Un enghraifft o ddatganiad gan adran Llywodraeth dan y drwydded agored newydd gan Lywodraeth DU. Newyddion da am lawer o resymau.

Pam greodd Llywodraeth DU trwydded newydd? Dw i’n methu ffeindio rheswm digon da i osgoi Comins Creadigol am ddata a dogfennau.

O’r tudalen am meddalwedd:

• Software which is the original work of public sector employees should use a default licence. The default licence recommended is the Open Government Licence.
• Software developed by public sector employees from open source software may be released under a licence consistent with the open source software.

Meddalwedd, dogfennau, beth yw’r gwahaniaeth? LLAWER! Dw i ddim yn deall pam dyn nhw ddim yn defnyddio GPL neu BSD am feddalwedd newydd.

Mae’r trwyddedau BSD yn fwy rhydd na GPL ond maen nhw dal yn gweithio gyda’i gilydd. (Dyna pam mae Apple yn gallu defnyddio systemau Unix fel sylfaen a dosbarthu – heb ddosbarthu cod ffynhonnell.)

Fy mhwynt. Dylet ti ddarllen pa mor dda a chynhwysfawr ydy’r GPL: termau ac amodau am ailddefnydd, cod ffynhonnell, cod crynodol, ategion ayyb.

Dyn ni’n gallu cyd-ddefnyddio’r dogfennau dan y Drwydded a dogfennau dan Gomins Creadigol. Ond ble mae’r addewid gyda meddalwedd?

Mae meddalwedd yn edrych fel ôl-ystyriaeth yma.

Sa’ i eisiau cwyno am y syniad, mae’n wych. Bydd e’n gyffrous i weld y projectau, busnesau newydd, straeon sy’n dadansoddi’r data yn y wasg, atebolrwydd gwell ayyb.

Sa’ i eisiau fersiwn Cymraeg o’r drwydded, dw i’n chwilio am resymau pam mae trwydded newydd yn bodoli o gwbl. Gobeithio mae gyda nhw rhesymau da nid jyst trwydded ego.

Joi Ito a thrwyddedau gwahanol:

Companies and governments are beginning to create vanity licenses either for purely branding and egotistical reasons or because there are certain features that they would like to “tweak”. What many of these communities don’t understand is that tweaking a free content license is a lot like tweaking character codes or the Internet protocol. While you may have some satisfaction of a minor feature or a feeling of ownership, you will introduce the friction of yet another license that we all have to understand and in many cases, fundamental incompatibility and lack of interoperability.

Cwestiwn olaf: pryd fydd Llywodraeth Cymru yn wneud rhywbeth tebyg?

YCHWANEGOL 05/10/2010:

Dw i wedi derbyn atebion i rai o fy nghwestiynau am destun/data a meddalwedd. Dw i wedi dysgu rhywbeth am ddata a thestun, mae’n edrych yn dda iawn.

Anghofiais i bwynt dilys ar yr ochr meddalwedd, ti’n methu ail-trwyddedu cod sydd dan GPL dan unrhyw drwydded arall. Mae ailddefnydd o feddalwedd yn gyffredin iawn – mewn rhai o gyd-destunau mae GPL yn de facto yn ymarferol.

Mae pobol yn trafod OGL yn y cyd-destun meddalwedd ar y gofrestr UK Government Data Developers fan hyn. Mae National Archives dal ar agor am adborth.

YCHWANEGOL 14/10/2010:

Newydd sylwi ateb am copyleft, GPL a meddalwedd.

This book “A Useful Fiction“, which came out last year, has just brought me reasonably up-to-date with devolution of the United Kingdom, particularly some of the finer details which I’d missed.

It has many good insights into the idea of Britain and its democracy, or rather democracies. The cover picture is a Union Flag with some serious-looking cracks in it, so you get the general idea.

I like Patrick Hannan’s scattershot style. He doesn’t resist a few cheeky observations about Blair, Brown, other politicians, Prince Charles, etc. He has some fun with the subject, which is pretty important if you’re talking about devolution and suchlike. That said, he’s fairly even-handed and journalistic about it.

Read it before it gets out of date! It’s published by Seren.

It turned out to be Patrick Hannan’s last book. Here’s an obituary of Hannan written by Meic Stephens.

Sgorio – Welsh for score – turned into a no score draw on the night despite regularly pulling in tens of thousands of viewers on other nights.

It is a regular show on Channel Four in Wales featuring top matches from the German, Spanish and Italian leagues.

Under the TV rating system, any programme with fewer than 2,500 viewers is regarded as “making no impact”.

Today the Western Mail ran a very similar story. Before we get into a discussion about what this might mean, let’s examine the figures. According to The Telegraph:

The figures were compiled by the Broadcasters Audience Research Board.

The body surveys viewing habits of 11,300 viewers in 5,100 British homes, and weights them according to the rest of the population.

How many homes own television sets in the UK? Let’s use BARB’s own figures:

In 2009, 25.9 million homes own at least one television set out of a total of 26.6 million homes in the UK.

Let’s concentrate on television-owning homes. According to this 97% of homes in the UK own a television.

The 5,100 British homes is 0.02% of the homes that own a television. BARB is collecting these figures by sampling one house in every 5000 television-owning houses in the UK, roughly speaking.

That may be adequate for popular programmes but is it enough to gauge the popularity of a minority language programme?

S4C publishes a top 20 chart. It would be good to have figures for other special interest programmes for comparison, but BARB doesn’t publish these figures free of charge. (Subscribe if you want.) Regardless, how meaningful are these figures in light of the sample size? I’m not aware that BARB has more fine-grained techniques for sampling S4C viewing, anyone know?

How many people live in Wales and in the UK? Let’s take the population figures from the Office for National Statistics:

Wales: 2.9 million
United Kingdon: 59.8 million

Let’s now look at sampled viewers. BARB’s sampled viewers make up a proportion of the total number of viewers in the UK. Let’s assume BARB has picked a fair distribution of sampled viewers in Wales. We could then expect the proportion of sampled viewers in Wales to match the proportion of the UK who live in Wales.

As a proportion, Wales makes up 4.8% of the UK population. Therefore we would expect BARB to have sampled approximately 548 viewers in Wales (which is 4.8% of 11,300).

I’m going to make an assumption here. I’m going to assume that out of the 2.9 million people in Wales, 97% have access to a television in their own home. This reflects the 97% of households who own a television in the UK. Therefore we calculate that around 2.8 million people in Wales have a television in their own home. My aim is to get an approximate impression of the scale here – the order of magnitude – to decide how trustworthy the statistics are. The figures may be slightly off, so please let me know if you have more accurate figures.

Therefore, each sampled viewer in Wales represents roughly 5000 of the television-watching population in Wales. This is similar to the figure for households above. I’m also assuming S4C’s heartland is Wales, although it is sometimes available in households outside Wales.

BARB’s threshold is 2,500 viewers for a programme “making an impact”. These are not real viewers, but figures extrapolated from the comparatively tiny sample size.

So according to this analysis, the conclusion that Sgorio made “no impact” rests on just ONE of the sampled viewers in Wales.

Again, is this enough to measure the reach of a programme, in particular one in a minority language?

UPDATE 21/10/2010: Comments are off but trackbacks and pingbacks are on.

Here’s an early Christmas present.

Visit data.gov.uk and it will bounce you on to a Google Group. Request to join the group and introduce yourself. You might get access to the developer preview of the site – like I just did!

This might be old news to some as it seems to have gone live on 30th September according to the site blog. I guess I assumed it was for “special” people, so that’s a lesson learned. If you see an interesting door, knock it.

I’m still finding my way around. There are 113 datasets including census data, ASBOs, air quality, crime, fear of crime, work, health, motoring, (un)employment, police and it goes on.

I think at least some of this data has been already available in different places. But having it linked to from one place is a good idea.

Pick a subject and there are always people out there who are cleverer than you. That’s another lesson, or rather, reminder I get from the web. Whatever you think about the UK government, inviting people to build things with a resource like this is at least a way of acting on that lesson.

The open invite encompasses not only a central website, but actually having exportable data formats and clear conditions for data re-use. I am not a lawyer but the terms and conditions seem fairly clear. Generally I don’t like the phrase “Crown Copyright” if it’s something that was gathered using public money, but it’s apparently there to ensure attribution and accurate use of the data. I thought copyright couldn’t be applied to numerical data? Perhaps someone out there can explain.

The preview is for load testing purposes, according to the welcome email:

Since the appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt in June we have been working on how to pull together a single point of access for government data. We’ve talked to a range of people, and looked at what others have done, and over the summer we have built a first version, with a combination of open source and re-using of existing facilities such as CKAN.

We would now like your help over the next weeks and months to make it better – and more useful for you as developers. We would like feedback on how the site should work, what developer support facilities and tools there would be useful to you, and what further data should be freed up for re-use.

We’d also be interested in your ideas on how the data can be used – and if you can build some more great applications with what is available now this will help the drive to free up more over the months ahead.

At this preview stage, we are manually approving membership requests so that we check how the load on our server scales as we ramp up our service.

I’m currently looking at census data for Welsh language ability, collected during the 2001 census. It might lead to ideas for our Hacio’r Iaith event.

Recently I found George Orwell’s seminal essay Politics and the English Language online, originally written in 1946. I’d heard of it before but never thought to track it down.

Here’s some of the intro:

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.

If you’ve ever enjoyed the Birtspeak section in Private Eye or wondered about just what our authorities and our local and national government(s) are really saying and not saying, do read the whole thing. Orwell does an excellent job of dismantling the slippery, cliched communications of our time, without the benefit of actually being alive right now. This is a real issue with real consequences and not just for pedants.

We had the perfect example last month. One way to judge UK chancellor Alistair Darling’s recent Budget would be to calculate its impact on your personal finances. (Disclosure: Darling has indirectly gifted me an approximate saving of £71.61 next year according to the BBC’s budget calculator.)

But another way to judge the imaginativeness, the clarity and the originality of the ideas would be to look at the language Darling used. Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times has examined the Budget speech and calculated a sharp increase in the use of cliched jargon words:

“Stakeholders”, “overarching”, “benchmarking” and “strategic” – all words recently banned by local authorities – were more in evidence this year than last.

It goes on. (In that sometimes annoying and self-defeating habit of newspapers, the entire column is produced verbatim on one web page without guidance – you have to skip past the first section to see it.)

As far as the English language is concerned, I’m always divided about the well meaning work of, say, the Plain English Campaign. Sometimes, more complex ideas do take more specialised words and longer sentences to describe. And often what I read of their earnest work strikes me as a bit precious or reductionist. For instance, from their site:

1. High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process.

2. Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.

Does the admittedly clumsy sentence 1 retain any of the full meaning it might have been intended to have when re-expressed as sentence 2, I wonder?

Just a couple of days ago, I mentioned some really odd police posters I’d seen in Cardiff. This isn’t about those posters. (At least those police ones were trying to make some kind of valid point, but failed.)

It’s about the ones that say “These chemicals won’t be used in a bomb because a neighbour reported the dumped containers” and the like. I’ve only seen one so far, on Clare Road in Cardiff just now. When I say poster, it’s actually a huge billboard.

Cory Doctorow already did a pretty fine job of covering the lunacy and “socially corrosive” effect of these posters in London. So I won’t rehash what he said.

I’m mainly here to point out the amplified ridiculousness of having this poster displayed in Cardiff, Wales – where we have no living memory of bomb planting nor acts of terrorism. (Correct me if I’m in any way wrong on that. Sheesh.)

Is this a threat now? Do they know something we don’t? The answer to both those questions is “no”. If London doesn’t need this, we in Cardiff really don’t need this. Clare Road is a main road running through Grangetown – which enjoys fairly decent levels of respect and integration between different people, thanks very much.

I can think of several things more appropriate and meaningful to do in the locality than reporting my neighbour because they might appear to have weird hobbies. Here’s the spot on Google Street View. You might prefer to remember it as the location where the band Super Furry Animals did a couple of photoshoots.

The remixes of the posters are well worth a look – a great antidote to the fear mongering.

The police have some new posters on display around the UK. I don’t like the posters. It was a definite case of dislike at first sight.

It turns out the posters are there to advertise the new Policing Pledge:

The Policing Pledge is a set of promises to local residents that not only gives more information about who their local neighbourhood policing team is, but also ensures that communities will have a stronger voice in telling the police what they think is most important and what they are most worried about.

We’ll have to see if that turns out to be successful. The posters themselves contradict both of those aims. So judging by the posters, I don’t think they’re on to a good start.

PR, publicity and communications for the police is a difficult job, worth doing carefully. I think they’ve got it wrong because the way they’re communicating clashes with the intended message. The medium, the method and the message are all at odds. I’ll try to focus mainly on the posters as communication. This is not a personal rant against the police – I’ve not had any major dealings with the police as an organisation. If anything I try to avoid them wherever possible, as a good citizen should. Who knows what the police themselves think – this campaign is mainly about Home Office diktats of course.

I had a whole load of thoughts about this campaign all at once. I’ll attempt to summarise them now.

Confusion
As other people have pointed out, the perceived message of the posters is unclear. I first saw the posters on bus shelters in Cardiff city centre. They are very eye-catching but I was in a hurry to go elsewhere. So I was left wondering what they’re advertising. My first question was “are these teaser ads for a new film?”. Really it just made me think of cop shows and how awful it would be to get arrested and hear those words in their original form. (I had to use my imagination. I’ve never been arrested.) I wasn’t left with any impression of how personable and nice the police now are. Or are being commanded to be.

Lack of depth
How many people will take time to research the underlying message about the Policing Pledge? The original press release about the adverts might tell you something. I learned that the adverts ostensibly publicise some well meaning changes in the police that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has ushered in. And that other citizens are subject to a large scale campaign of confusion, not only in Cardiff but across the UK and across a variety of media including radio, press adverts and digital. On closer inspection of the poster it says “The police now pledge to listen and respond to residents’ concerns about neighbourhood crime”. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to be doing anyway? By that measure, it’s merely a publicity campaign, spending our money to correct our perceptions. It raises more questions than it answers.

Unintended messages
You may have seen the slogan “Keep Calm And Carry On” on posters and t-shirts recently. It’s a poster design from the archives of World War II, when invasion of these islands was expected. It’s now the direct inspiration for this new police campaign. The original has grown in popularity because it’s a quaint relic of a bygone era which has seen its message of stoic British resolve reapplied now. It’s all very tongue in cheek. By using this format, the Home Office may be seeking to be trendy – but they just end up co-opting aspects of what the message meant then and means now. The original was simply a propaganda poster. Draw your own conclusion from that.

Institutional
Orwellian is a word that has been used about the police posters. It’s an almost artless design and very “official” looking. This just likens the police to an institution, rather than individuals who speak with a human voice – and listen back. I did have a thought that PR Week may have covered this and would give me the details of which agency had received how many thousand to throw together this campaign. I found a recent quote from Jacqui Smith saying she hoped to “increase public confidence by 15%“. This is vague at best. It made me think of the film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four when the tannoy repeatedly announces to the proles that living standards have improved by x percent. Smith says in the article that she’s “scrapped all but one central target for the police – to raise public confidence”. Public policy is not my area of expertise but I thought “public confidence” was something you earned indirectly by conducting your service in a way that’s effective, sensitive, impartial, speedy, intelligent and things like that. They could have gone for a cheesy picture showing community relations in action. In my head I’m imagining a uniformed police officer shaking hands with a smiling youth while an old lady looks on approvingly. That would have been clichéd, but better.

Advertising
Mainly though, my confidence in the police was unaffected by this advert. Arguably, advertising is a poor medium to get that across. You can’t use a cheap tactic to grab attention and then make your more subtle points in other media. It just doesn’t work like that. If it’s part of a media mix then each element has to make sense in isolation. Advertising is by and large, in my opinion, a self-referential medium. You always know you’re reading adverts. They make you think about the way advertising pervades society and also about specific advertising campaigns – whether they’re effective and that sort of thing. With other media you “zone out” and listen to the message. That applies to a conversation, phone call, television programme, radio, a newspaper article or this blog post. You have a chance of thinking about someone’s thoughts and taking your mind off the medium itself. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in saying that – advertising makes you think of advertising. If you’re interested in communications as I am, then you also wonder how much money was spent and what’s being done to measure the effectiveness (if at all). It’s comparatively easy to measure value of marketing for a commercial product, but less so for a Home Office strategy. Besides, advertising is one of the least trusted forms of communication. The value of print advertising to business buyers is declining – look at the way newspapers are struggling. That should tell you something.

Broadcasty
This is supposed to be about local policing. But there is a pool of only three slogans (I think) which are the same, uniformly across the UK. There is one aspect of this which forms an exception – there are Welsh language versions of the posters on bus shelters, at least in Cardiff and probably elsewhere in Wales. They look very similar and say essentially the same thing as the English versions. That’s at least a concession to “local”. But it’s not local enough. Try harder. Again, model what you’re trying to say. It’s not enough to broadcast the promise that you’re listening to individuals.

Only a bit digital
The mention of a digital part of the campaign intrigued me. But when you follow the URL mentioned in the poster, you go here. It has a copy of the Policing Pledge and a search engine taking you to a page about your neighbourhood policing team. Unless I’m missing something, that’s it. I also found a bizarre page of commands about linking to Directgov which I’ll ignore, thanks.

There are other ways to communicate which are more nuanced and interactive. Initially, you can monitor blogs. This will give you some insights into what people are saying in local communities about the role of the police. It won’t tell you what everyone’s thinking because at the moment only a few individuals have blogs, arguably within a certain social group. But you would get some genuine feedback. You also have the opportunity to comment directly, in a transparent, open fashion.

In a wider way, you can also monitor Twitter searches (which can be thought of as a kind of blog). Even Flickr is a bit like a blog platform, in the sense that somebody can run their own media outlet for photos. The barriers of entry to both services are lower than that of a written blog. Again, that’s a good way to get opinion and respond. Be prepared to see people remixing your messages, as they did with the recent terror scare posters in London.

For companies, social media now allow you to do some of your customer service in public. That could work equally well for the police, even though they don’t have “customers”. While I’m on it, neither should they use the term “service users”. “People” might be a good term. I genuinely hope they’re reading this blog post – that would be a welcome bit of police surveillance. (Disclosure: my work involves online community building.)

You could possibly use online video. Show your face. Introduce the neighbourhood policing team for each area. It would be cheaper than advertising and it would persist for longer. It would be a start. (What about the digital divide, does that create a barrier to access? Well, the current ads only give two options if you want to find out more – visit a URL or send a text. I sent a text and it just sent me the info on my local neighbourhood policing team, as above. Either way, the technological requirements remain the same.)

There are also good established ways. Go out and meet people. Listen to them and have a two-way conversation. I’m pretty sure there are police who understand this. It’s about earning trust. Public confidence increases by one person at a time.

[ UPDATE: Gordon Brown has now backed down and withdrawn this proposal. Although I've had no reply as yet from my MP (Labour party), it's still rather excellent news. ]

Whatever your political persuasion, if you live in the UK and value government openness then this may trouble you.

Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don’t have to. They buried the news on the day of the Heathrow runway announcement. This is heading in the diametric wrong direction from government openness.

The above quote is taken from mySociety where you can find more info on how to complain. You have until Thursday 22nd January 2009 to do this.

If you’re on Facebook, there’s a group to spread the word.

I’ve written to my MP. If he responds, I’ll post it here.