availability.

Obviously cynics out there will say that governments don’t want people to know that they can’t solve all the world’s ills – and that they want to preserve a mystique of omnipotence, so that people will be miserably grateful to them for the bounty bestowed. In this model, governments don’t offer explanations lest citizens see them as merely mortal, and boot them out.

Now, I don’t know about you, but servile gratitude and illusions of infinite power doesn’t sound much like the current attitude to government from most people I know.  We live in politically disillusioned times where many people worry if the government can actually fix anything, never mind everything.

If ever there was a time to start routinely explaining to citizens that government is a process of ceaseless compromises it is now, in the hard times. There are plenty of those around the world right now.

I believe that citizens could be both more forgiving of governments, and more empowered to demand change if services were closely connected to explanations of why compromises have been made.  I think that the reason it hasn’t happened before isn’t really politics: it’s simply because it wouldn’t have been possible on paper. On paper you can’t link through to an animated narrative, or a set of votes, or a transcript of a key decision.  I think the main reason we don’t connect services with explanations is because governments haven’t really grokked the meaning of simple linking yet – not really.  I’m looking for the first government, national or local, willing to give it a shot.

Governments, companies and large organisations of all kinds regularly spend astonishing amounts of money on computer systems that are either completely broken, or which are instances of  what I call Hateware – software that appears to have been designed by people who actually hate users.

Why does this happen? Obviously there are multiple, terribly complicated factors. But I’m going to boil down one of the biggest problems to a little story.

Story time

[Dreamy fade sequence]

Imagine you have been made responsible for replacing the desk chairs in your office. The old ones have gone all sweat coloured, and you’re worried one might collapse.

So you put out a competitive tender for furniture companies. You wait, vet and score all their bids, and finally you invite the finalists in to make their pitch.

In they come: smart, sober, dressed in a way that suggests success whilst avoiding ostentation. They set up their presentation, and start to tell you about the range of office furniture they have. The pitch is fantastic. They’ve already thought about all your concerns. They have an impressive array of happy clients who are just like you. Their slides are polished and focussed. They’ve brought fabric swatches to flick through. The chairs are handsome, with just the right number of pleasing gizmos. And they can ship next week.

The presentation draws to a close – any questions?

“Well, that was fantastic – I particularly like your X1 basic office chair. Just one question, what’s the cost?”

A few minutes pass as they reflect on the wide range of maintenance contract options, chair customisations and bulk purchasing reductions. Eventually, with a little nudging, you get the price for one chair.

“The base price of the X1 office chair is currently one millions pounds, with a £500,000 yearly licensing contract. Plus tax.”

Moments later the presenters, laptops, suits and fabric swatches bump to earth on the pavement outside the office door. Security is instructed never to let anyone from the company in, ever again.

The Moral

How does this little story explain anything about ICT?

Well, re-read the story above, but replace ‘chair’ with ‘payroll system’. And replace ‘fabric swatch’ with ‘lovingly photoshopped mockups, customised for your company branding’. Go on – I’ll wait.

The pitch no longer seems so crazy, and you certainly wouldn’t kick someone out when they announce the price. Why? Because you don’t know what is a sane price for a payroll system, and what’s an absurd, insulting price.

The moral here is quite simple: you can’t make good decisions if you are lacking even the most basic frame of reference about what something should cost, or how it works.

The problem is that when it comes to identifying technology needs, and procuring successfully to fill them, you can’t simply rely on general life experience to save you.  It’s  a specialist skill, and one that requires knowledge to be constantly relearned and unlearned as technologies change.

Too few large organisations understand this. They see buying a new computer system as very much like buying new furniture – it’s just ‘all stuff the office needs’, along with car parks, printer paper or tea bags. This attitude fails to see that many modern organisations don’t have IT systems and websites, they are IT systems and websites. They can no more delegate this to some junior staffer than they can delegate the strategy of the whole business.

Almost all large organisations today need at least one person right up at the top level of the company who can spot the million pound chairs without the help of subordinates.

Now what?

Once organisations understand that they are regularly buying million pound chairs, their CEOs and boards face another problem: how do they know which of their staff can actually spot the million pound chair, if any?

Unfortunately, the solution isn’t obvious.

As of right now there are no professional qualifications that would guarantee the right skills set. Worse, there’s even an unfortunate association in my mind between people with lots of qualifications like ‘MSCE’ and ‘SAP Certified Associate’ and projects that are triply gold plated, entirely missing user-centered design, and inevitably compromised by a tribal loyalty to one vendor.

So what’s a CEO to do? The answer, for now, unfortunately has to be to hire through trust and reputation networks. Find people who appear to have delivered nimble, popular user-centred projects on limited budgets, and get them to help you hire and restructure.

Trust networks, of course, can backfire: trust the wrong person and you can be in trouble. But the Enterprise computing world has backfired into the laps of leaders and managers enough times in the last two decades.

It is time for leaders to bring some people who have got their hands dirty in the guts of digital projects into the decision making rooms, and onto the decision making boards.

————

Tom Steinberg is the director of mySociety, a social enterprise which provides consultation services and software development to a range of clients in the public and private sectors.

Tom will be talking more on this theme at the Local Government Association Conference next week.

Keen on the idea of setting up a mySociety-style site like FixMyStreet.com or WhatDoTheyKnow.com? Not sure what you need? Then read on.

At mySociety, we’re working really hard to create software tools that are attractive and easy to set up in diverse countries, cities and regions. Now we want to make sure everyone knows what we offer, and how it can be useful. This is a beginners’ guide to what mySociety can offer in the way of software tools.

First up, the basics:

• All our code is open source.
• Some of our code is available in simple-to-use packages.
• There are two types of package. We call them Platforms and Components. This post is about explaining the difference.

Platforms

You can think of Platforms as flat-pack websites – like furniture that arrives in a cardboard box, with all the screws, instructions and tools included. Our Platforms provide everything you need to replicate a site like FixMyStreet.com or WhatDoTheyKnow.com in your own country, city or region, but you need to do a little work to get it up and running.

Platforms are great for people who don’t want to spend a long time reinventing the wheel, and who want to get a basic, functional site up and running as fast as possible.

We provide the software, and you just need to add:

1. Data to populate it
   For example, if you’re setting up a website using the FixMyStreet platform, you need the names and email addresses of every bit of government that you want to send reports to. (This isn’t as daunting as it might sound – it might just be one authority and one email address! And if not, well, we’ve had lots of success with crowd-sourcing this sort of information).
2. A server to host it on
   We can help you here, if it’s a problem for you. See step 1 on this page.
3. Enthusiastic people to run it
   Don’t forget this vital consideration! Computers are great, but they can’t do everything themselves. You will need people – volunteers or paid staff – to promote, improve, and interact with the users of your website.

The following platforms are available to download and install:

• FixMyStreet
  For reporting common street problems such as potholes or broken streetlights. Creates transparency about local government, at the same time as providing a practical service to users.
• Alaveteli
  Our Freedom-of-Information Platform. Whether or not your country has a Right to Know law, this Platform lets people ask questions to public authorities, – and it publishes all the conversations online.

If Platforms are like a flat-pack piece of furniture, Components are more like the parts of a kitchen. When you have a kitchen built, you get to choose from a number of parts that fit together: cupboards, drawers, shelves, etc. You can ignore things you don’t want, and add in things you do – and you end up with a kitchen that suits your needs.

Components will save you a lot of time because you won’t need to create database structures, APIs, search mechanisms, admin interfaces, and so on. Just slot in a Component – like you might slot in a dishwasher – and it’s all done for you. We’ve done our best to make them easy to deploy, easy to customise, and easy to connect together.

You will definitely need technical skills, although we are working on lowering that barrier. Components cannot run on their own – they need a website to fit into. And just as with our Platforms, you’ll need data. But you don’t need a server – we host the Components ourselves.

Right now we just have one component which is fully documented and ready to use, but we’re working on followups right now. This component is called MapIt.

• MapIt 
  MapIt is a web service which you can use to work out which boundaries a point or postcode exists within. An essential foundation for geographic lookups of all kinds. You can play with the UK instance here. We use it on:
  • Our parliamentary monitoring website TheyWorkForYou.com. Users are shown their own MP’s data even if they don’t know who that MP is – all they have to do is input their postcode.
  • Our ‘contact your representative’ site WritetoThem.com. Users input their postcode and are shown everyone who represents them, from local to European level.
  • Our street problem-reporting site FixMyStreet.com. It sends problem reports to the relevant local council, based on the co-ordinates of where the problem was reported.

We are also working on a new component for building Parliamentary Monitoring Websites on top of, called PopIt. It isn’t quite ready for prime time yet, but if you join the Poplus email list, you can follow progress.

Where can I get these Platforms and Components ?